Presidential hopeful George Allen (previously featured on this space) has been busy apologizing for welcoming the non-white fellow at a campaign appearance to America and calling him a racial epithet. "It was a mistake," he says. "It just came out wrong."

Well, it was kind of a weird word he used, so maybe... naaaaaaah.

That link'll take you to a photograph of Allen with members of Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the successor organization to the segregationist White Citizens Council, in 1996.

Here's what the CCC believes. (You gotta figure those are *hard* cs.)

We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.

How'd the photo get taken? He walked up to them at a conference and suggested they take it. They're an influential group in some circles. Handy for a politician building a certain kind of base.

But George Allen's relationship with the CCC... went beyond poses and portraits. In 1995, he appointed a CCC sympathizer, Virginia lawyer R. Jackson Garnett, to head the Virginia Council on Day Care and serve on the Governor's Advisory Council on Self-Determination and Federalism. According to the CCC's Citizens Informer, Garnett delivered a speech before a CCC gathering saying that the Federalism Commission was "created to study abuses by the Federal government of constitutional powers that rightfully belong to the states."

Later that year, Garnett closed the Virginia Council on Day Care after accusing it, as he wrote in a letter to Governor Allen, of attempting to "form the minds of our young children with a radical ideology before they enter public schools." The Virginia Council had aroused Garnett's ire, according to the Virginian-Pilot newspaper, for preparing an "anti-bias" curriculum for daycare teachers. Allen approved the shut-down.

And he wants to run for president, you know.