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Former congressman and Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike Parker has endorsed Democrat Joe Biden in the November election. (AP Photo/Rogelio Solis, File)

Mike Parker, the last Republican candidate for governor to lose in the general election, has for almost two decades been a non-factor in Mississippi politics.

But in recent weeks, Parker’s name has resurfaced as he joined more than two dozen former Republican congressmen across the nation in endorsing Democrat Joe Biden for president.

The ghosts of Parker’s political past will be on the November general election ballot in Mississippi in another way.

Parker, the only candidate in state history to force Mississippi House members to cast the deciding vote on who would serve as governor, said he will vote this fall to take that responsibility away from House members.

Mississippi voters will decide in November whether to remove a state Constitutional provision requiring a candidate for statewide office to win both a majority of the votes and the most votes in a majority of the state’s 122 House districts.

If both of those thresholds aren’t met, that same constitutional provision, written in 1890 by white lawmakers to keep African Americans from holding statewide office, grants the state House the responsibility to decide the winner from the top two vote-getters.

This year’s proposed change would instead force a runoff election between the top two vote-getters instead of letting House members decide the outcome.

Surprisingly, Parker said recently he was not familiar that amendment would be on the November ballot.

“I think that is good,” Parker said. “If that is what the amendment says, that is what I will vote for.”

Parker, age 70, says he has no regrets in forcing the House to decide the election for governor on the first day of the 2000 session of the Legislature.

In the November 1999 election, Ronnie Musgrove, the Democratic lieutenant governor, won a plurality of the vote against Parker, a former congressman who resigned from the House to run for governor as the chosen candidate that year of the Republican establishment. Not only did neither candidate win a majority of the popular vote, but Musgrove and Parker each won 61 House districts.

Based on those results, Parker said he opted to take the election to the House, as allowed by the Constitution, to see if members would vote the way their constituents voted “one way or the other.”

“A lot of them wanted to push it under the rug. But they are elected to vote,” Parker said.

The House voted for Musgrove 86-36, with two Republicans voting for Musgrove and two Democrats voting for Parker. All three independents voted for Parker.

While Parker is still the only candidate to take a statewide election to the House for the members to decide, there have been other instances where candidates could have done the same. In two races for lieutenant governor in the 1990s, the winning candidate did not achieve both constitutional thresholds to win, but in those instances the candidate who did not receive the most popular votes conceded.

Twenty years after Parker threw the election to the House, the Legislature has opted to put the proposal on the ballot to remove the archaic provision from the Constitution. But the Legislature’s action only comes after a federal lawsuit was filed saying the provision was unconstitutional because it had the possibility of diluting minority voting strength.

Based on the lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Daniel Jordan of the Southern District of Mississippi, strongly hinted that if the provision was not removed by a vote of the people, he would do it himself.

Ironically, Parker, who in Mississippi history will always be closely associated with the electoral provisions of the state Constitution, said he has not kept up with the issue.

But he does keep up with national politics enough to know he opposes incumbent Republican President Donald Trump.

“His (Biden’s) politics are not mine,” Parker said. “They are very different. I am a Republican. Trump is not. This is a constitutional thing more than anything. Trump does not understand our system of government. He has no respect for our system of government. That is sad.”

Parker bemoans the fact that his grandchildren live next door to he and his wife in Brookhaven, but they limit their contact with them because of COVID-19. Parker said both he and his wife have pre-existing conditions that would put them in danger if they contracted the coronavirus from the grandchildren, who are now in school, or the children’s mother, a teacher.

Parker said his brother-in-law, whom he describes as the healthy member of the family, recently died “a terrible death” from COVID-19.

“He was on a ventilator for 20 days,” Parker said. “I can’t imagine the leadership of the country not telling us how bad this is. The people needed to know that.”

The post Former GOP congressman Mike Parker endorses Biden, finds his legacy on November ballot appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force talks with Shannon Singletary, senior associate athletics director for health and sports performance, as she tours campus facilities during her visit to the University of Mississippi. (Photo by Logan Kirkland/ Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services)

OXFORD — Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, met with state and local leaders at the University of Mississippi on Saturday and praised Mississippi and other states across the South for what she called “incredible work.”

Birx, on a tour of college campuses across the nation this week, acknowledged Oxford is one of the top cities in the U.S. for new cases per capita. She said the college town effect — where most of the population is comprised of students — can skew the rate, but the fact that the university is finding and isolating those cases is a good thing.

“We’re confident that the university is finding cases,” Birx said. “We want to encourage them to find more asymptomatic spread — but they’re finding cases, they’re quarantining, isolating and most importantly, they’re caring for those students.”

On her last visit to Mississippi in mid-July, the state was in midst of a growing outbreak, but she said the recent improvements toward the end of the summer are a testament to the power of sustained behavior change.

Masks and social distancing are working, she said, encouraging governors across the South to continue their efforts to reverse trends over the summer.

Mississippi’s latest executive order mandating masks and limited crowds is set to expire on Monday. But Gov. Tate Reeves told reporters last week the mandates likely won’t be dropped altogether, though restrictions could loosen.

Mississippi is one of only a few Southern states to still have a statewide mask mandate, but Birx said it’s a piece of the many metrics that has pushed the state to no longer be considered a “red zone” risk by the federal task force. She added that eight weeks ago, about 60 of the state’s 82 counties had test positivity rates of over 10%. Now, just 23 do.

The state has cut its positivity rate in half over the same time, based on the task force’s metric that only counts some labs that reliably report both negative and positive results. At six months into the pandemic in Mississippi, cases are back down to where they were mid-June, before they began to sharply rise.

Though improved over the past few weeks, Mississippi’s new deaths per capita are still the highest in the nation, and August brought the most monthly deaths to date.

Birx pivoted her attention to college campuses, advising universities to have a plan but be flexible. And when an outbreak does occur, she said, university leaders should work through it without shutting down, if possible, to keep continuity of care and behavior change.

She spoke directly to students as well, saying on her visit she saw most students wearing masks but parents were not. She encouraged students to opt-in to new surveillance testing that looks for people with the virus but without symptoms. In addition to its contact tracing efforts and diagnostic testing for symptomatic students, the university is launching broader surveillance testing with the capacity of 500 per week, university officials said Saturday.

Birx reiterated that asymptomatic surveillance testing, particularly at universities because many students don’t have symptoms, will be “critical”. As of now, the university publishes a daily dashboard with case and other surveillance metrics, but not number tests performed. Across the state, daily tests have declined in recent weeks, as cases have. Diagnostic tests are expected to decline as fewer patients present with symptoms, but health experts advise random surveillance testing is also necessary to gauge and thwart asymptomatic spread. 

“I want to be clear to every student: We know you’re not intentionally transmitting the virus, you don’t know you have it, but I think its key for them to know that you can be infected, not know it, and pass the virus on, and eventually through that cascade it can get to someone that’s particularly vulnerable and have a bad outcome,” Birx said. “Students can be a real voice to get that information across.”

She briefly addressed college football, saying she thinks it can be played safely if teams adhere to strict policies to limit spread, noting the Major League Baseball’s bumpy but ongoing return. But she did not address crowd sizes of said games.

State Health Officer Thomas Dobbs has repeatedly warned that college football brings more risk than just the sport itself, but the gatherings it brings with it have to be considered. The university’s own contact tracing team has tracked most cases back to social gatherings off-campus and has quarantined around 400 students total, officials said.

Birx’s 20-minute press conference was mostly meant to encourage, and she repeatedly conveyed the power of messaging by officials to meet people where they are, saying that sometimes leaders can forget the “public” in public health.

“The entire South has shown us a way forward with this virus, what Mississippi has been able to do just over the last four to five weeks, shows us if we change our behavior, if we wear our masks, if we social distance, if we wash out hands, if we take care of others, there’s a pathway forward that maintains retail open, maintains universities and schools open,” she said. “But it’s all of us together working together to protect communities by protecting each other.”

Editor’s note: The SEC case chart is courtesy of Welch Suggs, journalism and sports media professor at the University of Georgia.

The post In Mississippi visit, Dr. Deborah Birx credits masks and distancing for state’s COVID-19 gains appeared first on Mississippi Today.

A dead Asian giant hornet sent from Japan is held on a pin by Sven Spichiger, an entomologist with the Washington State Department of Agriculture. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Just a few months back, when the reality of COVID-19 was setting in, when it was raining every day and flood waters were rising, when we were reading about the likelihood of an extreme hurricane season, when March Madness had been scrubbed, when college baseball had struck out, when The Masters had been postponed, when wildfires were engulfing Australia, when grocery shelves were emptying and the stock market seemed to be crashing, and when we couldn’t even buy toilet paper to wipe our you-know-whats, even more chilling news came our way.

Something called murder hornets were said to be invading the North American continent. MURDER HORNETS: Just the name sent chills down our spines. The photos were frightening. Some were over two inches long with big and evil black eyes, orange and black stripes and monster stingers. They fed on the heads and thoraxes of honeybees and could kill humans with their extremely deadly venom.

Speaking for me, I had nightmares. No, really, I did. Those giant Asian hornets invaded my dreams. I’d see them flying around and then one would buzz right at my nose and – I’d wake up sweating. I figured, given the way 2020 was heading, it wouldn’t take long for those wicked creatures to reach Mississippi.

I mean, Kobe Bryant’s helicopter had crashed, cancer had silenced Little Richard and John Prine had died of COVID. 2020 was a living nightmare. Could murder hornets be far behind?

Now I know you’re wondering where I am going with this because the murder hornets never came close to the Magnolia State. At least that’s what the Mississippi State University Extension Service tells us, and they are the experts.

But…

Rick Cleveland

On a recent afternoon when both my son, Tyler, and I had unexpectedly finished work early, we decided to go play a few holes of golf. It was a lovely, if hot, day at Lake Caroline. The fairways were lush. The greens were rolling perfectly. There were just the two of us and we had nobody in front of us. We played fast. And pretty well. I was one-under-par. Take that, 2020…

And then we got to the par-5 fifth. Tyler took the scenic route, left rough, then right. I missed the green with an easy wedge shot. The blazing sun came out from behind the clouds. Funny how hot it gets when things start going wrong on the golf course.

So Tyler, dripping sweat, tapped in for a bogey 6 and started to reach down into the cup to retrieve his golf ball. He saw something moving down there and quickly pulled back his hand. Both of us watched as a huge something with big wings and eyes like Spiderman – and orange and black stripes – appeared out of the top of the cup.

And then it flew, right at Tyler.

“It’s a bleeping murder hornet,” Tyler screamed, sprinting as fast as I have ever seen him run toward the sixth tee. He dropped his putter. His hat flew off. So did his sunglasses. His golf glove fell out of his back pocket. He left a trail is what he did. The thing followed and then flew off.

I finally quit laughing and returned to the business at hand. I had a five-footer left for par to remain one-under. I took my practice strokes, crouched over the ball – and then I heard a buzzing noise. I should have stepped away, but I didn’t. I yanked the putt left, and then I heard Tyler holler again: “The murder hornet is back, right above your head!”

I high-tailed it off the green toward our golf cart. Thankfully, the whatever-it-was did not follow. We never saw it again.

Yes, it’s funny now. Every time the subject comes up, we double over laughing. But…

It. Was. Not. Funny. Then.

And that leaves the obvious question. What was it?

MSU Extension Service

A cicada killer wasp, common in Mississippi, can be two inches long.

“I would say it almost had to be a cicada killer wasp from the size and the behavior you are describing,” answered Dr. Blake Layton, Jr., an entomology professor at Mississippi State. “Almost has to be. They look fierce and they have a huge stinger, although they rarely sting anybody unless you are a cicada. They sting cicadas, paralyze them and then carry them off. I get several calls a week about them and many come from golf courses.”

MSU Extension Service

European hornets, like this one, are common in north Mississippi.

Another possibility, Layton said, is the European hornet, most common in the northern part of the state, which feeds on honey bees.

Do they get as far south as Gluckstadt?

“They certainly could,” Layton said.

He emailed photos of both varmints. I showed them to Tyler who had the closest look at what we encountered.

“Could be, although neither one looks big enough,” he said. “Tell you the truth, I didn’t hang around long enough to say for sure which one it was. I wasn’t exactly studying it.”

I can vouch for that. It might not have been a murder hornet, but it surely looked the part.

The post Murder hornets in Mississippi? No, but… appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Like you, I can close my eyes and see the events of September 11, 2001. The pain, the fear and the death are all seared on our hearts. Yet, as dark as the smoke was rising, there was a silver lining — we came together as a nation. We gave to strangers, said thank you to a first responder and got to know our neighbors. We flew our flags and somehow adjusted to the changes that were thrust upon us.

Then it faded away.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Never Forget appeared first on Mississippi Today.

What if they didn’t play the Super Bowl one season?

In Simpson County, in 2020, they are not.

Rick Cleveland

In this weirdest of football seasons, the Simpson County Super Bowl – the one that matches close neighbors Mendenhall and Magee – has fallen victim to COVID-19. In Simpson County, where Magee and Mendenhall high schools are seven miles apart and the rivalry has endured for nearly a century, that’s far more meaningful than that other Super Bowl the NFL puts on.

Here’s the story: Magee coach Teddy Dyess said he had one player test positive for COVID. As a result, the entire Trojan team has been quarantined for 14 days. Therefore, Magee will forfeit its games with Natchez this Friday night and with Mendenhall on Sept. 19.

Mageenews.com

Magee football coach Teddy Dyess

“Our kids are devastated,” Dyess said Thursday morning. “When I told them at practice (Tuesday), they were all over the field squalling. Football is important to them. You grow up in Magee, playing Mendenhall is huge. Not playing that game is devastating. There were tears all over our practice field.”

Mendenhall players took the news hard, as well. Coach Monroe Allen delivered the news to his Tigers after receiving a call from Dyess.

“I think most of us went home and went to bed early last night ’cause losing the chance to play our rival hurt,” Allen said Wednesday. “That game is a big deal around here, and it’s something our kids look forward to every year.”

Allen should know. He played football at Magee. He now coaches at Mendenhall. And he will tell you the rivalry is as fierce as any in Mississippi.

It has been that way for a long, long time. This would have been the 98^th renewal of the rivalry. Magee leads the series 49-45-2. The rivalry might best be illustrated by the huge manufacturing plant that sits about halfway between the two towns of the east side of U.S. 49. City fathers of Magee and Mendenhall once argued at length over the site of the plant that originally housed Universal Manufacturing. Finally, both sides agreed the only way both towns would support a bond issue was to locate the plant midway in between. So that’s what happened.

This pandemic has played havoc with high school football across the state. First, the Mississippi High School Activities Association (MHSAA) delayed the start of the season for two weeks. Jackson Public Schools canceled their football season. So did Greenville and Greenwood schools. North Forrest, too. Nearly every day, a game is postponed, canceled or rescheduled. For games that are played, attendance is limited to 25 percent of capacity.

And who knows how the pandemic will affect the playoffs at season’s end? For one thing, we know the championship weekend site will change. This season’s six championship games were supposed to be played Dec. 4-5 at Starkville, but Mississippi State now plays Missouri at home on Dec. 5 because of SEC scheduling changes forced by the pandemic. As it now stands, the MHSAA has not named a championship site, although Mississippi Veterans Memorial Stadium appears the most likely site.

You should know there is a domino effect to each postponement or cancellation. For instance, Collins High also has had to quarantine its players because of exposure to COVID-19 during a 34-0 loss to Magee last week. Guess who Collins was supposed to play this Friday night? Mendenhall. So Mendenhall has lost not one game, but two. But wait, Collins was supposed to play at Taylorsville on Sept. 19. Instead, Mendenhall will go to Taylorsville that night.

Monroe Allen

“I am glad we were able to put that together,” Allen said. “It’s another tough game, but we just need to play. Our guys want to play.”

And maybe they will. And maybe they won’t. Remember, it only takes one positive test to change everything. The only thing certain about this 2020 season is uncertainty.

For that matter, future cancellations could occur that would give Mendenhall and Magee the opportunity to have their Super Bowl after all.

“We’d welcome the opportunity to play it if it were to happen,” said Mendenhall’s Allen.

Said Magee’s Dyess, “You bet we would.”

The post After 97 years of games, COVID-19 cancels Simpson County’s Super Bowl for 2020 appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Cassandra Wilson holds up a voter registration form and voter registration drive flyer in downtown Clarksdale days before her first drive.

CLARKSDALE — Frustrated by the response of elected officials after the pandemic slowed her business, Cassandra Wilson has used her down time for something she’d never done before: registering Delta residents to vote.

Wilson, the 35-year-old mother of three whose taxi and tourism business went from more than 50 rides a week before the pandemic to zero, was not qualified to receive COVID-19 relief funds.

She blamed the lack of federal, state and local government leadership to ensure the financial security for people in the Mississippi Delta, where the pandemic has heightened economic and health disparities.

“I felt like a lot of little people kind of got left out the loop,” Wilson said. “If you didn’t fall on the right end of the spectrum, you lost your house, you lost everything because of these big people who could not relate to everyday, average working people who were born into poverty. There are households around here with two full-time, 40-hour working people who are barely able to stay above water.”

She wanted to change how politicians’ decisions affected her life and those around her. So with the challenge of prohibitive voting laws and a deadly pandemic, she initiated the first step: registering people to vote.

Facebook

Cassandra Wilson poses at her first voter registration drive in Clarksdale

In June, Wilson set up a tent and a table on a Clarksdale street with voter registration packets, snacks, pens, masks, and sanitizers laid across the tables. Whether residents walked up to register or drove through, each individual received masks and sanitizer. With her taxi business at a halt, she decided to drop registration packets off to others who could not attend the drive due to work, she said.

She took off from work at her other full-time job, sacrificing income to work on these voter registrations drives. With help from her 13-year-old daughter and 12-year-old niece, the trio has helped 20 people register to vote so far across three Delta towns: Lula, Friars Point and Clarksdale.

Wilson’s goal is to get 200 people registered ahead of the Oct. 5 registration deadline.

One challenge Wilson has experienced is a lack of education around government and the voting process prevents people from voting.

“I think this young lady was maybe like 22 years old and she asked me, ‘What is voting? Who do you vote for?’ and I love that,” Wilson said of a registrant at one of her drives. “(I said), ‘This is how you vote, this is why you vote’ … We have a lot of that in the Delta.”

More than 23,000 people reside in Coahoma County, which has about 15,000 eligible voters. But voter turnout has remained fairly low. For example, in the March primaries, only 23% of eligible voters cast a vote, according to data from the Circuit Clerk’s office.

Ray Sykes, chair of the Coahoma County Democratic Party, said he’s heard “no one is coming out” to the polls because community members fear going grocery shopping, church and gathering in large groups.

Despite this, he expects a record turnout, but he said it falls on the local leaders to get folks out.

“Elected officials have a duty to push the turnout,” Sykes said. “Pastors have a duty to get the public involved.”

Some Delta-based political leaders expressed more concern with getting people to the polls rather than voter registration, especially now during a pandemic.

“Everyone wants to press voter registration … which is great. I’m not knocking it. The real problem is getting people out to vote,” said David Rushing, chair of the Sunflower County Democratic Party. “We’re under-resourced, and the state is under-resourced.”

But Mississippi doesn’t make it easy for people to vote.

The state has some of the most restrictive voting laws in the nation, and is one of only six states which has not taken action to make voting safer during the pandemic. For instance, Mississippians must provide an excuse in order to vote early.

In July, Gov. Tate Reeves signed a bill into law stating people could only vote early during the pandemic for two reasons: if they are under a physician-imposed quarantine or providing care for a dependent under quarantine.

“It’s not the intent (of the legislation) to make it harder to vote,” Senate Elections Chair Jennifer Branning, R-Philadelphia, told Mississippi Today.

Currently, two lawsuits have been filed against state officials challenging Mississippi’s absentee voting requirements.

To register to vote, an individual must be 18 or older, a resident of Mississippi, and cannot be convicted of disenfranchising crimes. On Election Day, voters must present a Mississippi voter ID, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Pam Shaw, a longtime Democratic political strategist and president of P3 Strategies, said it should be incumbent on circuit clerks and county supervisors to create innovative and safer ways to do voting. She suggested creating curbside voting and expanding voting hours in the weeks prior to the election.

“You do it in a way that does not compromise staff of the clerk’s office and the people who come,” Shaw said. “If you say, five days before, or two weeks before, it gives them time. … It gets rid of all of the people who may be hesitant and eases the burden you’re going to have on Election Day.”

But by taking matters into her own hands — battling a public health crisis, small town politics and what many call modern-day voter suppression — Wilson said she hopes that her small efforts will make an impact during the upcoming election, even if just one person goes to the polls because of her work.

“I just want to see a better Clarksdale, want people to do better, especially African Americans,” Wilson said. “We don’t know how this election is going to go in November, but I can tell you one thing — it’s going to be very difficult for us to go to the polls the way we used to.”

The post Upset with elected officials after COVID-19 halted her business, Delta woman registers people to vote appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Eric J. Shelton, Mississippi Today/ Report for America

Mike Espy speaks to media after his debate against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith inside the Farm Bureau Federation auditorium Tuesday, November 20, 2018.

Mike Espy, in a new television ad that first aired Thursday, sharply critiqued U.S. Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith for her response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Espy, the Democratic former congressman who’s running against the Republican senator in the November election, attacked Hyde-Smith over comments she made in March in which she said the coronavirus pandemic would be “over in two weeks.”

The first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Mississippi the same week she made that comment.

“Hyde-Smith has simply not done her part to stand up for Mississippi,” Espy said of the senator’s COVID response in a fundraising email on Thursday morning. “This is a sitting senator who is actively hurting her own people.”

Espy also said Hyde-Smith “voted to take money away from unemployed workers while our unemployment rate doubled, and took off for summer recess without providing any additional relief for those struggling.”

When asked for comment, a spokesman for the Hyde-Smith campaign fact-checked several lines of the ad and said of the unemployment critique: “Not true. (Hyde-Smith) supported unemployment benefits. It is Democrats who are blocking the latest relief bill.”

“The increasingly false and desperate campaign being run by Corrupt Mike Espy is shameful. There’s not a single part of this ad that’s true,” Hyde-Smith campaign spokesman Justin Brasell said. “If Mike Espy thought he had any realistic chance to win this race, he would not resort to these kinds of despicable tactics and lies. Senator Hyde-Smith has fought for billions in relief funds to assist unemployed workers, healthcare providers, and small businesses as we all work to safely reopen our economy and fight this global pandemic.”

READ MORE: Here’s where Cindy Hyde-Smith and Mike Espy stand on healthcare.

This is Espy’s second television ad in as many weeks. Meanwhile, Hyde-Smith has not yet purchased airtime — an unusual reality for an incumbent senator less than two months from Election Day.

Espy has outraised Hyde-Smith in all but one campaign finance reporting period this year. And Hyde-Smith has raised less money this year than 96 incumbent U.S. senators. The three who have raised less than her announced they were not seeking re-election.

The Hyde-Smith campaign hasn’t scheduled events, Brasell recently told Mississippi Today. And this week, the Espy campaign is ratcheting up pressure on Hyde-Smith to debate. The Hyde-Smith campaign has not yet accepted debate invitations.

The post ‘Hurting her own people’: Mike Espy blasts Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith over COVID-19 response appeared first on Mississippi Today.