Judging by these three stories from the last twenty-four hours or so, there's still a fair number of folks out there who really do want to repeal the twentieth century and travel back to the good old days of the nineteenth.

First, there's the always amusing/pathetic GOP congressman Steve King, who says an "urban" President Obama is presiding of "slavery reparations" by supporting a settlement in a discrimination case between the USDA and black farmers:

On Monday night, he suggested that President Obama, as a senator, may have been prejudiced to help the black farmers. "Figure this out, Madame Speaker: We have a very, very urban Senator, Barack Obama, who has decided he's going to run for president, and what does he do?" King said. "He introduces legislation to create a whole new Pigford claim." He then said the claims -- which stem from discrimination against black farmers in the 1980s and 1990s -- are "slavery reparations." "We've got to stand up at some point and say, 'We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress,'" he said.

Next up, we've got Judson Phillips, the president of Tea Party Nation, who apparently believes that only people who own property should be allowed to vote:

PHILLIPS: The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn’t you were just a citizen and you got to vote. Some of the restrictions, you know, you obviously would not think about today. But one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community. If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.

And last but certainly not least, we've got perhaps the most bizarre story of the bunch: apparently, some southerners are celebrating the one hundred fiftieth anniversary of the their secession from the United States:

ATLANTA — The Civil War, the most wrenching and bloody episode in American history, may not seem like much of a cause for celebration, especially in the South. And yet, as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union. The events include a “secession ball” in the former slave port of Charleston (“a joyous night of music, dancing, food and drink,” says the invitation), which will be replicated on a smaller scale in other cities. A parade is being planned in Montgomery, Ala., along with a mock swearing-in of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederacy.

Why are they celebrating? Because they've got a big chip on their shoulder:

“We in the South, who have been kicked around for an awfully long time and are accused of being racist, we would just like the truth to be known,” said Michael Givens, commander-in-chief of the Sons, explaining the reason for the television ads. While there were many causes of the war, he said, “our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”

Here's a hint: if you don't want people to think you're racist, you might start by not celebrating secession. After all, this is what you're celebrating: