Last Call For The Long Game

At least Democrats are finally admitting that after the disappointment of 2020's state elections, that winning back state legislatures are going to be next to impossible without major investment by the national party into state party efforts.

Now, Democrats are licking their wounds and looking to cobble together a new strategy for success in state legislative races after failing to flip a single chamber throughout the entire country last year. Those defeats are particularly stinging now as Republicans are left in control of redistricting for 187 House districts, while Democrats will have full control to delineate just 84.

Those defeats stand in stark contrast to the victories Democrats projected in states like Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina and Texas. Adding insult to injury, Democrats also ceded both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature.

And with redistricting coming just ahead of the 2022 midterms, those losses have Democrats alarmed.

“I think it's devastating,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which helps Democrats win state legislative races. “If we hold the House in 2022, it will be a structural miracle. Because Democrats failing to flip a single chamber and in fact losing two in 2020 is the kind of thing that will set Congress back decades.”

It is that alarm that is fueling Democrats’ scramble to achieve greater success in state legislative races.

Heather Williams, the executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), said the party is “in the process of solidifying our strategy” and “ready to do recruitment and find candidates for seats on condensed timelines,” noting that redistricting will delay the entry of candidates in some races.

“I think it's imperative that Democrats win back state legislatures across the country,” added Pennsylvania state Sen. Jay Costa, who serves as Democrats’ floor leader. “I can't tell you how many years we've been trying to do it. And we've come close, we take three steps forward, and then over two cycles we take six steps back.”

Democrats have been tantalizingly close in several chambers. The party last year was two seats away from flipping the Arizona state House and Minnesota Senate and nine seats away from flipping the Texas state House, to name a few. Democrats made no headway in Arizona or Texas and won only one seat in Minnesota.

Nearly a dozen Democrats who spoke to The Hill said that the top priority is adjusting their messaging strategy for state races.

Democrats have preached as gospel for years that the party succeeds both locally and nationally when focusing on kitchen table issues like health care, jobs and education.

However, the party is looking to take that one step further by vocalizing the connections between specific communities and those issues rather than have a blanket talking point on issues like expanding access to health care.

Democrats must “communicate what we want to do and what we're trying to do, and again, depending upon what part of the state you're talking about. … In Southeast Pennsylvania … there's a message along those lines,” Costa said. “In the southwestern part of the state, which is trending significantly more Republican, it's a different conversation.”

 

I don't think the problem is "messaging" as it is "having done something to crow about". Turns out that actually doing something great, like, I dunno, a major infrastructure bill that helps tens of millions?

Might put points on the board with voters in 2022, but Dems have to brag about it at every opportunity.

Will they listen?

Hell they still haven't passed either infrastructure bill. Can we start there?

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

The Biden Administration is turning to the Pentagon's Civil Reserve Air Fleet program to get commercial jetliners into Kabul in order to airlift Americans and Afghan refugees out of Afghanistan.

President Biden said Sunday that the U.S. military is “executing a plan” to move stranded American citizens to the Kabul airport in greater numbers, including through an expansion of a safe zone around the facility and by creating conduits for people to access the compound “safely and effectively.”

“Our first priority in Kabul,” Biden said in remarks at the White House, “is getting American citizens out of the country as quickly and as safely as possible.”

The president would not say how the plan for “increased rational access to the airport” is being carried out or whether U.S. troops have expanded their perimeter outside the airport and further into Kabul, which could put them at heightened risk of attack from Taliban factions manning security checkpoints and Islamic State operatives who, U.S. officials warn, pose a serious threat.

In recent days, the Qatari ambassador to Afghanistan has escorted small groups of Americans into the airport, according to two people familiar with the effort who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive operation. American citizens have been instructed to meet at rally points in the city, and the ambassador then accompanies them to guarantee safe passage, these people said. Qatar has served as an intermediary between the United States and the Taliban at several stages of the American withdrawal, sponsoring peace talks and serving as the first point of refuge for many evacuees.

The operational shift comes as U.S. commanders gear up for what officials hope will be a dramatic acceleration of evacuations from Afghanistan in the coming days, enlisting domestic commercial airliners and a number of foreign allies to aid the effort.

Evacuations had slowed over the past couple days, as backlogs in way stations like Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar prevented planeloads of people from departing Kabul, grounding planned flights out and degrading humanitarian conditions at the already overcrowded airport.

The addition of 18 commercial airplanes — activated, the Pentagon announced Sunday, as part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet — is intended to address those bottlenecks. The jetliners, contracted from domestic airlines United, American, Atlas, Delta, Omni and Hawaiian, will not be flown into Kabul, but used instead to move those taken to places like Qatar on to other destinations in Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Persian Gulf. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier in the weekend that 13 countries had pledged to temporarily host evacuees, while an additional 12 had agreed to serve as transit points.

Biden said Sunday that the mobilization represented a “first stage,” leaving the possibility that more flights could be added to the effort.

On Saturday, the U.S. military operated 14 evacuation flights that took about 3,900 people out of the country, while 35 other planes evacuated approximately the same number, according to White House and Pentagon officials. That’s up twofold from Friday — but still short of the 5,000 to 9,000 people per day that senior military officials have said they have the capability to evacuate themselves.

 

Biden's still wisely being intentionally cagey about operational security, as he should be, but it's excellent that we're bringing in more airliners to get more people out more quickly. It's a move that makes sense and will work, and hopefully these additional planes will be pressed into service in a matter of days, if not sooner.

We still have thousands of Americans in Afghanistan, and for now, the US is working to get them out. That's a good thing. When something like this goes bad, well, some of my earliest memories are of the news counting the hundreds of days that US hostages were held in Iran in 1980.

Regardless, evacuation numbers have increased dramatically over the weekend.

Earlier estimates said the upper limit on how many people could be evacuated per day was between 5,000 and 9,000. The fact that the US flew out ~10,400 over a 24-hour period is important. https://t.co/nqCqFIcHEe

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen) August 23, 2021

The takeaway here is that Biden is getting the job done, despite all the howling from the GOP and the media.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

We're now watching the total collapse of regional hospital systems in states like Texas, where hundreds are dying daily from delta and hundreds more are dying because there are no facilities to take care of emergent patients any longer.

Emergency room doctors in Southeast Texas say they are running out of hospital beds, and some patients are waiting hours, sometimes days to be admitted into a hospital.

“Are there patients dying because of this that might not have died? Absolutely, yes,” said Southeast Texas Regional Advisory Council CEO, Darrell Pile. “I am very concerned about the fatalities that are about to happen.”

As of Friday afternoon, Pile says 482 patients were waiting for hospital beds in his 25-county region. He said 211 of those patients are COVID-19 positive.

An additional 120 patients are waiting for an ICU bed. Of those patients, 65 are COVID-19 positive.

“The poor nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists can’t see all the patients that are mounting in the lobby, and now we have patients waiting in parking lots and we have patients waiting in the back of ambulances in parking lots. It’s a gridlock at the emergency department level,” Pile told KPRC 2.

The SETRAC CEO says the Southeast Texas region is short about 2,000 nurses, which he says is the main reason behind the bed shortage.

“It’s a situation where a patient, after waiting hours, may get into an emergency department room with a curtain drawn and be assessed and be decided they need to be admitted, but there’s nowhere to go, and that’s where they stay for hours and hours and maybe days,” said Pile.

In some cases, he says patients are being flown out of state to places like Louisiana, Utah, Colorado, North Dakota and Minnesota, instead of going to the Texas Medical Center.

“We are used to being the place where patients fly to. They come here,” he said.

At Altus Baytown, a freestanding ER, Dr. Robert Velarde said they are facing something they have never seen before.

“For us, this is the worst surge since COVID has started,” Dr. Velarde told KPRC 2. “It’s hectic. It’s tiring. It’s stressful.”

Due to a lack of hospital beds, if patients need to be admitted into a hospital for more specialized care, he says the delay is overwhelming.

“We are trying to treat the patient who should be in the ICU in the emergency room. They are not getting the full supervision or maintenance they need,” he said.

Dr. Velarde says his ER staff has spent hours on the phone looking for hospitals that can accept his patients. In fact, they have even used Google to find hospitals across the country that may have open beds.

“If I want a COVID bed, I have to be calling like 50 to 60 hospitals a day just to find one,” said Dr. Velarde. “They even hired a person here just to come and make calls trying to find a bed for the patient.”

 

And governors in these states are either doing nothing, are prevented from doing anything by GOP legislatures, or both.  We're seeing triage measures at best. We need to be back in lockdown mode, but nobody will tolerate it. The violence would kill people too. Southern GOP states are out of resources and governors are doing things like "requesting more nurses" and turning libraries into field hospitals, instead of telling people to get the vaccine and otherwise stay home.

We're at the breaking point now.

By the way, the FDA is expected to announce that the Pfizer vaccine is getting full approval as early as today, which means more vaccine mandates are going to be coming. A new USA Today/Ipsos poll out Monday finds more than 70% of Americans support public mask mandates as 'a matter of health and safety" and more than 60% support vaccine mandates.

The problem, in the same poll, is that 20% of Americans say they will never get the vaccine, regardless of mandates. Some 70% of Americans say that employers, universities, airlines, restaurants, and other businesses should be able to refuse service to the unvaccinated.

That's the next big fight over the months ahead, and I fully expect the US Supreme Court to step in, maybe even before the end of the year.

We'll see where we go, but the next couple of months at least are going to be abysmal.

StupidiNews!

 StupidiNews returns!

I know it's been a while and my schedule working West Coast hours hasn't been too amenable to keeping up with what's effectively 4 AM Pacific time posts, but we're going to get back into the swing of things starting today

• Utility crews across Eastern PA, New York, and New England are working to restore power to more than 56,000 as Tropical Storm Henri came ashore in Rhode Island and Connecticut on Sunday.
• Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson and his wife Jacqueline are "doing well" after both were hospitalized for COVID-19 over the weekend.
• The US Supreme Court has temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that would have required President Joe Biden to reinstate the Trump-era Migrant Protection Protocols program.
• UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is asking President Biden to delay the exit of US troops from Afghanistan past next week's August 31 deadline.
• The US has now passed 200 million Americans who have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.