JFP – Hood: Clarion-Ledger takes facts from “goofy” blogs
Enmity between Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and Clarion-Ledger Perspective Editor Sid Salter is obvious this week, as the two hammer each other over disagreements regarding the facts around a June decision by the Mississippi Public Service Commission, and the implications of that decision.
“You got a writer like that, they may rely on another article or go to some goofy blog, and they don’t get the facts, and they’re espousing errors,” Hood told the Jackson Free Press today, adding that The Clarion-Ledger edited out his accusation that Salter “shad[ed] the facts” from a letter he sent them to respond to Salter’s recent characterizations.
The controversy started with a July 8 column in which Salter wrote that “at the root of the current standoff over the PSC budget is a perceived political alliance between the PSC and Hood—despite the PSC denying his recent Mississippi Power motion. Who’s kidding whom here? This flap is about partisan politics, not the best interests of utility ratepayers.”
Hood wrote in a July 10 response to The Clarion-Ledger and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal that the PSC needs the additional staff “because the Public Utilities Staff has admitted that it does not conduct actual audits,” and criticized power companies for using “its legislative and executive allies to weaken the commission’s diligent efforts to fulfill its responsibilities to ratepayers.” The attorney general included a sentence in his response that appeared in the Tupelo paper, but not the one that originates in Jackson: “Such clearly erroneous comments should lead readers to wonder if Mr. Salter’s words are shading the facts.”
“They didn’t put that part in The Clarion-Ledger article, but they put it in the Tupelo (Daily) Journal,” Hood said Tuesday.
Jackson Free Press
7/15/9
hattip Respond Mississippi, who writes
But we would like to know who the “goofy blog” is. We expect he means Y’all Politics, the Dean of Mississippi Political Blogs, because of the fits YP has given him over the years. But with a descriptor like “goofy” we can only hope he means us.
