BREAKING by @nickjudin: A man called Mississippi's vaccine hotline to get an appointment...
"The lady told me, ‘I want you to know that there’s no documentation that the Moderna vaccine is effective.’ [FALSE] She asked if I still wanted to take it.” 1/ mississippifreepress.org/10482/msdh-axe…
Bobby Wayne was undeterred: "I told them I have cancer, and I want to get the vaccine."
After he told his daughter, Dr. Elizabeth Wayne, an assistant professor of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, she shared the story on Twitter. 2/ mississippifreepress.org/10482/msdh-axe…
When Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith claimed a woman in her home town & the woman's dead father were victims of voter impersonation, she spoke as if it had happened in 2020.
I did some digging. Turns out, it happened in the 1990s.
Back in 2010, Jennifer Jackson wrote this letter to Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (then a Democratic state senator), sharing her voter fraud allegations from the 1990s and urging her to support voter ID.
The For The People Act seeks to remedy an issue where states have “voter identification laws that discriminate against Native Americans” because they do not recognize tribal IDs for voting.
NEW: While calling #HR1 a "radical" bill that would "nullify" Mississippi's voter ID law, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith told the story of a woman whom the senator said was the victim of voter impersonation—along with her dead father.
@SenHydeSmith: "(Jennifer Jackson) called and said, ‘Cindy, I went to vote, they told me I had already voted.' Then, she looked above who signed her name & her deceased father had already voted that day, too. So don’t tell me there is not voter fraud.” 2/ mississippifreepress.org/10618/sen-hyde…
Sen. Hyde-Smith's office did not respond to a request for comment. BUT I did manage to track down Jennifer Jackson who told me her story, which she said happened decades ago—likely in the late 1990s.
Mississippi's senator is flying to the border in Texas to address a "true crisis."
I don't recall her flying to Jackson when residents of her own state's capital city went without clean running water for a month. Some here felt like that was a crisis.
Jackson's water system still is in crisis, btw. There's some duct tape on the crisis for the moment, but it's far from fixed.
Perhaps when Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith is done with the Texas performance, she might spare some time to visit her own state?mississippifreepress.org/10153/under-th…
Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith has offered legislation that she says would address that Jackson water issue, but the details are murky and it's not clear that it would actually fix the problem. mississippifreepress.org/10321/specific…
I worked on this timeline with @nickjudin, which you can use to get a fuller view of the sequence of events and policy decisions that leaders made as the novel coronavirus spread in Mississippi, pushing our hospitals to the brink: mississippifreepress.org/9913/mississip…
Hattiesburg Mayor @toby_barker on March 20, 2020: “The potential for this to carry on for two to three months is real. This alone should be a sobering thought for anyone. We are about to be stretched like never before."
Mississippi Republicans: "Cash-poor Jackson should fix its own water crisis."
Also Mississippi Republicans: "We aren't going to allow Jackson, our capital city, to raise its own sales tax by 1 cent so that it can address its water crisis."
The post-integration destruction of Mississippi's capital city was intentional. This double talk doesn't inspire confidence much has changed.
Why wouldn't lawmakers take pride in Jackson and want it to thrive, if not for its residents, then to draw business/travel to the state?
Perhaps it's that a thriving capital city in a Deep South state is dangerous to entrenched good ole boy power. Look at how Atlanta is transforming Georgia.
But I hope that's not the case. I want to think better of our lawmakers. You gotta love Mississippi to lead Mississippi.