This isn’t new news. It happened more than a week ago. But I’d missed it. So maybe you did too. The Chief Judge of the New York State court system, Janet DiFiore, announced on August 23rd that court employees would have until September 7th to get vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.
In response Dennis Quirk, President of the New York State Court Officers Association, published the addresses of DiFiore’s two homes and called for protests outside her homes. He was suspended for doxxing the Chief Judge. But as he pointed out the state can’t suspend him as President of the union.
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.
I have no insight into why arch-Trump toady Jason Miller was stopped and questioned at the airport in Brazil on the way back to the United States. But he and a lot of other US right-wingers were there for something called “CPAC Brazil”, which as the name suggests is a CPAC event held down in Brazil. But given that that event is another example of the Trumpite International, which has US and Brazil as two of its dominant players, it’s important to see the Brazil event – which has been embraced by most all Trumpers – through the prism of what’s happening on the ground in the country.
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.