“This is truly a case of one man, a longtime tobacco industry lobbyist, using his power to destroy a program that was reducing tobacco use among Mississippi’s kids,” said Matthew Myers, President of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, a national nonprofit organization. <\/p>\n
In a report to be issued Wednesday, the group documents what it calls Barbour’s “relentless attack” on what it said was the nation’s most successful anti-smoking program.<\/p>\n
Barbour complained that the program received its funding directly from the courts and that it needed legislative approval, according to Myers. When the legislature passed a bill to continue the funding, Barbour vetoed it and went back to the courts to withdraw all remaining monies from the program. <\/p>\n
Myers says he believes Barbour’s motive was to protect his longtime clients in the tobacco industry. Barbour served as a lobbyist for tobacco clients from 1998 to 2002. His firm, Barbour, Griffin, & Rogers, was paid a total of $3.8 million by the tobacco companies, according to reports obtained by the United States Senate Office of Public Records.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Barbour said he killed the program because Partnership for a Healthy Mississippi’s budget wasn’t transparent enough. The organization responded by noting that the Partnership’s audits are made public every year.<\/p>\n
I don’t have an overarching point here, other than the belief that this seems to be a quintessential example of Republican policymaking circa 2006. Hire a far-right lobbyist, find a successful government program that benefits the public, kill it, and lie about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mississippi is home to one of the more successful anti-smoking programs in the country. Between 1999 and 2004, the program reduced smoking by 48% among public middle school students (from 23% to 12%) and by 32% among public high school students (from 32.5% to 22.1%). Naturally, Mississippi’s Republican governor, Haley Barbour, who happens to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9251\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}