InkBlots

George E. Curry will be the featured speaker at the 2006 Aaron Henry Scholards Lecture Series on Race, Politics, Gender and Culture, sponsored by Mississippi Valley State University Thursday. Curry is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association.
Panelists will include Ross Reily, executive editor of the Delta Democrat Times in Greenville.

Ouch. Wasn’t last week supposed to be all about expanding the Democratic Party’s base, demonstrating a sense of political inclusiveness and pragmatism that broadens the reaches of an outfit that in defeat would have been heading in the direction of utter irrelevance?

So what was U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel of Manhattan thinking when he took a gratuitous dig at Mississippi?

Mississippi paces New York on a variety of measures, from the top personal income tax rate (5% in Mississippi versus 6.85% there).

“The other question Rangel might have asked is why people from Mississippi aren’t flooding into his politically corrupt, crime-ridden city,” James W. Bailey wrote in The Clarion-Ledger (though Bailey himself apparently lives in Reston, Virginia).

But it may be WDAM in Hattiesburg that has the best retort, albeit a tad uncouth.

Gannett Co. Inc. named Larry Whitaker, former publisher of The Times, in Shreveport, La., as The Clarion-Ledger’s top executive. He succeeds John Newhouse, who held the position for a little over a year before he resigned Tuesday.

A letter writer in the University of Alabama’s student newspaper, The Crimson and White, has officially put Mississippi State on notice: “You suck,” he opines. The tender diss drew this retort from an MSU Reflector reader.

The “Mississippi: Believe It,” crafted and executed by the fine folks at Jackson’s Cirlot Agency, has earned the attention of The New York Times.