Opinion

Far-right extremism, or white supremacy, is the fastest growing ideology in the United States. The impact of white supremacists terrorizing Black communities has led to calls for serious action, even an anti-lynching bill. This alone reflects how dangerous they are.

Add to that the January 6 insurrection and the evidenced involvement of the Proud Boys, and other groups, leading to the FBI describing the attack on the United States Capitol as an act of domestic terror.

Monday was the deadline here in Connecticut for state employees to get vaccinated, per order of the governor, Ned Lamont. The state press corps spent last week speculating about the number of workers who'd walk off the job before being forced to get the shot. Attention settled on school bus drivers. Around 500,000 children depend on them. Reporters asked the Lamont administration what it would do if thousands of kids were left stranded. But by Monday, it was clear that the vast majority of drivers complied with the law.

A similar pattern played out across the country. Deadlines were imposed. Blood oaths were taken. Anxieties grew. Americans of seemingly sound mind swore they'd never get vaccinated against their will. Then — obedience. The people who said they'd never do what they were told did what they were told. The people with so many "reasons" for being against vaccines forgot all about those "reasons." The people whose identities were built on "beliefs" decided those "beliefs" weren't as important as the consequences of keeping them.

When the two-track plan to pass President Joe Biden's ambitious jobs and infrastructure program first emerged, many progressives understandably thought it was a trap. To summarize an impossibly complex situation: Earlier this year, Biden proposed a giant bill that would contain huge chunks of the progressive agenda. Some of it was GOP-friendly, such as building roads and bridges. Some of it — childcare funding, policies to reduce climate change, and health care expansions — was not. But centrist Democrats refused to vote for the entire bill through budget reconciliation, which only requires a party-line vote, because they wanted to say they were "bipartisan." So a scheme was concocted: Put the GOP-friendly items in one bill that could pass on a bipartisan basis, and put the rest in a bill to pass on a party-line vote.

So Democrats concocted an intra-party deal: Progressives vote for the moderate-pleasing bill, and, in exchange, moderates vote for the progressive bill.

It's way past political cliche, but that old “Popeye" comic strip where J. Wellington Wimpy promises to pay a short-order cook tomorrow for a hamburger he plans to eat today, is still the best way to describe Republican intransigence this week over a vote to extend the nation's debt ceiling that's soared past cartoonish farce.

In case you missed it, on Monday, Republicans in the narrowly divided U.S. Senate voted to block the approval of new borrowing intended to pay for old debt that they're complicit in racking up.

Defenders of the U.S. Postal Service are urgently renewing their calls for the ouster of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy as his 10-year plan to overhaul the cherished government institution is set to take effect Friday, ushering in permanently slower mail delivery while hiking prices for consumers.

"DeJoy calls his plan 'Delivering for America,' but it will do the exact opposite—slowing many First Class Mail deliveries down, taking their standard from three to five days," Porter McConnell of Take on Wall Street, a co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, warns in a video posted online late Tuesday.

Last week, in a piece about how the Republicans are humiliating the Democrats, I said there's no real chance of the United States Congress failing to raise the debt ceiling. Failure would instantly trigger a worldwide economic calamity. Though the Republicans are behaving irresponsibly, don't worry, I said. The Democrats won't let that happen.

The point of last week's piece was that the Democrats, in standing by the filibuster, are giving the Republicans the means of humiliating them. Today, I want to focus on the GOP's role, specifically that voting against raising the debt ceiling is a hostile war-like act. We're so familiar with their war-like hostility, however, it seems like old news. It shouldn't be. The GOP's war-like hostility drives the news. If you do not understand that, you do not understand American politics.

Fox News contributor Jessica Tarlov, a former Democratic strategist who holds two master's degrees and a Ph.D., destroyed her co-hosts' false claims and the conservative cable network's framing about the crime "surge" on Tuesday's edition of "The Five."

Speaking about news that the murder rate had skyrocketed 30 percent, Tarlov made clear that the FBI statistic was from last year.

The Sept. 20 confab wasn't just about fictitious vaccine dangers, though. Oh, no. That would be too focused for a medicine show, then or now. The day's event was also about government overreach, the redeeming power of religion and Black Lives Matter protesters. Disjointed, perhaps. Hard to follow, absolutely. That was the point of the exercise — keeping the audience terrified, ready to both buy and believe. At least they had raffles and food trucks.

Let's listen to a few raised voices from the day's entertainment, ably captured by the Kansas Reflector's Tim Carpenter. (You can watch the event here, but I wouldn't recommend doing so without a bottle of Scotch nearby.)

Just in case you may have been led to believe that the pending U.S. Supreme Court challenge from Mississippi is a singular, heartfelt moral argument over abortion, a legal brief filed in the case last week attempts to broaden the challenge to an attack on same-sex marriage and LGBTQ rights as well.

Indeed, the argument from the guy who designed the recent Texas law that has all but banned abortions in that state is a broadside against judges making any decision not specifically in black ink of the Constitution.

Last week, Jennifer Rubin wrote about the sinking reputation of the United States Supreme Court. With respect to a new abortion law in Texas, which invalidates Roe v. Wade, the Post columnist said that, "The nub of the problem is not that (or not only that) voters are angry that the court allowed a diabolical and invasive Texas law to go into effect. The problem, rather, is that once the facade of impartiality and nonpartisanship is shattered, it is nearly impossible to get back."

It's an important piece. You should read it. But the assertion that "the facade of impartiality and nonpartisanship" is hard to put back together once it's started coming apart is worth dwelling on. Is it true? Well, I have to repeat myself, to wit: most people most of the time have something better to do than pay attention to politics. 2000's Bush v. Gore should have shattered "the facade" utterly, but didn't. Why? For one thing, 9/11. For another, most people have other things to do.

The union representing Massachusetts State Troopers is claiming that "dozens" are set to resign over the state's Republican governor's mandate that all executive department personnel provide proof of vaccination by October 17, or risk "disciplinary action including possible termination," according to the Associated Press. That mandate applies to "42,000 state workers and contractors in the executive branch."

In an undated statement the State Police Association of Massachusetts (SPAM) says "dozens of troopers have already submitted their resignation paperwork, some of whom plan to return to other departments offering reasonable alternatives such as mask wearing and regular testing."

By now, it should be abundantly clear that the insurrection of January 6, 2021, was not a spontaneous uprising perpetrated by an angry horde of amped-up Trump supporters. To the contrary, the insurrection was the culmination of an attempted coup designed to prevent the peaceful transition of power.

But while the insurrection failed, a new coup is brewing and gathering steam. It is being spurred by Trump's relentless promotion of the "big lie" about the stolen election, and by means of massive voter suppression and voter subversion legislation enacted since the election in key Republican-dominated states to guarantee that the GOP regains control over Congress in 2022 and that Trump is restored to the presidency in 2024.