Last Call For I Recall Gavin, Con't

With only weeks to go to California's recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom, the polls remain distressingly tight.

 

Earlier this month, results from a SurveyUSA poll showed that 51% of likely voters in California’s upcoming recall election would vote to remove Gov. Gavin Newsom from office. It was the first poll to show a majority favoring his removal and led to a dramatic shift in polling averages.

Before these results, polling averages calculated by the politics and data website FiveThirtyEight showed a seven-point margin favoring keeping Newsom in office. But with SurveyUSA’s data, the margin narrowed to less than one point. As of Aug. 17, the latest date for which FiveThirtyEight has data, the margin inched up to 1.2 points, with 48.8% for keeping Newsom in office and 47.6% for removing him.


FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages are perhaps the most sophisticated data-based method of assessing the state of the recall race. The numbers come from a statistical model that aggregates individual poll results into two averages — one for keeping Newsom in office and another for removing him. The website has been producing these averages since mid-July but incorporates polls that go as far back as January.

FiveThirtyEight also tracks averages for whom Californians would choose as a replacement if Newsom is recalled. In their latest numbers, Larry Elder leads with an average of 19%, followed by Kevin Paffrath at 9% and John Cox at 6%. The other 43 candidates on the ballot have averages below 5%.

 

In other words, there's a 50/50 shot that odious grifter Larry Elder ends up governor.

Nobody in California seems to think that there's much alacrity needed, either.

It's a disaster in the making.

 

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

Tragic violence in Afghanistan today as suicide bombers tried to disrupt the airlift from Kabul, leaving scores of bodies, including a dozen US troops dead.

Suicide bombers struck the crowded gates of Kabul airport with at least two explosions on Thursday, causing a bloodbath among civilians and U.S. troops, and bringing a catastrophic halt to the airlift of tens of thousands of Afghans desperate to flee.

Two U.S. officials put the U.S. death toll at 12 service members killed, making it one of the deadliest incidents for American troops of the entire 20-year war.

There was no complete toll of Afghan civilians but video images uploaded by Afghan journalists showed dozens of bodies of people killed in packed crowds outside the airport.

A watery ditch by the airport fence was filled with bloodsoaked corpses, some being fished out and laid in heaps on the canal side while wailing civilians searched for loved ones.

Several Western countries said the airlift of civilians was now effectively over, with the United States having sealed the gates of the airport leaving no way out for tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the West through two decades of war.

A Taliban official said at least 13 people including children had been killed in the attack and 52 were wounded, though it was clear from video footage that those figures were far from complete. One surgical hospital run by an Italian charity said it alone was treating more than 60 wounded.

The explosions took place amid the crowds outside the airport who have been massing for days in hope of escaping in an airlift which the United States says will end by Tuesday, following the swift capture of the country by the Taliban.

 

This is horrific.

Republicans, of course, aren't waiting for the bodies to cool before attacking President Biden.

Twenty years of failure just landed on our doorstep, and I fear this isn't the final butcher's bill, for America or for Afghanistan.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

The best places in America for economic growth are no long Republican states, they're Democratic states with high rates of vaccination, particularly urban counties with mandates.

With Covid-19 cases once again rising across the country, the U.S. is struggling to curb the latest, delta-driven surge, as hospitalizations and deaths have steadily climbed. But at least so far, the economy has proved highly resilient. There are many reasons for this, ranging from generous stimulus checks to the Federal Reserve’s commitment to buying bonds and holding interest rates low.

But some interesting new data on the overlap of electoral politics and economic dynamism suggest another reason: The geography of America’s economic engine is heavily concentrated in counties that Joe Biden won in 2020. These counties are much more heavily vaccinated than the rest of the country and thus better able to withstand the economic effects of Covid’s delta variant.

The shift of U.S. economic production toward blue counties predates the arrival of the coronavirus. After the 2016 election, Mark Muro, the policy director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Project, found that the 472 counties Hillary Clinton won produced 64% of the country’s economic output, while the 2,584 counties Donald Trump won contributed just 36%. That was a significant jump from the 2000 election, when the blue-red county economic split was 54% to 46%. Muro dubbed this divide “high-output America” vs. “low-output America.”

Last year, after Biden defeated Trump, Muro looked again and found that the economic output divide has grown even more pronounced. The 520 counties Biden won account for fully 71% of U.S. gross domestic product, while the 2,564 that Trump carried produced just 29%. In other words, America’s economic engine is bluer than ever.

The partisan lean of these 520 economically vital counties has almost certainly helped to protect U.S. growth because Democrats are much more likely to be vaccinated than Republicans. To pinpoint the difference between high-output and low-output America, I asked Muro to compare county-level vaccination data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for blue and red counties. He found that the average share of fully vaccinated people, age 12 and above, in the Biden-voting counties that produce 71% of GDP was 61%, as of Aug. 22, while the share in Trump-voting counties was 46%—a gap that’s grown substantially since April, when vaccination rates in high-output and low-output America were almost the same.

“At this point, reduced vaccination rates align very much with 2020 Trump voting across counties, and that—it turns out—aligns very closely with weaker economic performance,” Muro says. “The irony is that low vaccination rates are likely to slow economic recovery.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the delta wave has hit red America hardest. Nine of the top 10 states with the highest cumulative seven-day case rate per 100,000 residents as of Aug. 22 voted for Trump: Mississippi (840), Louisiana (756), Florida (700), Alabama (525), Tennessee (511), Arkansas (511), Kentucky (511), South Carolina (490), and Alaska (455). Nationally, there were 308 cases per 100,000 people.

The divergence in Covid cases and the effect on economic activity in red and blue counties may be attributable to more than just low vaccination rates. The nature of work in Biden counties vs. Trump counties probably also plays a role. High-tech workers in economic powerhouses such as Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties in California are far better able to shield themselves from infection than, say, meat and poultry processing workers in plants in Iowa or South Dakota.

Still, says Muro, “these gaps likely mean that blue America may be gaining another economic advantage over red America this summer, as blue areas better fend off the delta variant while red ones struggle with it.”

 

Gosh, vaccinated urban counties where Biden won represent 70% of America's GDP, and they're the places not just surviving, but thriving in the pandemic era?  Vaccinated and ready to go back to work, school, and play actually means something significant?

Who could have known?

Oh wait, everyone except for the GOP and their death cult, that's who.

StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump says he will invoke executive privilege to block all House January 6th committee subpoenas, the Biden administration has not weighed in on the matter yet.
• In the wake of FDA approval of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has issued an executive order blocking businesses or local governments from mandating it.
• Japan's ruling LDP party will hold elections on September 29th as PM Yoshihide Suga expected to face a tough challenge from his own party.
• The Biden administration says fewer than 1,500 Americans remain in Kabul, but are expected to be evacuated ahead of next week's Taliban deadline.
• Internet chat site OnlyFans has reversed its controversial decision last week to end sexually explicit content on the site to appease banks, the site's fan base has been built mostly by sex workers.

Last Call For Greening For Green

Corporations stuck with lots of commercial real estate and empty offices in the era of the pandemic are finding new ways to get workers back to the office, green perks like treehouses, bird blinds, and beekeeping.

 

The investment company Nuveen has spent $120 million renovating its office tower at 730 Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, overhauling the lobby, devoting the second floor to amenities and refurbishing a 22nd-floor terrace.

And the finishing touch? Two beehives on a seventh-floor terrace.

Following the latest trend in office perks, Nuveen hired a beekeeper to teach tenants about their tiny new neighbors and harvest honey for them to take home.

“In conversations with tenants, I get more questions about that than anything else,” said Brian Wallick, Nuveen’s director of New York office and life science investments.

Office workers who were sent home during pandemic lockdowns often sought refuge in nature, tending to houseplants, setting up bird feeders and sitting outdoors with their laptops. Now, as companies try to coax skittish employees back to the office and building owners compete for tenants when vacancy rates are soaring, many have hit on the idea of making the office world feel more like the natural world.

The effort seeks to give office workers access to fresh air, sunlight and plants, in tune with the concept of biophilia, which says humans have an innate connection with nature. Designs that include nature are shown to promote health and wellness.

Some of the more unusual nature-themed offering include “treehouse” lounges and vegetable plots that let desk workers dig in the dirt. Beekeeping programs — complete with honey tastings and name-your-queen contests — are, ahem, all the buzz. One upcoming project in Texas will include a bird blind, allowing workers to peek out at other winged creatures.

There’s a lot more focus on amenities and how to make an office better than working from your dining room table,” said Richard A. Cook, a founding partner at CookFox Architects.

Some companies say nature-centered amenities have won them over. And some workers find the outdoorsy vibe reassuring.

But it is unclear whether nature will be enough to attract tenants after the success of remote work over the past year and a half. Some companies have already shrunk their office space, and many employees, having ably performed their duties from home, are questioning the need to go into an office at all. The surge in coronavirus cases from the spread of the Delta variant has caused some companies, like Amazon, Apple and Facebook, to postpone their return to the office to next year.

Two weeks ago, office buildings in 10 major metropolitan areas were 32 percent occupied, down slightly from the week before, according to Kastle Systems, a security company.

Incorporating nature in office buildings is not entirely new. Before the pandemic, developers, owners and architects were already adding terraces and rooftop lounges and bringing plants and natural light inside — part of a drive to make offices healthier. Scientific studies show that biophilic spaces are associated with increased cognition and productivity, lower stress levels, fewer sick days and less staff turnover.

But now a connection to nature has gone from being “a nice-to-have to being a risk if you don’t do it,” said Joanna Frank, the president and chief executive of the Center for Active Design, which operates Fitwel, a healthy-building certification program.

Adding natural features to offices can be expensive, but the costs can often be offset with higher rents. Commercial buildings with healthy-building certifications (such as Fitwel and the Well standard, administered by the International Well Building Institute) can fetch rents up to 7.7 percent higher than noncertified buildings, according to a recent study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

It's not a terrible idea, but it's not going to solve the issue either.

Work from home is here to stay, and corporations had better get used to it, and fast. 

Nobody wants to spend two hours in the car per day just to get to a PC they can remote into from home when they spent the last year-plus proving they 100% could do the job from their couch. 

Especially if your job primarily involves PC and phone work and not physical lifting, making, fixing or delivering, you're going to see more and more workers be okay with less pay or fewer office benefits for the benefit of working from home and coming in on a limited schedule...or not at all.

If you want to mess with the office beehive, that's great. But I'm thinking that the majority of us will be working from home well into the future.

The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

One thing that America has completely and utterly failed at is the program designed to get rental assistance to millions of Americans facing eviction, and the NY Times has discovered that after seven months, the program has only doled out about 10% of the funds it has gotten because the process is so ridiculously difficult that nobody can handle it.

 

The $46.5 billion rental aid program created to pay rent accrued during the pandemic continues to disburse money at a slow pace, as the White House braces for a Supreme Court order that could strike down a new national moratorium on evictions.

The Emergency Rental Assistance Program, funded in the two federal pandemic relief packages passed over the last year, sputtered along in July, with just $1.7 billion being distributed by state and local governments, according to the Treasury Department, which oversees the program.

The money meted out was a modest increase from the prior month, bringing the total aid disbursed thus far to about $5.1 billion, figures released early Wednesday showed, or roughly 11 percent of the cash allocated by Congress to avoid an eviction crisis that many housing experts now see as increasingly likely.

“About a million payments have now gone out to families — it is starting to help a meaningful number of families,” said Gene Sperling, who oversees the operation of federal pandemic relief programs for President Biden.

“It’s just not close to enough in an emergency like this to protect all the families who need and deserve to be protected. So there is still way more to do and to do fast,” he added.

The report came as Mr. Biden’s domestic policy staff mapped out policy contingencies if the Supreme Court strikes down the moratorium, which is the administration’s principal safeguard for hundreds of thousands of low income and working class tenants hit hardest by the pandemic. White House lawyers expect a court decision this week.

The moratorium was initially implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last September under President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Biden extended it several times this year, but allowed it to briefly expire earlier this month. He reinstated it, in a slightly modified form, on Aug. 3 under pressure from congressional Democrats.

That final 60-day extension, enacted over the objection of White House lawyers, was intended to buy more time to distribute the emergency rental assistance.

The program is administered by the federal government, but it is up to states to build out a system to deliver aid to struggling renters and landlords, and that has been the main source of its problems.

 

Here's the problem: states don't want to do this. They want to evict people. The corporate lobbyists for the massive property rental and Wall Street real estate investors want people evicted so they can snap up the rentals and make billions. 

There's been minimum progress, but it's not going to save millions of people from getting evicted in the next few months once the Supreme Court kills the eviction moratorium. Here in KY and Ohio, where the moratorium is already dead thanks to the 6th Circuit court, thousands have already been evicted and thousands more will be soon, right into the heart of the COVID delta spike.

This is a disaster, all the way around, on states, on Trump, on Congress, and on Biden.

Af-Gone-Istan, Bipartisan Stupidity Edition

In a way, I've never seen the pundit class, Democrats, and Republicans so universally in agreement on anything in the last five years but there you are. They all agree that House Reps. Seth Moulton, a Democrat, and Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, are two of the most inanely moronic people on the planet right now.

Two members of Congress made an unauthorized whirlwind trip to Kabul early Tuesday, leaving less than 24 hours later on a flight used for evacuating U.S. citizens, allies and vulnerable Afghans.

The visit by Reps. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) — which was not approved as part of the normal process for congressional fact-finding trips — served as a distraction for military and civilian staffers attempting to carry out frenzied rescue efforts, according to two people familiar with the trip who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the matter.

It is not clear how the lawmakers, both of whom served in Iraq before being elected to Congress, first entered Afghanistan. Moulton’s office did not confirm the trip until the plane evacuating the members of Congress left Afghanistan’s airspace. Meijer’s office did not respond to an email seeking comment.

The cloak-and-dagger trip infuriated some officials at the Pentagon and the State Department, where diplomats, military officers and civil servants are working around-the-clock shifts in Washington and at the Kabul airport to evacuate thousands of people from the country every day.

“It’s as moronic as it is selfish,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide a frank assessment of their trip. “They’re taking seats away from Americans and at-risk Afghans — while putting our diplomats and service members at greater risk — so they can have a moment in front of the cameras.”

In a joint statement from Moulton and Meijer emailed to The Washington Post by Moulton spokesman Tim Biba, the two pushed back on the notion that their trip caused a distraction.

“We have been on the other side of this argument while we were serving and it just isn’t accurate,” Moulton and Meijer said. “Trust us: the professionals on the ground are focused on the mission. Many thanked us for coming.”

 

If that's the best defense these two dirt clods have, then I actually wouldn't feel bad at all if both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy kick these clowns off all their committees and leave them grounded for the rest of the 117th Congress where they can share detention with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

There's dumb, performative stunts, and then there's this idiocy. Moulton and Meijer should both be ashamed of themselves, and I hope voters act accordingly.

StupidiNews!

• The US Supreme Court is leaving in place a lower court order for the Biden Administration to resume the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" refugee policy.
• The embattled National Rifle Association has canceled its annual conference in Texas due to COVID-19 delta variant spread in the state.
• House Democrats have passed the John Lewis voting rights bill, but Senate Republicans say they will filibuster and kill the legislation.
• Israel's new government is asking President Biden to scrap nuclear talks with Iran, saying they are a waste of time and resources.
• Microsoft says 38 million records from its Power Apps portal service were exposed on the internet, including Social Security numbers, COVID-19 vaccine status, and more.
  

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

Hawaii Gov. David Ige is begging tourists to stay away from the islands as the state is suffering a wildfire pandemic of COVID delta brought on by visitors.

In a news conference on Monday, Ige encouraged visitors and residents to reduce travel to essential business activities.

“It is a risky time to be traveling right now,” Ige said, adding, “It is not a good time to travel to the islands.”

The governor warned that tourists would not have the “typical holiday” they expect when visiting the islands due to restrictions including limited restaurant capacity and limited access to rental cars.

“I encourage everyone to restrict and curtail travel to Hawaii, residents and visitors alike. It is not a good time to travel to the islands.”

In a separate statement, the Hawaii Tourism Authority said residents and visitors should delay nonessential travel through the end of October.

Ige’s comments come as the state has struggled to deal with a rise in coronavirus infections.

Elizabeth Char, director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, said in a statement that the surge was due to community followed by residents flying to hot spot areas and traveling home.

“If things do not change, our health care systems will be crippled and those needing medical care for all types of diseases, injuries and conditions, including our visitors, may find it difficult to get the treatment they need right away,” Char said.

Hawaii has reported 9,389 new coronavirus infections in the past two weeks, according to state data. The state has reported 56,670 new cases since the pandemic began, and 564 cumulative deaths.

 

It's not like Texas or Florida, where Republican governors are getting help from neighboring states, it's Hawaii, where the closest land is the California coast some 2,400 miles away. This is all taking place at the height of Hawaii's tourist season, too.

Stay home, America.  It's not April 2020.

It's worse.

It's About Suppression, Con't

North Carolina, like all Southern states, makes convicted felons have to jump through various hoops to have their voting rights restored once they have served their time, and most Southern states make those hoops so onerous that getting the right to vote back is nearly impossible. Republicans have long used the tactic to harm Black voters in order to keep them off the voter rolls for life after serving prison time for a felony.

That is, until Monday's state court ruling that struck down the state's provisions as unconstitutional.

Judges have restored voting rights to an estimated 55,000 North Carolinians on parole or probation for a felony, according to a lawyer for the people who challenged the law that has kept them from voting.

GOP state lawmakers, who were defending the law in court, plan to appeal Monday’s ruling to a higher court. But if the ruling is upheld on appeal, then people convicted of felonies in North Carolina will regain their right to vote once they leave prison.

“Everyone on felony probation, parole or post-supervision release can now register and vote, starting today,” the challengers’ lawyer, Stanton Jones, said in a text message Monday morning after the ruling came down.

Most U.S. states allow people with felony records to regain their voting rights at some point after leaving prison, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. Some have the same rules North Carolina had until Monday’s ruling, requiring people to first finish their probation or parole. But a larger number have the rules that the judges have now switched North Carolina to, with people regaining their rights as soon as they leave prison.

It’s the biggest expansion of voting rights in North Carolina since the 1960s, said Daryl Atkinson, co-director of Durham civil rights group Forward Justice and a lawyer for the challengers in this case.

“Our biggest quarrels in this state have been over what groups of people have a voice at the ballot box to be included in ‘We the People,’” Atkinson said at a press conference Monday, later adding: “Today, we enlarged the ‘we’ in ‘We the people’.”

The law’s challengers argued that felon disenfranchisement laws were explicitly created to stop Black people from voting in the years after the Civil War and coincided with a widespread campaign to accuse newly freed Black people of felonies — troubling trends, they said, which have continued into the current day.

Jones said in his opening arguments in the trial last week, The News & Observer reported, that while Black people make up 21% of North Carolina’s voting-age population, they are 42% of the people whose voting rights have been taken away because of this law — “which is no surprise because that’s exactly what it was designed to do,” he said.

Now, if Monday’s ruling survives on appeal, North Carolina will be the only state in the South to automatically restore voting rights to people after they leave prison.

The challengers who won the case had said that once people are out of prison, they’ve rejoined society and should have a say in how it’s run. Even if they’re on probation they still can pay taxes and send their kids to school — and thus should be able to vote on the people in charge of spending their taxes or running the schools, said Dennis Gaddy, who founded Community Success Initiative, a Raleigh group that helps former prison inmates rejoin society.

“They can’t advocate for themselves” without being able to vote, he said. “They can’t advocate for their communities. They can’t advocate for their families.”

 

In other words, the ruling from the NC judges are that there's no compelling reason to force felons who have served their time to keep them from being able to register to vote, and that doing so is a denial of the 14th Amendment. Republicans of course say they will have the ruling blocked awaiting appeal. 

Republicans want as few Americans to vote as possible.

What does that say about their ideas of "democracy"?

The Good Package, Con't

Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema will never allow the $3.5 Good Package™ to pass as is, and she's letting everyone know that she determines its fate.

Kyrsten Sinema still opposes her party's plans for a $3.5 trillion, party-line spending bill. And she’s not up for a negotiation about it.

As House Democratic leaders hold back Sinema’s own Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill in order to push the Arizona Democrat and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to support a multitrillion-dollar spending bill, Sinema is making it crystal clear that her mind can’t be changed. And that applies even as her own legislation becomes a bargaining chip in House Democrats’ internal discussions.

The $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill “is a historic win for our nation’s everyday families and employers and, like every proposal, should be considered on its own merits,” said Sinema spokesperson John LaBombard. “Proceedings in the U.S. House will have no impact on Kyrsten’s views about what is best for our country - including the fact that she will not support a budget reconciliation bill that costs $3.5 trillion.”

It’s the latest entrenched position from the first-term moderate, whose resistance to changing the Senate’s filibuster rules and to supporting a $3.5 trillion spending bill is enraging progressives. Sinema and Manchin both helped pass Democrats’ budget earlier this month, setting up that gargantuan spending bill, but both are resistant to a social spending package that ultimately meets its $3.5 trillion top line mark.

Sinema in particular specifically opposes that spending goal, which was devised by Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Senate Democrats need all 50 of their members, including Manchin and Sinema, to pass a filibuster-proof reconciliation spending bill.

On Sunday Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her members were still pursuing a bill that costs $3.5 trillion, but are hoping to finance it in part with tax enforcement and tax increases on the wealthy and corporations. Meanwhile, moderates in Pelosi's caucus are declining to back the Senate-passed budget unless Pelosi puts Sinema’s Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill up for a vote on the House floor.

 

Sinema isn't alone however...

In statement shortly after Sinema's, Manchin leaned on Pelosi and House leaders to act now on the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill instead of waiting for the Senate to pass a massive spending bill.

"It would send a terrible message to the American people if this bipartisan bill is held hostage. I urge my colleagues in the House to move swiftly to get this once in a generation legislation to the President’s desk for his signature," Manchin said.

 

Pelosi knows damn well that passing the smaller bipartisan bill means Sinema and Manchin will 100% kill the entire Good Package completely, but if she doesn't pass it, the Good Package is done for, and Dems lose it all.

Again, this is entirely on Democratic leadership: Pelosi and Schumer need to deliver the votes.

That's the job description, folks.

StupidiNews!

• Democrat Kathy Hochul has succeeded NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo as his resignation became official at 12:01 AM, bcomin the state's first woman governor.
• Leaders of the G7 group of nations, including President Biden, will discuss an August 31st Taliban deadline for all Western troops to be out of Afghanistan.
• Vice President Kamala Harris's historic Asia trip continued to Singapore Tuesday where she accused China of "coercion" across the South China Sea area. 
• Polls in Canada show PM Justin Trudeau's government faces a tough snap election campaign this fall against Tory opposition as Liberals fight to keep power amid several Trudeau scandals.
• Chevrolet is recalling all of its electric Bolt auto models for a pair of battery defects that could end up costing the carmaker nearly $2 billion to fix.

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.