Editors' Note: The midterm elections are only six weeks away and it's harder than ever to know what to think about them.  To help you, the untutored ignorant reader who may believe in their naiveté the issues this fall include the future of democracy and the right of a woman to control her own body, the Spy's master political prognosticator, David Bloviator, has graciously agreed to spell out the conventional wisdom in words even you can understand from his vantage point at the center of all political intelligence, the National Press Club bar.

TMS:    Good evening, Mr. Bloviator.  It's such a pleasure to be able to meet with you in person at your favorite haunt.

DB: Yes, isn't it.  By the way, there seems to be a problem with my tab.  You'll have to pick up the next four rounds, you young cur.

TMS: Gladly.  Double Chivas-rocks for Mr. Bloviator.

The great man, now back at his post.

DB: [inhales his drink].  Ah, now we can get down to the hard work of assessing the midterm election picture.

TMS: And what is it?

DB:  Cloudy.  Although there are ominous signs for the Democrats.  After all, the party in power normally loses seats in the midterms.  And Biden is massively unpopular.

TMS: Why do you think that is?

DB:  Because of the economy, stupid.  It's in a shambles.

TMS: Really?  Hasn't Biden seen the best economic growth of any US President since Clinton? Hasn't the economy added 10,000,000 jobs since he took office? Isn't unemployment near its record lows?

DB:  But inflation is killing the average American family.  Do you know how much a bottle of Old Capitol Hill Scotch costs in Washington?  

TMS: How much?

DB: How should I know?  I can drink for free here.

TMS: What about Biden himself?  Is he an asset or liability to the Democrats? 

DB:  He is clearly a liability.

TMS: Why?

DB: He is so divisive.  Did you hear him calling his fellow Americans “semi-Fascist?”

TMS: Isn't it true?

DB: The truth is besides the point.  The point is Republicans will point out he is dividing and not uniting us.

TMS: How about Republicans who lie about the 2020 election and claim that Biden isn't really President?

DB: That's just Republicans playing to their base.

TMS: Right.  By being divisive.

DB: You're missing the point.  Democrats need to unite the country.

TMS: But Republicans get to accuse Democrats of supporting baby murder and that's OK?

DB: It's brilliant political messaging.  Midterms are all about exciting your base.

TMS: Speaking of which, hasn't the Supreme Court overruling of Roe excited the Democratic base?

DB: It's possible a few ladies will get their panties in a twist, but polling shows it's not a top issue for most voters.  People care about kitchen-table issues.

TMS: The polls I've seen rank it at #2, right behind protecting democracy.

DB: Don't worry, they'll get over it.  Speaking of which, my glass is empty. Another double Chivas-rocks if you please.

TMS: Let's talk about some of the other issues.  Republicans are attacking Democrats for being weak on crime.

DB: Crime is soaring.  Many voters are concerned.

TMS:  Actually, it isn't:

DB: But voters perceive crime as disrupting their lives, and that's a problem for Democrats.

TMS: If crime isn't soaring and Republicans are lying about it, isn't that a problem for the press?

DB: God, man, give it a rest.  Our job is to take the pulse of the body politic and not chase down everything someone says.  What could be more tedious?

TMS: If Republicans can't make an issue out of flat or falling crime rates, how about immigration?

DB: Immigration is the Democrats' Achilles Heel.  The border is in crisis.

TMS: What exactly is the crisis?

DB: My God you twit, the Board Patrol apprehended 2 million border crossers!  Doesn't that sound like an open border to you?

TMS: It doesn't sound like an open border to anyone if the border guards have stopped 2 million people in their tracks.

DB: But it's the perception of a crisis that counts.

TMS: Did you ever stop to think that the media is working with Republican anti-immigrant bigots to create the impression of a border crisis, when in fact the country is in desperate need of young immigrant families?

Republicans hope to cash in on fear of immigrants

DB: Politics is all about perception, you young whippersnapper.

TMS: What's your impression of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?

DB: A rising star. A bright light.  The future of the Republican Party?

TMS: Even though his anti-science policies killed thousands of Floridians who didn't have to die.

DB: But he stood up for freedom.

TMS: What freedom?  Freedom to die?

DB: The freedom not to be forced to wear those horrible masks in public.

TMS: What about his program of defrauding migrants in Texas and flying them to places DeSantis hopes won't be prepared to receive them?

DB: As my distinguished colleague Blake Hounshell put it in The New York Times, the migrant flights were “the cherry on top of a months-long campaign to essentially troll liberal cities and states.”

TMS: I can't take this any longer.  HOW CAN YOU OR ANY JOURNALIST COMPARE THE UNSPEAKABLY CRUEL AND TRANSPARENTLY FRAUDULENT KIDNAPPING OF REFUGEES TO SMALL TOWNS LACKING IN RESOURCES TO A SUNDAE TOPPING?  DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW INCREDIBLY CRUEL AND CYNICAL IT IS TO TREAT ANY HUMAN BEING LIKE THIS?  IS IT ALL JUST A GAME TO YOU?  DO YOU EVER CONSIDER THE REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES OF PRETENDING THAT A WHITE EXTREMIST ELECTION-DENYING REPUBLICAN PARTY IS JUST ANOTHER POLITICAL ACTOR?  DO YOU REALLY NOT SEE THE THREAT TO THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY ITSELF, NOT TO MENTION THE BLATANT BIGOTRY AND HATRED THAT ANIMATES REPUBLICANS?

DB: [slumps down on bar].  Harraumph!

TMS: [shakes DB's unresponsive form; gets no response].  Thank you, Mr. Bloviator!

Good and dead: pervy rape-enabling democracy-subverting mouthpiece and mainstream Republican Ken Starr

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

Superannuated Republican dirty trickster and enabler of rapists Ken Starr died in obscurity last week at the age of 76.  It's hard to improve on the summary provided in his Rolling Stone obituary:

We could stop there, but it may be useful to locate this antidemocratic creep where he belongs: in the wonderful mainstream of the Republican Party that never-Pres U Bum Republicans mourn.  For Ken Starr would have been some obscure d**k partner at an insufferable law firm tying up the peanut butter rulemaking for 27 years without the enthusiastic participation of the entire Republican establishment, including, critically, that portion that puts on black robes and cosplays as judges.

We have to set the Waybac machine to the 1980's.  Life was good under the smiling reign of St. Ronald of Bitburg.  Between his cheerful attacks on “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks” and his visits to the graves of Nazi war criminals, his popularity managed to persuade Republicans that they had a perpetual lock on the Presidency.  It also provided high level government jobs and a later lifetime of ease to modestly qualified Republicans who could put up or agree with such nonsense and to insane whack jobs who were otherwise unemployable.

After Michael Dukakis fumbled the ball in 1988, allowing unlovable aristocrat George H.W. Bush to win, Republicans were sure that they were entitled to the Presidency in perpetuity.  When the voters dared to otherwise decide, the Republicans were stunned, according to the New York Times:

 

(The Yankees went on to suck too, by the way.)

But the Republicans' “more philosophical” stance soon curdled into denial and rage.  The party decided on the strategy it has since followed whenever a Democrat is President: total vicious opposition.  Here's how one bright light of the Republican strategy described their position in 1994:

At 41, Mr. Kristol already has a long conservative pedigree, as the son of the commentator Irving Kristol and a former top aide to William Bennett, Secretary of Education, and Vice President Dan Quayle. But Mr. Kristol rose to new prominence over the last two years by writing a series of widely circulated memorandums that challenged the conventional wisdom on health. ...

Mr. Kristol played heretic, arguing against the idea that there was, in fact, a health care crisis; he also urged Republicans to resist any effort at making a grand compromise with the Democrats on the issue. "I never thought we faced an inevitably dominant resurgence of liberalism," he said, then and now. "I always thought '92 was a rejection of Bush, not an endorsement of activist government."

Hey, whatever happened to that guy?  Hope he's happy about how things turned out, especially the hundreds of thousands who died between 1994 and 2014 because they could not afford health care, which to Billy was not a crisis.

The vicious Republican opposition to Clinton led directly to Ken Starr's reign of legal terror.  Republicans trotted out all sorts of wild claims about the Clintons, but the one they pimped the hardest (with the dishonorable participation of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal) was the Clintons' investment in a busto Arkansas land scheme known as “Whitewater.”  No evidence of Clinton wrongdoing was ever found (or really even alleged), although a Special Prosecutor named Robert Fiske spent years pursuing the matter.

When Fiske, a highly-regarded ex-prosecutor and white-shoe lawyer, eventually concluded that there was nothing there, he was replaced by Starr:

Mr. Starr, 48, a conservative Republican in private law practice, is untested as a prosecutor. His background contrasts sharply with that of Mr. Fiske, a Wall Street lawyer, a former United States Attorney and a political moderate....

The White House was pleased with the initial results of Mr. Fiske's investigation, in which he found no basis for criminal prosecution arising from the discussions between the White House and Treasury that were the subject of the Whitewater hearings.

But under a broadly worded charter granted by the appeals court today, Mr. Starr has the authority, if he chooses, to go back over the ground covered by Mr. Fiske.

Under the old Special Prosecutor law, the choice of special prosecutor was vested in a panel of judges chosen by extreme reactionary Chief Justice William Rehnquist.  So it was no surprise when the panel he chose, including a bag carrier for the notorious racist hell-raiser Jessie Helms, decided to keep appointing a Special Prosecutor until they found someone unscrupulous enough to carry out their desired political lynching.

Whereupon our dead guy spent the next four years chasing down one smear after another until he found that President Clinton had had a legal and consensual (albeit disgusting and inappropriate) affair with an intern.  You know the rest of the sordid tale. 

The point here is that Ken Starr was no slavering outlier in his dishonorable effort to bring down an elected Democratic President.  He was acting with the full support of the wonderful moderate mainstream Republican Party that today cowers in a corner as their demented flag-bearer ever more openly pursues a fascist policy of democratic subversion by inciting mob violence.

After the impeachment trial ended and Starr's, um, service to his country ended, he parachuted into the kind of no-heavy-lifting high-paying sinecure usually made available to loyal Republican handmaidens; in his case, Presidency of a fourth-rate Baptist diploma mill in Tumbleweeds, Texas [Louise, please check – Ed.].

Which he proceeded to f**k up royally:

John Clune, a Colorado lawyer who specializes in cases of campus assault and who had already resolved three other women’s claims against Baylor, filed a lawsuit on behalf of an alleged victim that...claim[ed] that at least 52 rapes by at least 31 players had occurred from 2011 through 2014...

Baylor’s interim president has said in a statement that he cannot confirm Mr. Clune’s numbers, which followed other troubling figures that Baylor’s board gave to The Wall Street Journal in October: assaults on 17 women by 19 players, including four gang rapes....

Ken Starr loved a good sex scandal

University officials have said in another court filing that Ms. Hernandez was Mr. Elliott’s fifth alleged assault victim at Baylor — her lawsuit said she was the sixth who had reported a sexual assault to Baylor — and that Mr. Briles was indeed apprised of her alleged assault. In addition, they said, only extraordinary interventions by Mr. Starr and Mr. Briles kept Mr. Elliott from suspension or worse because of academic misconduct.... 

Mr. Briles, the revered coach who had led Baylor to gridiron glory, was effectively fired. Mr. Starr, the affable president who reveled in that glory, was demoted; he later resigned.

Yeah, that's right, affable.

Somehow in the thousands of words conventional wisdom geyser Peter Baker spilled in his Starr obituary he didn't have room for any of these facts, reported in the March 9, 2017 editions of, wait for it, The New York Times.

You might think that an obituary of a man known for trumpeting claims of sexual misconduct to overthrow a President might have included a tidbit about how that same affable gent was unconcerned about much more serious charges of an epidemic of rape of women he was supposed to protect as the President of a Christian institution.

But then you might start to wonder why Baker didn't bother to mention Starr's earlier role as a mouthpiece (alongside prominent Jewish Democratic advocate Counselor Underpants) for degenerate child rapist and Presidential friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Starr's sordid post-Monica career and his ability to escape any serious accountability for his misdeeds only proves the point that he was not a rogue or an extremist; he was in the mainstream of the white Christian hypocrites who make up today's Republican Party.  

Why anyone who remembers his career should be surprised every weeknight at 5 p.m. Eastern about today's gruesome subversive Republican machine led by a lying sex criminal is hard to understand.

Especially because those never-Pres Tiny Toadstool Republicans seem so, what's the word for it?

Ah, yes.  Affable.

Neither sustainable nor normal: This f***in' guy.

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

Really we tried.  We tried so hard to stop obsessing about pisspoor New York Times columnists.  Nobody gives a f*** what they say anyway, as they have proven for decades. We haven't said boo about them in weeks.  

It was this Tweet that broke us:

The answers to the political dilemmas @jbarro identifies are 1) tailoring laws to the malleable zone of public opinion in purple + reddish states and 2) proving that abortion bans can be sustainable and ultimately normal in the reddest states. That's it; that's the task.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 8, 2022

Sustainable and ultimately normal? 

We know what banning safe, legal abortion looks like.  It was normal for the first 70 years of the previous century.  Maybe ol' Ross is too young to remember those days, but we haven't:

Pregnant women seeking abortions in Chicago had few options before 1973, when the Supreme Court codified the right to have an abortion in Roe v. Wade.

Abortion had been illegal in Illinois since the early 19th century, and few doctors were willing to defy the law. Some women tried to self-induce abortions using objects or chemicals, which often led to infection and sometimes death. Others turned to Chicago’s organized crime syndicate, but its services were expensive and often unsafe.  

Some of us remember those days, especially those among us who faced the terrible risks of terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Those people can be described as “women.”

Here's one typical example of what happened to women who sought to terminate their pregnancies before abortions were legal.  It was so common that it appeared on page 36 of the December 1, 1954 New York Times:

In 1954, the very act of putting career ahead of motherhood was uncontroversially regarded as a capital offense. 

The pre-Roe agony and mortality of peritonitis, hemorrhage, or other fatal sequelae caused by an unsafe  abortion was, to use Ross's anodyne term, ultimately normal:

"In the 1960s, it is estimated that thousands of people attempted to abort with these unsafe methods. Hospitals regularly saw women in 'septic abortion wards,' where they would die of hemorrhage or infection after an incomplete attempt to self-abort.  

From the point of view of the woman who died painfully from sepsis, it probably wasn't sustainable, but that minority view was not shared by white men like Ross who arrogated to themselves the right to  impose their religious metaphysics on women who did not share them. 

And illegal abortions weren't rare either, according to Kinsey Report data:

One out of twelve? That meant that millions of women were driven to unsafe, life threatening abortions before Roe.  This is the sustainable world Ross wants to inflict on 21st century women because his Catholic metaphysics demand it.  He knows this because Christian Scripture discusses abortion exactly, let's check here, zero times.

Voters in the reddest states must not be subscribing to Ross's Tweets, or must be too dense to understand them, because in crimson-red Kansas, voters chose to maintain their rights over their own bodies by a margin of 59% to 41%.

By the way, what would constitute “proof” that outlawing abortion had become ultimately normal?  100 dead women a year?  1,000?  How many girls would have to bear their rapist's child?

Speaking of sustainable, it's now the case in Ross's beloved red states that women are being denied all sorts of health care because of fear that their doctors will be criminally prosecuted for an abortion:

Now, when patients arrive with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages or hemorrhaging — all situations where abortion has been established as standard care — the questions for the lawyers are more pressing: “Do we wait until the fetus is definitely dead, or is mostly dead good enough?” she asked. “If they’re telling us to wait for the condition to be fully emergent, how much bleeding is too much?”

“Having to consult a lawyer in an emergent situation is a whole new ballgame,” she said.

So is a felony conviction for providing medical care to women, but for the women who suffer and perhaps die while waiting for a lawyer to parse a statute written to criminalize anything any whackjob could consider an abortion (like Plan B, which isn't), it will soon become sustainable and normal and thus OK with Ross.

And the gratuitous cruelty of Ross's refined metaphysics doesn't stop there:

Forensic nurses who care for sexual assault victims in the emergency room said they would no longer provide morning-after contraception for fear it would be considered an abortion drug. Because the old law punishes those who “aid and abet” an abortion, an anesthesiologist worried that he might be prosecuted for putting a patient to sleep for an abortion. A neonatologist worried about liability for declining to resuscitate a fetus judged no longer viable. “We already work under a cloud of getting sued. That’s what we signed up for,” Dr. Kwatra said. “This is different. This is criminal liability, not civil liability. This is jail time.” 

And if Ross has his way, these cruel restrictions on women with cancer or other serious health concerns will in purplish states will be tailored to the prevailing sentiments of Republican-dominated legislatures.

You'll be pleased to know that forced-birth flacks claim that doctors are being too cautious.  If you're a doctor willing to stake your life and freedom on the half-assed opinions of notorious liars, you're better than we are.  We'd be scared s***less.

We've only got the stomach for about two more words from Ross.  Remember his reference to “thermostatic backlash?”  We assume he's trying to equate the outrage of women and others who care about them to the loss of their rights and possibly their lives to the mechanical response of a brainless device like a thermostat to a change of conditions.  You can reduce fear and anguish to a phenomenon no more human that expansion of a copper coil, but it doesn't sound like the “pro-life” position.

Maybe Ross thought that when his classmates got up and left when he sat down with them in Leverett House Dining Hall it was just “thermostatic backlash.” We think it was their considered judgment that his cruel freakish views wrapped in condescension were too repulsive to be borne.

And you know what?  They were right.

Report from Mississippi: Nor Any Drop to Drink

Dispatches from the Old Confederacy

By Phil Ochs
Mississippi Correspondent

It's been almost ten years since our old buddy John “the Bongmaster” Roberts '76 told us that state discrimination against Black people was no longer a problem in America.

Gov. Tate “What Me Worry?” Reeves

So on this last long weekend of summer, let's raise a glass to toast the brilliant insights of the Sage of Leverett House.  If you're in Jackson, Mississippi, though, don't put water in the glass, because the stuff that comes out of the tap is unfit for human consumption:

The entire city of more than 150,000 was without safe drinking water, with no end in sight. Many residents here say they adapted long ago to catastrophic government failure.

“Jackson’s water’s been messed up; I don’t even feel like they should be issuing people bills,” said Roshonda Snell, 32, who works at a local hotel. “It’s infected, and you can’t even do nothing with it.”

Lack of safe running water is something more commonly thought of as a problem in poor and developing countries without the financial resources or will to install and maintain a water system. But in the richest country in the world, how could this happen?

As usual, there's one white answer.

The EPA warned Mississippi in 2020 of "imminent" dangers for people drinking Jackson's tap water.

The 80% Black city has sought repairs since the 1940s.

Governor Reeves repeatedly refused requests for funding and the state only approved 6% of requested repair funds last year. pic.twitter.com/MvE2eZm4dn

— AJ+ (@ajplus) September 1, 2022

The estimate to repair the system comes to $2 billion, a sum far beyond the capacity of the city to bear.  Of course, the State will not allow its capital and largest city to suffer and languish, right?  The state's potato-faced Republican Governor, Tate Reeves, has responded.  Last week, he told the residents of Jackson not to drink the water.  Then he told them they could be thirsty for an indeterminate amount of time.

This is not the first time that the white supremacist tuber in a J.C. Penney suit ignored the plight of the residents of his capital city:

Gov. Tate Reeves (R) declared Jackson’s ongoing water crisis an “immediate health threat.” Experts say this crisis was years in the making, a result of inadequate funding for essential infrastructure upgrades. For the past year, leaders of this majority-Black, Democrat-led city have pushed for additional funding from the White Republicans who run the state. Little has come of those appeals....

Jackson might be the seat of power for the state government, yet many in the city contend that the water system is a glaring example of how the community has been starved of investment and attention. For decades, the city’s population has been shrinking, an exodus propelled in large part by the flight of white residents — along with their tax dollars — to surrounding affluent suburbs where, by and large, the water on Tuesday was flowing just fine.

Who saw that coming?  Not John Roberts!

Gov. Spud Reeves has also been sitting on over $400 million in federal water infrastructure funding, thanks to Joe Biden and the Democrats, or more than enough to slake the thirst of the residents of Jackson.  Last year the white Republicans who run the state also authorized the expenditure of a different $450 million of Federal money for infrastructure, as long as the community requesting the aid matched it dollar-for-dollar.  So if your community or county is rich and white, you cam get state aid.  If your city is poor and Black, you get to drink from puddles.   Nothing fishy going on here, of course.

The defenders of the white plutocracy that run the state may complain that you can't make out a claim of systemic racism based on this one data point.  OK, let's scout around and see if we can find anything else that would raise a bark from Bilbo, the ol' racism hound.

Say hello to washed-up football player and Mary's ex-boyfriend, Brett Favre.  What does he have to do with anything?  According to NBC News, in an impressive act of journalism:

Mississippi took federal money intended to ease the plight of poor people, some of them Black, and used it to enrich already rich white men.  It paid over a million dollars to Favre to make supposedly motivational speeches which he never made.  Don't worry; there's more:

The speeches aren’t the only welfare grants tied to Favre. Text messages obtained by Mississippi Today and authenticated by Pigott show that Favre sought a $3.2 million grant for a drug company in which he was a shareholder and a $5 million award that built a volleyball arena at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter played the sport and where he played football. Favre’s lawyer declined to comment.

Let's hear it for volleyball!

So while poor Black families in Jackson are forced to shell out $300 a month to avoid dying of thirst or dysentery, Brett's daughter gets to play volleyball in a gleaming new facility. If that seems fair and reasonable to you, then you must be be a white Republican. Like John Roberts.

In addition to stiffing thirsty Jacksonians and shoveling money at rich celebrities, what else is Mississippi's predatory white plutocracy doing to make the poorest and more wretched state in the nation better?

As previously recounted in the Spy, they have terminated rental and unemployment assistance to the state's poor and unemployed, even though all the dough came from the federal government.

And just this year, after the reality of the collapse of Jackson's water system was evident to even the meanest intelligence (such as a Mississippi white Republican legislator), the ruling plutocracy handed out tax cuts to the rich and screwed the public school students of the state to pay for it:

The Mississippi Legislature may end the 2022 session taking credit for a historic tax cut while leaving local officials on the hook to either raise property taxes on their constituents or decide where to make cuts to their school districts. As gasoline prices rise and overall inflation rates increase, the Legislature is preparing to underfund the program that provides for the basics of operating local school districts by what may be a record amount. The only options for local school districts to deal with the state funding shortfall could be to make cuts or raise local property taxes.

Keep in mind that the white elite sends its mouth-breathing children to private segregation academies, so its appetite for providing a decent public education to majority-Black schools is shall we say limited?

They also cut the income tax by $500 million, benefiting higher income Republicans, while maintaining the nation's highest 7% sales tax on food.  Food.  Chew on that.  Just don't wash it down with tap water.

But don't think that the predatory white Republicans in the state are against people paying income taxes.

Mississippi is one of only five states that will levy taxes on the amount of forgiven student loans (up to $1000 in taxes for Pell Grant recipients who are by law poorer), disproportionately affecting Black residents, who rely on such loans in lieu of merit scholarships from their daddies.

But don't worry – the white Republican Governor and Legislatures have already agreed not to tax forgiven PPP loans, the kind that goes to white businessmen like Florida Republican Congressman and car dealer Vern Buchanan, who trousered $2,300,000 for his heroic effort to sell cars during the COVID pandemic:

Congressman Vern Buchanan had over $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.https://t.co/bXpwJlWRm4

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) August 25, 2022

Let's just keep in mind that these state-level shenanigans were made possible by a 50-year Republican policy of letting white Republican states get away with murder to pander to their racist voters, whose power has been enshrined by a bent Republican Supreme Court.  And all, repeat all, of the current crop of Never-FLG pundits and gasbags now heard to bemoan what happened to their beloved Party of Lincoln were in on the scam.

The results: across great swaths of this country, and notably in white supremacist plutocracies like Mississippi, racism, like water, is everywhere.  And like the water that oozes out of the tap in Jackson, it's toxic and disgusting.  And it comes to you thanks to the Republican Party.