"What Republicans do wrong, the media says, is they're conservatives," Barbour told Ben Smith of BuzzFeed. "It was a very, very close election. Obama won by two points. Fewer people voted than last time."

He continued that Republicans "do have to do some things to fix this," but added that it also came down to who was running. "We had some sh*tty candidates," he said. "We pissed away two seats."

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Barbour said he can't pick Akin “out of a line-up with the Spice Girls,” but “I just don’t want us having Harry Reid’s favorite Republican running against Claire McCaskill.”

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"While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt," Barbour told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I thought he did what he was supposed to do.”

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Hemmins, the most visible face of the movement to defeat Mississippi's now-notorious Personhood Amendment, heading for a close vote today, was talking to Brad Prewitt. He's the campaign director charged with passing the initiative, which defines life as beginning at fertilization. He's also a father through in-vitro fertilization, which fertility specialists say Initiative 26 would make practically impossible.

“Nothing’s fair,” Prewitt replied, according to a recording, and walked away.

Prewitt (who didn't respond to my request for an interview yesterday) had reason to be testy. Initiative 26, until recently considered an easy sell in a fiercely antiabortion state, had just been declared a tossup in a reliable poll. Support for the amendment has dropped 17 points in just two weeks, his anti-26 counterpart, Stan Flint, told me, as the public debate shifted to what it would actually mean to declare fertilized eggs people. It would affect not only IVF, but also ban abortion and many common forms of birth control, open the door to prosecuting women who suffer suspicious miscarriages, and tie the hands of doctors trying to save women's lives.

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Instead, he's dropping out.

The Mississippi governor, who was in New Hampshire just over a week ago and who was slated to return to the first-in-the-nation primary state in early May, released a statement Monday afternoon claiming that he's not sure he has the "absolute fire in the belly" required to wage a '12 campaign.

On one level, it's easy to see why Barbour is backing out now. The burden of his tone deaf (and worse) comments on race and his home state's fraught racial history posed two serious problems for him: (1) In a general election campaign against America's first black president, they might distract from or overshadow his and his party's preferred message; (2) The prospect of (1) threatened to cost him primary season support from the conservative establishment -- which might not have a problem with his comments per se, but which is not overly eager to commit political suicide in the '12 election.

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That is hardly fresh news. Mississippi's child welfare system has been shockingly inadequate for years. Poorly trained social workers are handling far too many cases, and there are thousands upon thousands of reports of abuse and neglect every year. Many of those reports are not acted upon by the state's Division of Family and Children's Services, which the governor controls. The state was sued in 2004 and was forced to agree to a series of reforms. Now, years after settling, the state has not reformed very much:

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Every morning Barbour's press secretary e-mails "a list of press clippings, along with a daily compendium of birthdays, historical notes, and jokes" to the rest of Barbour's staff along with some unidentified other Barbour "allies." And, obviously, the "jokes" on the list are real knee-slappers about how Janet Reno is a man and something about the horrible disaster that struck Japan a few days ago. And that's just from the "on this day in history" section:

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The controversy centers on comments made by Barbour, the Mississippi governor and likely presidential candidate, to a Weekly Standard writer last year. The resulting profile already landed Barbour in trouble because he lauded the racist White Citizens Council of his hometown as a force for good.

Now, the Clarion-Ledger is spotlighting a separate part of the profile, in which Barbour claims he saw Martin Luther King speak in town in 1962, with both whites and blacks in attendance. The newspaper has done searches of various archives and found no evidence that King came to Yazoo City in 1962.

Here's what Barbour told the Standard:

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Nostalgia for the "War Between the States" is a fact of American life. But Barbour’s failure to do the right thing comes close on the heels of another embarrassing episode in which the onetime chairman of the Republican National Committee claimed that racial segregation and violence had not marred his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi during his younger years in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The reason for Barbour’s latest gaffe is that his Tea Party constituency wants to "take the country back" to Nathan Forrest’s time, Reconstruction, when something “had to be done” to arrest the trend of Black Republicans undermining the power structure of the white South. The Obama administration is the perfect foil: A liberal black man from the Land of Lincoln (or maybe Africa?) is imposing the heavy hand of federal authority on the "prostrate" South all over again.

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Now Barbour's in trouble again for refusing to denounce plans to honor the KKK's first Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest with a commemorative license plate. Asked about the NAACP's request that he denounce the proposal by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Barbour told reporters: "I don't go around denouncing people. That's not going to happen. I don't even denounce the news media."

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At a press conference on Tuesday, Mississippi's Republican governor -- who is now clearly pursuing the 2012 Republican presidential nomination -- was asked about a proposal from the state's chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to issue a license plate commemorating Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general who went on to serve as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. As we noted last week when the proposal first made news, there was a good chance Barbour would be able to duck this particular issue, since the plan had yet to even be introduced as a formal piece of legislation. And yet:

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Meanwhile, back in the Magnolia State, the Sons of Confederate Veterans are mounting a campaign to issue commemorative state license plates in honor of the 150th anniversary of what the group still calls "the war between the states." One of the proposed plates would feature Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who served as the Ku Klux Klan's first Grand Wizard -- and who oversaw the infamous "Fort Pillow Massacre" of 1864. True, Barbour may end up ducking this one; the plan still has to be presented to the Legislature and passed. But it could land on his desk, too; the name Nathan Bedford Forrest still has resonance with many white Southerners.

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"I just don’t remember it as being that bad," Barbour said, in perhaps the most memorable line of the piece.

Now, a man who says he was a close childhood friend of Barbour in Yazoo City, Miss., has come forward with a strikingly different account of those years -- one marked by brutal and persistent injustice under segregation. Salon spoke with Steve Mangold, a retired San Jose public relations executive who wrote a letter to the Clarion-Ledger newspaper this week disputing Barbour's take on Yazoo City's history.

Mangold, who, like Barbour, was born in 1947, says he grew up a block away from Barbour and that the two were close friends through the end of junior high, when Mangold went off to a boarding school out of state and Barbour remained in Yazoo City to go to the local high school.

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Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the nation. According to a 2009 study, "a black male born in Mississippi today can expect a shorter life span than the average American in 1960." But!

The flight logs obtained by POLITICO indicate that Mississippi has spent more than $500,000 over the past three years on Barbour's air travel. That total does not include security and other logistical costs associated with his trips. And through a quirk in Mississippi law, whenever the governor is out of state, Mississippi must pay the lieutenant governor a salary differential as acting governor.

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So recorded the great Southern writer Willie Morris in his classic book "Yazoo: Integration In a Deep Southern Town," with suitable melodrama, of the first day little black boys and girls and little white boys and girls sat together in classrooms in his Mississippi Delta hometown. The moment came fifteen years after the dawn of "Massive Resistance": an organized conspiracy, uniting all strata of white Southern society, high and low, to defy the order of the Supreme Court to integrate its schools "with all deliberate speed."

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When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns' integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn't tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the 'Citizens Council,' is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.

And remember, that is in response to this passage from a new Weekly Standard profile of Barbour:

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In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Asked about the first quote in that passage, Ferguson told me: "I don't think that he meant segregation wasn't that bad. I think he meant that it didn't roil the town the way some people might think it did." He added: "I get the sense that [Barbour] himself was just kind of oblivious. He was a fun loving football player, probably chasing skirts and all that."

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Asked about coming of age in Yazoo City, Miss., during the civil rights "revolution," Barbour, who was 16 when three civil rights workers were murdered in the state in the summer of 1964, tells Ferguson, "I just don't remember it as being that bad." He goes on to talk of standing "at the periphery" when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in his hometown (but not really paying attention to what was said because he was too busy looking at girls) and to salute the Citizens Council for (supposedly) ensuring the peaceful integration of Yazoo City's schools -- something that was achieved 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Barbour tells Ferguson:

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