Life after: “Bill Frist, the likely new Senate majority leader, is hailed as a moderate, but he’s an antiabortion hard-liner who votes much like Trent Lott.” —Michelle Goldberg in Salon

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“Few senators have a worse voting record on civil rights than Trent Lott — but Bill Frist is one of them,” the National Organization for Women’s Kim Gandy said in a press release. “Frist has voted against sex education, international family planning, emergency contraception (the morning-after pill), affirmative action, hate crimes legislation and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This is the man who is supposed to save face for the GOP in the Senate? Think again.”

Also: Leadership in Recapturing Senate Pushed Frist Into Spotlight: “Until 1989, Bill Frist had never voted. Until Thursday, he had expressed no interest in being Senate majority leader. Now he will lead the United States Senate.” NY Times

And: a broader warning from Paul Krugman: Gotta Have Faith:

I’d like to think that the furor over Trent Lott’s nostalgia for Jim Crow, hidden in plain sight for years, would serve as a signal to ask about other uncomfortable truths hidden in plain sight. But I suspect that it won’t, that we’ll soon go back to worrying about politicians’ haircuts.

And then, years from now, when it becomes clear that much public policy has been driven by a hard-line fundamentalist agenda, people will say, “But nobody told us.” NY Times