Trent Lott: I'm astonished by his comments, but not really surprised. [Hmmm ... does that make any sense?] I've thought that Lott was out of the mainstream for years, and I had hoped that the GOP would deny him the Majority Leader role, since he bollixed it up last time. Maybe this will be the proximate cause. Yeah, it's fine for Republicans to fight for states' rights, and it is an issue that suffered at the hands of racists using it as a fig leaf. But in 1948 it wasn't even a fig leaf. Hell, it wasn't even a fig leaf in 1972 ("Segregation now..." etc.).