Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is re-upping his main and, seemingly, only defense against those in his state who dare to buck his rules against COVID-19 mitigation measures: He’s threatening more of the little guys with fines again.

Ooof, you can’t make this stuff up.

The whereabouts of conservative lawyer John Pierce, who is representing 17 Capitol insurrectionist defendants, have been fuzzy for some time.

The backlash to the new anti-abortion law in Texas is only slowly coalescing, and it remains unclear whether it will manage to put any kind of serious economic or political pressure on the state.

Case in point: the city council in Portland, Oregon is set to vote Wednesday on a measure meant to punish Texas for the ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

There are various points here from TPM Reader PT that I disagree. I don’t think there was ever a “Clinton / Gore / Lieberman wing of the party”. I also think it’s hard to argue that moderate or conservative-leaning Dems are obsolete when they have it entirely within their power to sink the President’s entire agenda. But there are enough accurate points that I wanted to share PT‘s take.

I’ve been paying a modicum of attention to the ongoing freakout of conservative Democrats in Congress, as I’m sure you have been as well. I have a couple of thoughts about them that I’d like to share with you.

First thought: to understand what’s going on, it’s helpful to think of this faction as a kind of ethnic group within the Democratic Party, and one that has until recently been at the top of the status hierarchy of their society (that society being, again, the Party). They were always the ones you needed to get things done; they could tank — or rescue — any legislation, they were the ones who could cut deals with the less conservative Republicans, they were the ones whose interests were always catered to. If you wanted to get ahead in national politics in the Democratic Party, you had to make sure everyone knew you were in the Clinton / Gore / Lieberman wing of the party, and not with that collection of leftists who didn’t know how to win an election.

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) put out a rather nebbishy statement today addressing the disastrous abortion ban that went into effect in his state this week, perhaps in part to cut through the curious silence on the part of GOP leadership on an issue it has campaigned on for decades.

Since the pandemic reached our shores last year, the right has been extremely vocal about its deeply held opposition to any type of government regulation that impacts personal health choices.

We’ve watched and covered public school districts in red states around the U.S. defying Republican governors’ orders against universal masking in schools for the past several weeks. But as sovereign nations, many Native American tribes around the country have been taking school-related COVID mitigation measures into their own hands for some time.

Back in April of this year, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) blamed the lackluster vaccination situation in the Magnolia State on “a very large African American population” and “a lot of rural people.”