Barbour’s Colorful New Year

Talk about ringing out the old.

After getting dinged a few weeks back for his racist posture, I’m sure presidential aspirant Haley Barbour was feeling no pain this New Years after pardoning a pair of African-American sisters who had been locked up in jail for sixteen years over an $11 robbery, one of the sisters being in dire need of a kidney transplant.

As Bob Herbert’s NYT Op-Ed pointed out this morning, however, Barbour wasn’t exactly a prince, basing the release on the cost savings to the state and the condition that one sister donate her kidney to the other. The way the women were informed (hey, on on TV!) was also pretty thoughtless.

I’m not sure how many accounts of the story suggesting the move, and the timing, was racially motivated.  If you look at this screen grab from yesterday, however, based on the resultant story visuals searching “Haley Barbour” on GoogleNews, you can see the good Governor up top associated with the happy Scott sisters, this wall of beaming African-American faces joined at the bottom of the page with Blind Justice.

Right.