Mississippi's Gov. Haley Barbour seems to think that he is immune from the type of criticism that has dogged Bush concerning the federal response to the hurricane Katrina recovery. After having appointed a "Governor's Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal" (headed by former Netscape CEO and big Republican donor Jim Barksdale) to outline plans for dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, Barbour has now quietly appointed his nephew, Henry Barbour, as executive director of the commission. Not surprisingly, Nephew Henry has no experience in such matters, but he did play a key role in working for Uncle Haley when Haley was the head of the RNC in the 1990s. Henry Barbour worked hard as head of the GOP's Team 100 program, an effort directed at bringing huge sums of monies from corporate donors into Republican pockets.
Henry was Uncle Haley's campaign manager during his uncle's 2003 gubernatorial campaign. The Mississippi Republican Party elected Henry Barbour as its national committeeman this past summer.
The move by Haley to place his campaign manager-nephew into this position should remove all doubts about whether or not Haley Barbour is running for president in 2008. Barbour will use the post-Katrina reconstruction as a mechanism for contacting donors and building a structure for his campaign. Barbour is blatantly using the state's recovery from Katrina for his personal political gain, at the expense of the welfare of the citizens of Mississippi.
Click on the link below and scroll down to the other links to read some of the documents that identified some of the work Henry Barbour did for the GOP in the '90s (and notice all of the connections between Gingrich, Dole, and Barbour):
http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/McConnell-47.html
The following link will take you to a complete list of the members of the Barbour commission. It's packed, naturally, with lots of big GOP players from various parts of the state:
http://www.governorbarbour.com/RRRCommission.htm
Bill Minor of the Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi wrote an article that was placed in the editorial section of the 10/9/2005 edition of the newspaper that does a good job of publicizing Barbour's cronyism in handling Katrina clean-up efforts:
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051009/COL0410/510090320/1200/OPINION
