The Two Faces of Haley Barbour. Is He a Traitor to America? Or Just a Money Hungry Politician?

Haley Barbour's office stated that his position is that Certain Religions aren't  "Real" religions.  What is a real religion, Mr. Armey?  What you have been practicing?  He says on the one hand that only certain Christian denominations are valid.  Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be known."  This is a summary of information collected from several sources about Haley Barbour. Haley will reside in Dante's ninth level of hell.

(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when looking at allegations about anyone.     Don't believe us, think for yourself and investigate for yourself!  And remember, the First Amendment Coalition and Religious Freedom Coalition of the South East do not represent any political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor are we involving ourselves in the political process.)

The biggest problem facing Mississippi in the wake of a massive oil spill in the Gulf isn't tarred beaches or ecological waste, the state's governor Haley Barbour said on Sunday. It's the national press corps, which, he asserted, is inflating the disaster's current impact and, as a result, decimating the state's tourism industry.

In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, the Mississippi Republican veered as close as any elected politician could to insisting that the biggest oil spill in the history of this country had been overblown -- at least when it comes to his state.

MR Barbour, just wait your turn.  The Oil will hit your beaches, kill your wildlife and your fish, and soil your wetlands just like it's doing in Louisiana.  So don't get your panties in a wad.  And if I were you, I would stop downplaying the largest natural disaster since katrina and you didn't do so hot with that one either.

"The truth is," he said, "we have had virtually no oil. If you were on the Mississippi Gulf coast anytime in the last 48 days you didn't see any oil at all. We have had a few tar balls but we have had tar balls every year, as a natural product of the Gulf of Mexico. 250,000 to 750,000 barrels of oil seep into the Gulf of Mexico through the floor every year. So, tar balls are no big deal. In fact, I read that Pensacola or the Florida beaches when they have tar balls yesterday didn't even close. They just sent people out to pick them up and throw them in the bag."

"The biggest negative impact for us has been the news coverage," Barbour added. "There has been no distinction between Grand Isle and Venice and all the places in Louisiana that we feel so terrible for that have had oil washing up on them. But to the average viewer [of] this show thinks that the whole coast from Florida to Texas is ankle-deep in oil. And of course, it's very, very bad for our tourist season. That is the real economic damage. Our first closure of fisheries in Mississippi waters came just earlier this week after about 45 days. So it may be hard for the viewer to understand, but the worst thing for us has been how our tourist season has been hurt by the misperception of what is going on down here. The Mississippi gulf coast is beautiful. As I tell people, the coast is clear. Come on down!"

Barbour has been one of the most defiant skeptics about the impact of the crisis in the Gulf, comparing the spill, early on, to the sheen commonly found around ski boats. Perhaps it's because Mississippi, so far, has yet to feel the spill's direct affects. The first signs of oil on the state's shores came four days ago. Barbour, meanwhile, said that there have been only two cases of oil washing up on shore.

And yet, his lack of caution or concern is notable. On Sunday, Barbour joined a growing chorus of Republican lawmakers to criticize the president for putting a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf. An investigation as to what went wrong with the BP well may not be completed. But the likelihood of another accident was statistically small, he stressed. And by the time the six-month suspension of drilling had ended, companies will have gone looking for oil off of different coastlines.  (God I hope So.  You Oil Barons have been the cause of enough misery)

Haley Barbour mulling a Presidential Run?

Evidence is mounting that Mississippi Gov. Harley Barbour (R) is mulling a 2012 bid for the White House.

On Friday afternoon Politico's Jonathan Martin reported that Barbour and his advisors are privately exploring the possibility of jumping into the race. From the report:

POLITICO has learned that Barbour is weighing the prospect of a 2012 White House bid and convened a private meeting April 8 with a group of some of his oldest and closest advisers, some of whom flew in from the East Coast to Jackson, Miss. The gathering stretched for six hours, during which time the topic of a presidential run was discussed.

Speculation on whether Barbour would vie for the Republican nomination began to surface as early as June 2009 and at that time the Mississippi governor did not deny he was considering running.

Here's what Barbour had to say about his presidential ambitions when speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS' Face the Nation last summer:

I'm not going to give any thought to running for anything until after the 2010 election. I'd be very surprised if I ended up running for president, but I can't just say flatly no. But I would be very surprised. My wife would be even more surprised.

Now, one year after Barbour made those comments, it appears that the Mississippi governor is stepping up his efforts to weigh a 2012 bid. Here's an excerpt from National Journal's Reid Wilson and Erin McPik's report last week:

Ed Goeas, a GOP pollster and top Barbour advisor, told Hotline OnCall that Barbour is exploring the race and taking a more serious look than he's done previously. Barbour firmly believes the focus needs to be on the midterms, but he also is aware that he has about 2 weeks after Election Day to decide whether or not he will launch a bid, Goeas said.

Barbour's conservative politics could make him a natural contender for the Republican nomination, but his candidacy also has the potential to ignite controversy among voters.

Just last week he faced criticism when he defended Gov. Bob McDonnell's (R-Va.) omission of slavery from his "Confederate History Month" proclamation while he also maintains ties to controversial figures like Jake Abramoff and George W. Bush.

Haley Barbour Won Big After Katrina

August 16, 2007 1:08 PM

Justin Rood Reports:

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster for hundreds of thousands of residents of the Gulf Coast. But for some family and friends of Mississippi governor and GOP power broker Haley Barbour, it was quite profitable, according to a new report by Bloomberg News.

In particular, Barbour's nephew and the governor's former lobbying firm saw turns of good fortune from work connected to rebuilding Mississippi after the catastrophic storm, the news service reports.

There is no evidence the governor or his nephew have violated the law.

"Katrina brought in a tide of money. Some benefited," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that watchdogs government spending. "It looks like the folks close to the governor did very well."

The governor's office declined to comment for this story.

Nephew Henry Barbour, a state lobbyist and former campaign adviser to his uncle, saw his income more than double after the storm hit, Bloomberg's analysis found. Firms paid large fees for his services, and his uncle made him executive director of the Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal.

Two of Henry Barbour's clients won business with the state for tasks recommended by Governor's Commission, the news service reported.

Henry Barbour told Bloomberg he had taken "a leave of absence" from lobbying while he served on the panel, for which he received no pay. During that time, his annual lobbying income grew from $183,000 to $379,000, Bloomberg reported. The federal government later recognized him and his fellow panelists with a "Gulf Guardian Award" for their efforts.

Finance company Government Consultants paid Henry Barbour's firm $65,000 from July 2005 through 2006, according to records reviewed by the news service. Bloomberg reported the company earned at least $400,000 in fees for issuing Katrina-related bonds for Mississippi -- issuances that were recommended by the Governor's Commission. The firm did not return a request for comment from ABCNews.com.

A Massachusetts-based engineering firm, Camp Dresser & McKee (CDM), paid Henry Barbour's firm $15,000 in lobbying fees, Bloomberg found. Later, the state chose it to work on a $3 million study of water management systems in six counties. Another client of Henry's firm, Waggoner Engineering, also worked on the project, according to Bloomberg.

Henry Barbour told Bloomberg he played no role with state bond issues, and his firm had decided not to accept new recovery-related clients after Katrina hit.  A phone message left with his firm Thursday was not returned.

Henry Barbour managed his uncle's gubernatorial campaign in 2003. Senior executives at both Government Consultants and CDM contributed thousands of dollars to the governor's re-election campaign in 2006, the news service found.

Former colleagues at the governor's old Washington, D.C. lobbying shop also benefited from the storm, Bloomberg revealed. Barbour Griffith & Rogers -- the firm retains the governor's name, although he no longer works there -- was paid $160,000 by a New York buyout firm to help it win a liquor license for the Hard Rock Casino in Biloxi, Miss., which it had just purchased.

"We encouraged" state panels "to expedite" the process, the lobbying firm's chief of staff Charlie Williams told Bloomberg. "And they did."

The buyout firm, Leucadia National, declined to comment to ABCNews.com. The lobbying firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The firm's principals have said Barbour no longer receives money from the lobbying group, but Barbour said recently the firm pays him "retirement." Unlike previous Mississippi governors, Barbour has declined to release his personal income tax returns.

"What Didn't Go Right?"

President Bush's absurd question underscores the arrogance of an administration whose "limited government" agenda is responsible for the disastrous federal response to Katrina.

Read down about Haley Barbour's involvement in the corruption.

Excerpt from an article in salon.com by Sidney Blumenthal

September 8, 2005 | The Bush administration's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina stands as the pluperfect case study of the Republican Party's theory and practice of government. For decades conservatives have funded think tanks, filled libraries and conducted political campaigns to promote the idea of limited government. Now, in New Orleans, the theory has been tested. The floodwaters have rolled over the rhetoric.

Under Bush, government has been "limited" only in certain weak spots, like levees, while in other spots it has vastly expanded into a behemoth subsisting on the greatest deficit spending in our history. State and local governments have not been empowered, but rendered impotent, in the face of circumstances beyond their means in which they have desperately requested federal intervention. Experienced professionals in government have been forced out, tried-and-true policies discarded, expert research ignored, and cronies elevated to senior management.

Before Katrina, the Republican theory received its most apposite formulation by a prominent lobbyist and close advisor to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist, who said about government that he wanted to "drown it in the bathtub." In relation to the waters that surround it, New Orleans has been described as a bathtub, and it has served as the bathtub for Norquist's wish.

Only two people in the light of recent events have had the daring to articulate a defense of the Republican idea of government. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, asked about rebuilding New Orleans, volunteered: "It doesn't make sense to me." He elaborated: "I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it ... we ought to take a second look at that." Thus Hastert upheld rugged individualism over a modern federal union. Just a month earlier, as it happened, Hastert had put out a press release crowing about his ability to win federal disaster relief for drought-stricken farmers in his Illinois district. While he was too preoccupied attending a campaign fundraiser for a Republican colleague to travel to Washington to vote for the $10.5 billion emergency appropriation to deal with Katrina's aftereffects, he did finally return to the capital to push for even more drought aid from the Department of Agriculture. Hastert's philosophy is not undermined by his stupendous hypocrisy, for hypocrisy is at the center of the Republican idea. Hastert simply has the shamelessness of his convictions.

The second defender was Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for which he was qualified by a résumé that includes being fired from his previous job as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association and, more important, having been the college roommate of Joe Allbaugh, President Bush's 2000 campaign manager and Brown's predecessor at FEMA. On Sept. 1, Brown stated: "Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well." Brown was unintentionally Swiftian in his savage irony. The next day, President Bush patted him on the back: "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Brown exemplifies the Bush approach to government, a blend of cynicism, cronyism, and incompetence presented with faux innocence as well-meaning service and utter surprise at things going wrong.

Even as the floodwaters poured into New Orleans, unimpeded by any federal effort to stanch the flow, the White House mustered a tightly coordinated rapid response of political damage control. Karl Rove assumed emergency management powers. The strategy was to dampen any criticism of the president, rally the Republican base, and cast blame on the mayor of New Orleans and governor of Louisiana, both Democrats. It was a classic Bush ploy against the backdrop of crisis. The object was to polarize the nation along partisan lines as swiftly as possible. While policy collapsed, politics reigned. Once again, Bush the divider, not the uniter, emerged.

The White House released a waterfall of themes. No matter how contradictory, administration officials maintained message discipline. The first imperative was to disclaim and deflect responsibility. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan admonished the press corps, "This is not a time to get into any finger-pointing or politics or anything of that nature." The president down to the lowliest talk show hosts echoed the line that criticism during the crisis and reporting its causes were unseemly and vaguely unpatriotic.

After establishing that line, the White House laid out other messages to avoiding responsibility. Bush declared, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." From his bully pulpit he intended to drown out the reports trickling into print media that he had cut the funding for rebuilding the levees and for flood control. Then Bush assumed the pose of the president above the fray, sadly calling the response "unacceptable." Meanwhile, he praised "Brownie."

After Sept. 11, there was an external enemy, "evildoers" against whom to summon fear and fervor. Now, instead, the flood has brought to the surface the deepest national questions of race, class and inequality. On Aug. 30, the day after the hurricane hit, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poor had increased by 1.1 million since 2003, to 12.7 percent of the population, the fourth annual increase, with blacks and Hispanics the poorest, and the South remaining the poorest region. Since Bush has been in office, poverty has grown by almost 9 percent. (Under President Clinton, poverty fell by 25 percent.) As these issues began to receive serious attention for the first time in years, Bush reiterated that it was inappropriate to "play the blame game."

Meanwhile, his aides sought to blame New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. On Sept. 3, the Washington Post, citing an anonymous "senior administration official," reported that Blanco "still had not declared a state of emergency." Newsweek published a similar report. Within hours, however, the Post published a correction; the report was false. In fact, Blanco had declared an emergency on Aug. 26 and sent President Bush a letter on Aug. 27 requesting that the federal government declare an emergency and provide aid; and, in fact, Bush did make such a declaration, thereby accepting responsibility. Nonetheless, these facts have not stymied White House aides from their drumbeat that state and local officials -- but curiously, not the Republican governors of Mississippi and Alabama -- are ultimately to blame.

Yet others operated off-message, casting aspersions on the hurricane's victims. The president's mother, Barbara Bush, interviewed on American Public Media's "Marketplace" program," said of the displaced from Louisiana who are temporarily housed in Houston's Astrodome, "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them."

And Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., suggested that the residents of New Orleans who failed to escape the flood should be punished. "I mean, you have people who don't heed those warnings and then put people at risk as a result of not heeding those warnings. There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving."

The White House sought to turn back the rising tide of anger among blacks by deputizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the early days of the hurricane and flood, she had been vacationing in New York, taking in Monty Python's "Spamalot" and spending thousands on shoes at Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue. In the store, a fellow shopper reportedly confronted her, saying, "How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!" -- prompting security men to bodily remove the woman. A week after the hurricane, Rice mounted the pulpit at a black church in Whistler, Ala. "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time," she preached, "if we just wait." One hundred and 10 years after Booker T. Washington counseled patience and acceptance to the race in his famous "Atlanta Compromise" speech in the aftermath of Reconstruction's betrayal, the highest African-American official in the land updated his advice of forbearance.

After a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Bush warned against the "blame game" as he pointed his finger: "Bureaucracy is not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people." His aides briefed reporters on background that "bureaucracy" of course referred to state and local officials. That night, at the White House, Bush met with congressional leaders of both parties, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi urged Bush to fire Brown. "Why would I do that?" the president replied. "Because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week," she explained. To which he answered, "What didn't go right?"

Bush's denigration of "bureaucracy" raises the question of the principals responsible in his own bureaucracy. Within hours of the president's statement, the Associated Press reported that FEMA director Michael Brown had waited five hours after the hurricane struck to request 1,000 workers from Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. Part of their mission, he wrote, would be to "convey a positive image" of the administration's response.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune disclosed that Max Mayfield, head of the National Hurricane Center, briefed Brown and Chertoff before the hurricane made landfall of its potential disastrous consequences. "We were briefing them way before landfall," Mayfield said. "It's not like this was a surprise. We had in the advisories that the levee could be topped." The day after Bush's Cabinet room attack on bureaucracy, the St. Petersburg Times revealed that Mayfield had also briefed President Bush in a video conference call. "I just wanted to be able to go to sleep that night knowing that I did all I could do," Mayfield said.

After its creation in 1979, FEMA became "a political dumping ground," according to a former FEMA advisory board member. Its ineffective performance after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina in 1989 and Hurricane Andrew struck Florida in 1992 exposed the agency's shortcomings. Then Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina called it "the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses." President Clinton appointed James Lee Witt as the new director, the first one ever to have had experience in the field. Witt reinvented the agency, setting high professional standards and efficiently dealing with disasters.

FEMA's success as a showcase federal agency made it an inviting target for the incoming Bush team. Allbaugh, Bush's former campaign manager, became the new director, and he immediately began to dismantle the professional staff, privatize many functions and degrade its operations. In his testimony before the Senate, Allbaugh attacked the agency he headed as an example of unresponsive bureaucracy: "Many are concerned that Federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective State and local risk management. Expectations of when the Federal Government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level. We must restore the predominant role of State and local response to most disasters."

After Sept. 11, 2001, FEMA was subsumed into the new Department of Homeland Security and lost its Cabinet rank. The staff was cut by more than 10 percent, and the budget has been cut every year since and most of its disaster relief efforts disbanded. "Three out of every four dollars the agency provides in local preparedness and first-responder grants go to terrorism-related activities, even though a recent Government Accountability Office report quotes local officials as saying what they really need is money to prepare for natural disasters and accidents," the Los Angeles Times reported.

After Allbaugh retired from FEMA in 2003, handing over the agency to his deputy and college roommate, Brown, he set up a lucrative lobbying firm, the Allbaugh Co., which mounts "legislative and regulatory campaigns" for its corporate clients, according its Web site. After the Iraq war, Allbaugh established New Bridge Strategies to facilitate business for contractors there. He also created Diligence, a firm to provide security to private companies operating in Iraq. Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and now governor of Mississippi, helped Allbaugh start all his ventures through his lobbying and law firm, Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Indeed, the entire Allbaugh complex is housed at Barbour Griffith and Rogers. Ed Rogers, Barbour's partner, has become a vice president of Diligence. Diane Allbaugh, Allbaugh's wife, went to work at Barbour Griffith and Rogers. And Neil Bush, the president's brother, received $60,000 as a consultant to New Bridge Strategies.

On Sept. 1, the Pentagon announced the award of a major contract for repair of damaged naval facilities on the Gulf Coast to Halliburton, the firm whose former CEO is Vice President Dick Cheney and whose chief lobbyist is Joe Allbaugh.

Hurricane Katrina is the anti-9/11 in its divisive political effect, its unearthing of underlying domestic problems, and its disorienting impact on the president and his administration. Yet, in other ways, the failure of government before the hurricane struck is reminiscent of the failures leading into 9/11. The demotion of FEMA resembles the demotion of counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. In both cases, the administration ignored clear warnings.

In a conversation with a former diplomat with decades of experience, I raised these parallels. But the Bush administration response evoked something else for him. "It reminds me of Africa," he said. "Governments that prey on their people."