Last Call For Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

 TPM's Josh Marshall sums up the Afghanistan situation perfectly:

The perpetual effort to stand up an Afghan government that could exist on its own did not work. That doesn’t mean the decision to topple the Taliban government in 2001 was a mistake. But that was twenty years ago. We are living in a dramatically different world today. We have been in a perpetual occupation in pursuit of no clear national security interest of the United States. At a certain point you have to realize that and act accordingly. I find convincing this suggestion that Biden refused a more phased or circumstances-based withdrawal precisely because he had seen up close how Barack Obama had been rolled by the Pentagon a decade ago.

In 122 AD the Emperor Hadrian built what history knows as “Hadrian’s Wall,” which bisects Britain. You can still see it today. It marked the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire. On this side Rome; on that side the tribes of Caledonia. Some twenty years later in 142 AD the Emperor Antoninus Pius, frustrated with the marauding and managing the tribes north of wall, constructed a new wall roughly one hundred miles further north into what is now Scotland. This was the Antonine Wall. Rome would garrison and pacify the region between the two walls. Twenty years later in 162 AD, the year after Antonius Pius died, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius abandoned the new territory and withdrew back to Hadrian’s Wall. Not everything works.

The intensity of the current handwringing over the fall of Kabul is an almost perfect measure of the denial about the failure of the current mission. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin. What was keeping us there this long? THIS! Look at it around you today. The collective unwillingness to endure this reality is what has kept the US in the country for at least a decade. Processing ten years of denial in ten hours is rough.

We’ve been in Afghanistan for either ten or twenty years because no one in authority was ready to endure this moment and not look back. I don’t know if Biden will pay a domestic political price for this denouement. But watching it all unfold I’m even more certain he made the right decision than I was a day ago. Does anyone think we’ll look back a year from now and think, wow, I wish we were still garrisoning Afghanistan? I doubt it.

Someone had to make the decision that Bush, Obama and Trump did not and apparently could not. Biden did.

 

Biden did the right thing.  The swift fall of Kabul only makes the point clear: this was always how it was going to end, because we've been propping up a Potemkin village for a decade now.

Cuomo's #MeToo Moment, Con't

Outgoing NY Dem Gov. Andrew Cuomo is nowhere near out of the woods, even with his resignation the investigation by NY state lawmakers will continue.

New York state lawmakers announced Monday that the investigation into Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) will continue days after initially saying it would end following his resignation.

Carl Heastie (D), the speaker of the New York State Assembly, and Charles Lavine (D), chairman of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that the committee would issue a final report on the investigation into sexual harassment claims against the third-term governor, whether Cuomo used state resources while landing his multimillion-dollar book deal, and if data on nursing home deaths had been misleading.

The governor’s alleged actions — which could lead to civil suits and criminal charges related to the sexual harassment allegations — are also being investigated by at least five district attorneys.

Heastie previously said the Judiciary Committee’s investigation of Cuomo would be moot after the governor leaves office later this month since its purpose was to determine if Cuomo should remain in office.

The governor announced last week that he would resign following a report from the state attorney general, which found that he had sexually harassed 11 women. Cuomo initially bucked calls to resign from friends, allies and even President Biden, but eventually announced that he would step down from office after reports that New York state lawmakers were preparing to start impeachment hearings.

Heastie’s announcement about the end of the investigation was met with a negative response from Democrats and Republicans in the legislature.

“The taxpayers paid for this investigation, and I think the taxpayers deserve to see what the Assembly has found,” tweeted Sean Ryan, a Democratic New York state senator. “Release all the evidence to the public.”

 

This is 100% the right thing to do. Cuomo still faces possible criminal and civil charges, and frankly the guy needs to spend some time behind bars. Good job here, NY Dems.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

As school starts Monday for students in Texas, the battle against the delta variant of COVID-19 rages on in the state's courts as Dallas schools will continue to enforce the county's mask mandate in all classes despite a state Supreme Court order blocking the stay of GOP Gov. Greg Abbott's order to eliminate all mask mandates across the state.

Dallas ISD will continue to require masks for all students and staff members, despite a decision Sunday by the Texas Supreme Court that temporarily halted Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins’ public health order requiring masks in public schools and businesses.

“Until there’s an official order of the court that applies to the Dallas Independent School District, we will continue to have the mask mandate,” Superintendent Michael Hinojosa said late Sunday.

But he said he knows the fight isn’t over: “After a court rules, then I will comply, if it’s not in my favor.”

Meanwhile, thousands of other Dallas-area students will return to school this week as confusion runs rampant over whether masks can be required on campus.

Some districts, including Garland and Irving ISDs, have announced masks will be optional while several others have yet to say how the ruling will affect them.

Hinojosa said he had been fielding text messages from superintendents across the state about the decision.

Under Jenkins’ order, 13 of the county’s 14 public school districts announced last week they would enforce mask mandates as students returned to school and the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19 spread throughout North Texas.

The majority of Dallas ISD’s 225 campuses start school Monday.

“We have 150,000 students. We have 22,000 employees,” Hinojosa said. “You can imagine the number of parents and other people who depend on us as we make decisions.”

On Aug. 9, before Jenkins had issued his mandate, Hinojosa issued his own mask requirement, saying that it was his responsibility to ensure the health of his employees and the district’s students. Children younger than 12 — essentially all students in pre-K through sixth grade — are not yet eligible for the coronavirus vaccine.

“As the superintendent of the second-largest district in Texas, I’m responsible for everything — most important, the safety of our students,” he said during a news conference last week.

The Dallas superintendent said the district’s attorneys found the governor’s executive order to be “very loose.”

Greg Abbott wants a fight, and the bigger the opponent, the more attention he gets nationally. What he really wants is for the Biden administration to step in with a Department of Education mask order, and that will make this a nationwide fight with death cultist GOP governors like Abbott, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Tate Reeves of Mississippi, and others who simply want people to get infected so the weak can be culled and everyone who survives can "move on".

Dead sick people require no state resources anymore, you know. It's good business.

And business of death is booming.

Last Call For I Recall Gavin, Con't

Californians overwhelmingly support vaccine mandates in the latest CBS News poll, and there's every reason to believe that Gov. Gavin Newsom will soon make them a reality. The question is whether or not Newsom's recall vote next month will send the Golden State back to GOP control.

As Californians express widespread concern about the Delta variant, they overwhelmingly say the state's recent rise in cases was preventable, had more people gotten vaccinated and taken more precautions.

California's vaccinated voice a lot of judgment toward the unvaccinated: "They're putting people like me at risk" is a top way the fully vaccinated pick to describe those who won't get the shot, with many others outright "upset or angry" with those unwilling to get it. From a policy standpoint, there's strong support for vaccine mandates, too.

Meanwhile, as the effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom heads into its final month, Newsom faces what looks like a turnout challenge: while voters would marginally prefer to keep him in office at the moment, it looks like that will heavily depend on whether Democrats in his party get more motivated about it.

When California's vaccinated describe people unwilling to get the vaccine, another phrase they select is that "they're being misled by false information," in addition to the emotional response of being upset. Far fewer of the fully vaccinated say they respect the decision of those who won't.

Behind some of those sentiments, we also see that while unvaccinated Californians tend to describe the decision to get the shot as a "personal health choice," the vaccinated are more likely to call it both a personal choice and public health responsibility.

Californians' list of what may have prevented rising cases is dominated by more vaccinations and taking masking precautions, while far fewer point to other measures like more travel and border restrictions. Nor do they cast any blame on scientists and medical professionals for the recent rise in infections. (Though on this, we do see more partisan differences: Republicans are notable for singling out limiting of border crossings as one top way to have prevented it, more so than more vaccinations or policy measures.)

So, given all that, vaccine mandates find wide support across California. A large majority support allowing employers to mandate vaccines for employees. And it's not all that partisan: four in 10 Republicans are OK with this idea, too. There is strong support for making vaccines mandatory for health care workers, and a lot of support for letting businesses that draw crowds also mandate that their customers be vaccinated. Moreover, many people would be more willing to use or visit such a business.

 

 

Indeed, we're looking at nearly two-thirds support for vaccine mandates in California. This should be a winner for Newsom in his recall vote, for the people of California to vote NO on recall.

All the GOP candidates have said they will remove all mask ordinances and mandates if they are elected.

Your choice, folks. Make the clearly correct one.

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

Kabul, and with it Afghanistan as a whole, has all but fallen to the Taliban over the weekend as the last US personnel out of the US embassy there has turned out the lights.

 

Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan.

The Taliban entered the capital earlier in the day, and an official with the militant group said it would soon announce the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from the presidential palace — a return rich in symbolism to the name of the country under the Taliban government ousted by U.S.-led forces after the 9/11 attacks. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media.

The insurgents pushed through a city gripped by panic, where helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out.

Afghans fearing that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor — who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital — remained in their thousands in parks and open spaces throughout the city.

Though the Taliban had promised a peaceful transition, the U.S. Embassy suspended operations and warned Americans late in the day to shelter in place and not try to get to the airport.

Commercial flights were later suspended after sporadic gunfire erupted at the airport, according to two senior U.S. military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing operations. Evacuations continued on military flights, but the halt to commercial traffic closed off one of the last routes available for Afghans fleeing the country.

Still, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam, as many watched in disbelief at the sight of helicopters landing in the embassy compound to take diplomats to a new outpost at Kabul International Airport.

“This is manifestly not Saigon,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”

The American ambassador was among those evacuated, said officials who spoke condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss ongoing military operations. He was asking to return to the embassy, but it was not clear if he would be allowed to.

As the insurgents closed in Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani flew out of the country.

“The former president of Afghanistan left Afghanistan, leaving the country in this difficult situation,” said Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council. “God should hold him accountable.”

As night fell, Taliban fighters deployed across Kabul, taking over abandoned police posts and pledging to maintain law and order during the transition. Residents reported looting in parts of the city, including in the upscale diplomatic district, and messages circulating on social media advised people to stay inside and lock their gates.

In a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in just over a week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly two decades to build up Afghan security forces. Just days earlier, an American military assessment estimated it would be a month before the capital would come under insurgent pressure.

 

Understand that Afghanistan fell in a week because the US and NATO got 99.99% of things wrong from day one, nearly twenty years ago. We never should have been there in the first place, and we should have gotten out ten years ago when I said we should have.

The breakneck speed at which Afghanistan has fallen is only proof that the nation-building exercise of a Middle East democracy in Kabul was always an arrogant American dream. We were always going to be propping up the army and the government until that day we stopped, and the day we stopped everything fell apart like a balsa wood house in a hurricane.

This last piece of Unfinished Bush Business is coming to a close, and we'll finally witness the disaster over the rest of the year that we only delayed for two decades. Republicans are loudly blaming Biden, as if somehow that Trump didn't want to do the same thing to the point of inviting the Taliban to Camp David before scrapping peace talks entirely two years ago.

And as usual, the real victims over the last two decades have been the Afghan people, who died by the hundreds of thousands and will only suffer more under the Taliban.

So it goes.

Sunday Long Read: Star-Crossed Distances

This week's Sunday Long Read comes to us from Rivka Galchen at the New Yorker, detailing the most powerful space telescope NASA has ever produced, the James Webb, expected to launch in a September mission. Once the space telescope goes online, scientists will have their clearest view yet through a time-travel machine as light from stars that took billions of years to reach us will be on display like never before.

Next month, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to take a slow boat from Los Angeles, spend a few days traversing the Panama Canal, and arrive at a spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The telescope will have been twenty-five years and ten billion dollars in the making. Thousands of scientists and engineers from fourteen countries will have worked on it. It could have flown, sure, but it’s a tight squeeze—plus the telescope weighs seven tons, and Kourou’s airfield is connected to its spaceport by seven bridges not built to endure such a load. The telescope will be put into Ariane 5, a European rocket named for a mythical princess who helped a man she loved defeat the Minotaur and escape a maze. Ariane 5 will carry the telescope some ten thousand kilometres in thirty minutes. The J.W.S.T. will then continue on its own, for twenty-nine days, toward a lonely, lovely orbit in space, about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, where we will never visit it, though it will stay in constant communication with us. From Earth, it will appear ten thousand times fainter than the faintest star.

On its way, the telescope will slowly unfurl five silvery winglike layered sheets of Kapton foil, about as large as a tennis court. These sheets, each thinner than notebook paper, will function as a gigantic parasol, protecting the body of the telescope from the light and the heat of the sun, moon, and Earth. In this way, the J.W.S.T. will be kept nearly as dark and as cold as outer space, to insure that distant signals aren’t washed out. Then eighteen hexagons of gold-coated beryllium mirror will open out, like an enormous, night-blooming flower. The mirrors will form a reflecting surface as tall and as wide as a house, and they will capture light that has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years.

This is the hope, at least.

“Oh, gee, I worry all the time,” said Marcia Rieke, an infrared astronomer based in Tucson, who has devoted much of the past two decades to the J.W.S.T. “Even the rocket, which is the most reliable rocket out there, it still has some tiny chance of exploding at launch.” Rieke, who has astrology-blue eyes and a no-nonsense ponytail, is the scientific lead for the near-infrared camera, known as the nirCam, which is one of four main research instruments on the telescope. She is an expert on the formation of galaxies, and the nirCam will allow us to see light from billions of years ago, when the earliest galaxies and stars were formed. I spoke with Rieke over Zoom, where she had as a background a lunar eclipse she photographed in Sabino Canyon, which is near her home but looks like it’s on Mars. “I’ve spent decades in this field, and there’s still so much I don’t know,” she said.

In 2017, Rieke and her team went to the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, where tests would be performed on the nirCam and other Webb instruments. They wanted to expose the telescope to the extremely cold conditions of outer space. Hurricane Harvey hit while they were there. “While I was at the airport waiting to fly out to Houston, I was watching the forecast and fortunately was able to change my car rental to an S.U.V.,” Rieke said. “So I was able to ferry the members of the team between their hotels and the Space Center. They brought in really nice catering for us. I’m not sure how they managed that.” Imagine sealing one’s gold-plated work of decades in a giant pressure cooker and then pouring liquid nitrogen on top of it—that resembles the exposure test. The telescope was in Chamber A, the gigantic vacuum chamber at the Space Center where the command module for Apollo was tested. Remarkably, Rieke’s team accomplished its mission. Rieke has seen the J.W.S.T. survive not only Hurricane Harvey but also numerous threats of cancellation, along with delays that have serially shifted the launch from an original date of 2010 to late 2021. I asked Rieke what she was most looking forward to seeing. “I’m looking forward to seeing that it works,” she said. “I’ll start sleeping better about thirty days after it’s been launched. Launch isn’t even the riskiest step in deploying the nirCam.” Once the telescope is up and running, Rieke will return to studying events that happened in our universe billions of years before Earth was formed.

It’s easy to forget that light takes time to travel. But when we see the moon we are seeing it as it was 1.3 seconds earlier; Jupiter we see as it was forty minutes ago; the Andromeda galaxy—the nearest major galaxy to ours, and the most distant object we can see without a telescope—2.5 million years ago. “My students are often frustrated to think that they can’t see the things in space as they are today,” David Helfand, an astronomer at Columbia University, said. “I tell them it’s this great advantage. It means that the universe is laid out like a book. You can turn to any page you want. If you want to see ten billion years into the past, you look out at ten billion light-years away.”

Helfand, a former president of the American Astronomical Society, looks like Socrates. He attributes much of his success in life to a background in theatre, and he spends a lot of his time teaching science to nonscientists—the only prerequisite for his perennial class Earth, Moon, and Planets is “a working knowledge of high-school algebra.” He taught me about the J.W.S.T.

Most of the light spectrum is not visible to the human eye. When we look up at the night sky, it’s as if we were listening to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with ears able to hear only the occasional middle C and maybe a tinny D. We have no biological receptors for radio waves, or microwaves, or ultraviolet radiation, or infrared radiation. If an object is moving away from us—and most everything in the universe is, because the universe is continuously expanding—the wavelength of its light is, in effect, stretched out, eventually rendering it infrared. Helfand said, “The atmosphere blocks out a lot of energy—that’s why we can live on Earth. But it’s not good for astronomy. And our atmosphere is particularly ugly for infrared.” On Earth, there are a number of telescopes larger than the J.W.S.T., but they can’t see the range of infrared light with the level of resolution and sensitivity that the new telescope will achieve.

“It will have many capacities, but the two big ones are ‘Very Far Away’ and ‘Very Close,’ ” Helfand said. The Very Far Away component will look back about 13.5 billion years, to when the universe was some quarter of a billion years old. “If you compare the universe’s life to that of a human, that’s like seeing the universe at, well, we’d have to calculate it, but it’s seeing the universe as a baby,” he said. After the big bang, the universe was a nearly uniform soup of matter and radiation. But by the mysterious epoch that the telescope will examine—sometimes called the Dark Ages—gravity had managed to amplify tiny irregularities in that soup, causing a kind of clumping. “So what we are on is the quest for the very first stars.” When did they turn on? What are they like? Did stars form before galaxies? How did black holes with masses millions of times greater than that of the sun form so quickly?

“The Very Close capacity is in some ways the most exciting,” Helfand told me. “It’s about looking at planets that are not too different from Earth.” The J.W.S.T. will study exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Exoplanetology is a young field. The first exoplanet (outside science fiction) was discovered only twenty-five years ago. By 2005, about two hundred exoplanets had been found. Today, more than forty-four hundred are known, and it seems likely that such planets are ubiquitous. Though they don’t emit light, Helfand explained that “when these planets pass in front of a star they leave a sort of fingerprint,” and that fingerprint can be read for clues. The J.W.S.T. will be able to describe the atmospheres of these planets, possibly detecting free oxygen or other gases—potential signs of life.

 

Exciting stuff here, if humanity survives on this rock long enough to be able to reach these exoplanets. We'll see, quite literally.

Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

GOP disinformation for political posturing,the media's insistence that the unvaccinated cannot be held responsible, and tens of millions of Americans refusing to take any precautions if not actively preventing them being taken by others has now led to a massive COVID-19 delta variant spike in the American South, worse than any point previously during the now 18 months of the pandemic.

The US remains among nations with the highest rate of new Covid-19 cases, driven mostly by a surge in the South, where many states are lagging in getting people vaccinated against the coronavirus. 

"This is starting to look really ominous in the South. ... If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they're actually probably the highest in the world," Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Friday. 

Infection rates began to plummet in the US in the spring as vaccines became widely available, while the seven-day moving average of daily confirmed cases climbed in other nations, including India and Brazil, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. 

In the month of August, the US has so far reported more than 1.5 million new cases of Covid-19, more than three times the numbers for Iran and India -- which now hold second and third place, JHU data shows. And the seven-day average has topped more than 135,000 cases, well ahead of other nations. 

On a state-by-state comparison, Louisiana has the highest rate of new cases per capita, followed by Florida. 

"That's how badly things have gotten out of hand. There is a screaming level of transmission across the southern states right now. And now we're starting to see this happening among younger age groups," Hotez said. 

Florida on Friday broke its own record high in Covid-19 cases over the past week, reporting 151,415 new cases -- the most infections recorded during a seven-day period since the pandemic upended lives across the globe. 

The surge has been fueled by the more contagious coronavirus Delta variant, overwhelming hospitals across the country. 

New hospital admissions for Covid-19 among adults ages 30 to 39 have reached a record rate, according to CDC data. 

The data show the rate of new hospitalizations reached 2.52 per 100,000 people on Wednesday among adults in their 30s. 

Just a month earlier, on July 11, the rate of new hospital admissions of patients with Covid-19 in that age group was 0.64 per 100,000 people, according to the data.

 

The rate is starting to go parabolic now. It's gotten so bad that even FLorida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is terrified and taking action.

As the Delta variant drives a surge of Covid-19 cases in Florida, a rapid-response unit will be deployed to administer monoclonal antibody treatments to residents infected with the virus, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday. 

"This is the most effective treatment that we've yet encountered for people who are infected with Covid-19," DeSantis said. "This, applied early and properly, has the ability to reduce your likelihood of being hospitalized." 

Monoclonal antibodies are intensely focused, lab-made versions of convalescent plasma. The antibodies come from people who have recovered from coronavirus. Researchers then take the blood, select the most potent antibodies, and make them into a drug. 

Speaking from Jacksonville, DeSantis said beginning at noon Thursday, the rapid response unit will begin delivering monoclonal antibodies in the city. 

The process will begin with referrals from the health systems, but the state is looking to move to allowing individuals to make appointments, he said. The intention is to expand the model to other parts of the state, the governor said. 

The state will also be deploying strike teams to long-term care facilities as well, DeSantis said, and the state "is going to bring in a lot more Regeneron into Florida." (Regeneron is a company that makes a monoclonal antibody treatment.)

 

DeSantis won't rescind his mask mandate ban however. His political career would end overnight, the state and national GOP would crucify him. Better to see thousands of Floridians die than admit he was wrong. 

And die, they will.

Who Checks The Fact-Checkers?

For years, Snopes.com has stood as one of the big fake news debunking sites, fighting the tide of disinformation for the GOP right and their death cultists. But as the old saying goes, you either fall as the hero or survive long enough to become the villain you fought.

David Mikkelson, the co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes, has long presented himself as the arbiter of truth online, a bulwark in the fight against rumors and fake news. But he has been lying to the site's tens of millions of readers: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times.

After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material. The articles include such topics as same-sex marriage licenses and the death of musician David Bowie.

Snopes VP of Editorial and Managing Editor Doreen Marchionni suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending “a comprehensive internal investigation.” He remains an officer and a 50% shareholder of the company.

“Our internal research so far has found a total of 54 stories Mikkelson published that used appropriated material, including all of the stories Buzzfeed shared with us,” Marchionni and Snopes Chief Operating Officer Vinny Green said in a statement.

"Let us be clear: Plagiarism undermines our mission and values, full stop," Marchionni added. "It has no place in any context within this organization."

Snopes’ editorial staff disavowed Mikkelson’s behavior in a separate statement signed by eight current writers. “We strongly condemn these poor journalistic practices. … we work hard every day to uphold the highest possible journalistic and ethical standards.”

Snopes told BuzzFeed News it plans to retract all of the offending stories and disable advertising on them. It will also append an editor's note of explanation to each.

Said Mikkelson, “There is no excuse for my serious lapses in judgement. I’m sorry.”

 

Suspended, but he still owns half the company.

 

Not a good look at all, throwing all your integrity away like this. I'd expect this from garbage merchants like Twitchy, Newsbusters, or the Daily Wire. But Snopes?

 

Yeah, won't be citing anything else from there, and it's a shame because the articles, while plagiarized, didn't have any factual errors. Is it fair to hold Snopes to a higher level?

Yes, yes it is. And they failed.

Af-Gone-Istan, Con't

The timetable on the fall of Kabul to the Taliban has moved up to the "days" mark from "weeks", as the remaining 3,000 US troops in Kabul desperately try to buy enough time to evacuate remaining US personnel from the embassy in Kabul.

The Biden administration is preparing for the fall of Kabul and a retreat from any U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan — a stunning reversal of expectations. It's looking increasingly likely to high-ranking aides to President Biden that the U.S. will have no enduring diplomatic presence in Afghanistan beyond Aug. 31 — the date Biden has promised the full troop withdrawal will be complete.

Why it matters: It's a major reversal from even a few weeks ago. The working assumption in Biden’s inner circle had been that Kabul could hold for the short term, allowing the U.S. to stay diplomatically engaged and help Afghan women secure their rights beyond the U.S. withdrawal. The 3,000 Marines and soldiers going in to help with the evacuation will also be gone by Aug. 31, we're told.

Between the lines: Biden is at Camp David this weekend, not at his Delaware beach house. He can relax there, but also has full comms. People can come and go without detection, and he avoids the optics of a beach vacation amid a mass evacuation.

The big picture: The U.S. embassy in Kabul wasn’t just a diplomatic building. It also was a major intelligence center with paper records and equipment there that the U.S. will remove or destroy. Protocols are in place for just such an emergency. Unlike Tehran in 1979, when the Iranian fundamentalists gained access to some sensitive material, the U.S. staff still in Kabul will ensure there’s nothing to gain. American diplomats at the embassy have been instructed to destroy important papers and desktop computers before they leave, according to a memo obtained by NPR.

Despite the efforts to secure intelligence and safeguard U.S. personnel and their Afghan supporters, Biden must brace for the symbolic defeat of seeing the Taliban overrun the space that housed the embassy. That includes the ambassador's residence — and the landmark "Duck and Cover" bar frequented by generations of troops, diplomats and journalists.

The major moment to come: Lowering the American flag that flies over what is essentially sovereign U.S. territory. That's typically done by the Marine Security Guard detachment that's always on post. It's a point of honor for the ambassador or chargé d'affaires to take custody of the flag and bring it back to State or a safe haven.

 

I wasn't around for the fall of Saigon, and I don't remember the fall of Tehran, is was a toddler, but this one I'm going to get to put into context for a long time. We've been in Afghanistan for 20 years, effectively my entire adult life, and it's come to nothing, I guess.

Reports out of the surrounding Afghan cities indicate that the Taliban has captured significant amounts of US weapons, vehicles, and helicopters as well.

It's going to be bad in Afghanistan very soon, folks, but the mission never could have ended any other way.

Last Call For Return To Sender, Con't

OK, can we get rid of corrupt Postmaster General Louis DeJoy now please?

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy purchased up to $305,000 in bonds from an investment firm whose managing partner also chairs the U.S. Postal Service’s governing board, the independent body responsible for evaluating DeJoy’s performance.

Between October and April, DeJoy purchased 11 bonds from Brookfield Asset Management each worth between $1,000 and $15,000, or $15,000 and $50,000, according to DeJoy’s financial disclosure paperwork. Ron Bloom, a Brookfield senior executive who manages the firm’s private equity division, has served on the postal board since 2019 and was elected its chairman in February.

DeJoy’s financial adviser purchased the bonds on the open market, Postal Service spokesman Jeffrey Adams said, and Bloom manages a division of Brookfield separate from the one that sells public securities.

Two ethics experts interviewed about the transaction disagreed over whether the bond purchases could cause conflict-of-interest issues in the agency’s top ranks. One argued that the transactions raise questions about oversight and governance at the nation’s mail service, which has taken on newfound prominence during the coronavirus pandemic and after the November election, in which nearly half of all voters cast their ballots through the mail. The other said financial connections between government officials could give off the appearance of conflicts without necessarily causing ethics problems.

Other elements of DeJoy’s financial ties have drawn close examination from ethics watchdogs. DeJoy-controlled companies lease four office buildings to global shipping behemoth XPO Logistics, DeJoy’s former company. XPO pays DeJoy more than $2 million annually in rent, The Washington Post previously reported. Brookfield also owns more than $500,000 in shares of XPO, according to its securities filings.

“I’m stuck on DeJoy’s purchase of bonds from the company in which his quasi-boss is a managing partner,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor who studies government ethics at Washington University in St. Louis, “because I wonder whether it affects Bloom’s ability to protect the public interest in his assessment of DeJoy’s performance as postmaster general.”

DeJoy’s personal spokesperson, Mark Corallo, referred questions to Adams of the Postal Service. He told The Post that DeJoy’s Brookfield bond purchases adhere to ethics regulations because the Postal Service does not do business with the firm.

Bloom in a statement released through Adams said his private equity division of the company sits “on the other side of an information wall” from other parts of the company that make investments, and that he had no knowledge of DeJoy’s purchases.

Brookfield’s private equity practice acquires and finances private corporations, among them a nuclear power infrastructure firm, Brazil’s largest private water company and an automotive battery manufacturer, according to its website. Brookfield has separate practices for public securities — which invest in publicly traded assets — real estate, infrastructure, renewable power and insurance solutions.

“I receive no benefit whatsoever when Brookfield bonds are bought or sold,” Bloom said in an email to The Post on Wednesday. “Brookfield has no business relationship with the USPS, therefore there is no basis for a conflict.”

 

This would be one thing if it was an isolated incident, but the guy has multiple ethics problems and conflicts of interest. It's far past time to pull the plug.

Let him go, Joe.

The Good Package, Con't

Blue Dog Dems in the House are about to destroy both the $1 trillion infrastructure bipartisan package and the $3.5 infrastructure reconciliation package, and unless Nancy Pelosi can get them in line fast, the Biden presidency is over.

Moderate House Democrats say they would sink a crucial fiscal blueprint outlining $3.5 trillion in social and environment spending unless a separate infrastructure bill is approved first, a new complication for the divided party’s drive to enact President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.

The centrists’ threat directly defies House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announced plans, and she is showing no signs of backing down. It also completes a two-sided squeeze on the California Democrat, who has received similar pressure from her party’s progressives.

Democrats can only pass legislation in the narrowly divided House if they lose no more than three votes. Solid Republican opposition seems certain.

“We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law,” nine centrists wrote in a letter to Pelosi obtained Friday by The Associated Press.

Congressional passage of the budget resolution seems certain because without it, Senate Republicans would be able to use a filibuster, or procedural delays, to kill a follow-up $3.5 trillion measure bolstering social safety net and climate change programs. That measure, not expected until autumn, represents the heart of Biden’s domestic agenda.

Pelosi has repeatedly said the House will not vote on the $1 trillion package of road, rail, water and other infrastructure projects until the Senate sends the House the companion $3.5 trillion bill.

Pelosi has set that sequence because her party’s progressives have worried that if the infrastructure bill is approved first, moderates unhappy with the separate $3.5 trillion measure’s cost would feel free to vote against it, causing its defeat.

A senior House Democratic aide said the party doesn’t have enough votes to pass the infrastructure bill this month. The aide contrasted the nine moderates to the dozens of progressive Democrats who would vote against that measure unless it comes after the House gets the Senate’s $3.5 trillion social and environmental bill.

The aide was not authorized to publicly discuss the party’s internal dynamics and spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I am not freelancing. This is the consensus,” Pelosi told Democrats of her plans in a conference call this week, according to a person familiar with the private call who described it on condition of anonymity. The speaker added: ”“The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills.”

Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which includes nearly 100 House Democrats, say many of their members have indicated they would vote against the infrastructure bill until the expansive $3.5 trillion legislation has cleared the Senate.

 

So right now, Pelosi lacks the votes to pass either bill. If Democrats wreck this, I don't see how we keep either chamber of Congress in 2022.  This is a disaster brewing, and Nancy Pelosi now has to solve it somehow.

Or we're all toast, and we get nothing.

Now, Pelosi has been in worse situations, and shepherded the Affordable Care Act through, and a hell of a lot more. But we're going to need that magic one more time, it seems. I know she's capable of it, and I'm expecting a deal soon.

We'll see.

Af-Gone-istan, Con't

As Spencer Ackerman notes, the Taliban is sweeping through Afghanistan now and will almost certainly have taken Kabul by the time our 20th anniversary observance of 9/11 rolls around next month. The Afghanistan debacle is a disaster twenty years in the making, a war we lost in slow motion more than 7,000 days ago, spanning four presidents and most of my adult lifetime, and we did this to ourselves. 

 

But it is the people of Afghanistan left behind to fall into the abyss of Taliban rule that will pay the ultimate price for our hubris as a nation.

THE U.S.’ TROOP WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN is almost at hand, as is the Taliban’s reconquest.

The Taliban have made eye-opening advances in the country’s northern provinces, which they were never able to subdue before the U.S. invasion. They began the week by overrunning or capturing six capitals in five days. They ended it by taking Herat, Lashkar Gar, and the crucial southern city of Kandahar. Zalmay Khalilzad, the longtime U.S. envoy, flew at the start of the week to Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban maintain a diplomatic office, to see if anything remains of the peace process – and, reportedly, whether the insurgents would be kind enough not to sack the U.S. embassy and cause a combination Saigon/Benghazi moment. “He will press the Taliban to stop their military offensive and to negotiate a political settlement,” the U.S. State Department said in their Monday announcement, “which is the only path to stability and development in Afghanistan.” In essence, Khalilzad is asking the Taliban not to win the war.

Nothing is inevitable. But it’s important to be clear about what an outright Taliban victory will mean: revenge killings, refugees and repression, including gendered repression. I’ve spent no serious time in Afghanistan – two months total out of 20 years, and never did I see the country beyond its Kabul, Khost, Paktia and Parwan provinces – so I don’t want to front like I have an emotional connection to it. That said, I met people in Afghanistan, people who treated me warmly when they didn’t have to, and I’m thinking of them with some dread.

When the U.S. withdraws from a war, the ensuing suffering of innocent people becomes, to the “national security” community, an argument for re-escalation. Think of the Yazidis stranded atop Mount Sinjar and the role that story played in returning the U.S. to war in Iraq. (And buy Samuel Moyn’s forthcoming book Humane for an excellent critical exploration of such issues.) We tend to conceive of this kind of suffering not as the result of the war, but as an alternative to it. That has a certain intuitiveness: you cease fighting in a place and disaster emerges there.

But it’s a mistake to think of the disaster as a departure from the war. Remember that the Taliban offered terms in December 2001. Donald Rumsfeld rejected them. Everything that followed made the Taliban stronger. The idea that continuing the war for a twenty-first year will make the Taliban weaker could only occur to an American Exceptionalism junkie in withdrawal. It’s easier to wish-cast about glorious wars that might have been than to cope with the fact that America’s works were an avoidable disaster that built nothing enduring except human suffering. It is far easier to consider the bloodletting that follows the U.S. presence to be merely the result of its absence. But to take that position is to wash the blood from American hands that waged the war, all the while claiming that the retreat is the contemptible hand-washing.

One of the consequences of waging Forever Wars is that they obscure what it means to lose a war. This is what it means: the Enemy wins. The Enemy’s victory will likely be terrible. Among the reasons it is so terrible is that the United States of America is an accessory to it.

Look at who the United States tries to save and who it doesn’t. The Biden administration is engaged in a valiant effort – one that did not happen during the brief interregnum between Iraq Wars – to resettle Afghans who worked for the U.S. military. It is a baseline obligation and a matter of honor.

It is also a moral floor that functions as a moral ceiling: The U.S. will save only those who lent it a service. It is not throwing open the doors to refugees who didn’t work for the United States. Those refugees are bound for, among other places, Iran, whose government, according to the United Nations refugee agency, “has consistently welcomed Afghans fleeing protracted conflict and violence for over 40 years.” The United States, which has fueled that protracted violence and conflict for over 40 years – first through the CIA-Saudi-Pakistani anti-Soviet coalition; then for the past 20 years’ war – cannot say the same.

 

What is coming is slaughter, butchery, and horror that has been two decades in the making. In every way we made this situation worse, and we've been making it worse really through seven presidents and four decades, and nearly my entire lifetime since 1979.

 

The butcher's bill we're going to see over the weeks and months ahead will be the fault of the Taliban, yes. But they will have 335 million American accessories.

Last Call For Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The initial Census 2020 figures are in, and they show that for the first time in our history, the percentage of white Americans as a whole of the American population has fallen.

The United States experienced unprecedented multiracial population growth and a decline in the white population for the first time in the nation’s history, according to U.S. Census officials who released data Thursday, revealing the most sweeping picture of America’s racial and ethnic makeup in a decade.

“These changes reveal that the US population is much more multiracial, and more racially and ethnically diverse, than what we measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, the director of race, ethnicity, research and outreach for the Census Bureau's Population Division.

The white, non-Hispanic population, without another race, decreased by 8.6% since 2010, Jones said during a Census bureau press briefing. He cautioned that some of the changes can be attributed to improvements to the survey. The White, non-Hispanic population is still the largest racial group in the U.S.

The release bolstered expert predictions and estimates in past years that showed continued expansion of the Hispanic, Black and Asian American populations and growing numbers of multiracial residents – only a fraction in past surveys.

“​​The diversity that we're seeing in this country is going to be much more pronounced,” said William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

 

We already had fiends like Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs scream about "The Great Replacement Theory" before, that white America was going to "vanish" into the "quagmire" of the multiracial and multicultural liberal future.  After this? 

The white supremacist backlash will be deadly and brutal in America. As Hussein Ibish at The Atlantic reminds us, when white supremacists are openly fantasizing about butchering their political enemies you should probably pay attention.

 

Decades of living in, studying, and writing about the Middle East have taught me that whenever a political faction becomes obsessed with violent rhetoric and fantasies, brutal acts aren’t far behind. And while there’s always been a strain of militancy on the American right and left fringes, there is something unmistakably new, and profoundly alarming, about the casual, florid, and sadistic rhetoric that is metastasizing from the Republican fringe into the party’s mainstream.

For sheer pornographic sadism, it’s tough to beat Jesse Kelly’s encomium to murder and torture published by the right-wing website The Federalist. Kelly doesn’t make any real arguments, other than declaring liberals terrible authoritarians. Instead, in language that the Islamic State would envy, he describes the visceral, almost orgasmic, joy of scalping a dying enemy:

Close your eyes and imagine holding someone’s scalp in your hands. I don’t mean cradling his skull as you thousand-yard-stare at his lifeless face. I mean a real scalp, Indian-style, of some enemy you just killed on the battlefield; somebody you hated and who hated you back.

You killed him, won the day, carved off the top of his skull, and now you’re standing over him victorious on the now-quiet field of battle, with a quiet breeze blowing through your hair. Your adrenaline is still pumping with that primal feeling of victory and the elation of having survived when others didn’t.

Kelly hastens to add that he is discussing “not a real scalping, but a metaphorical one.” But he concludes the essay by warning readers that when they are stuck in a “liberal utopian nightmare,” they will want to know that before the leftists prevailed, they “rode out onto the plains and made them feel pain.”

Again, the unmistakable lesson from the modern Middle East is: When people keep saying they’re fantasizing about how great it would be, and feel, to kill you, believe them.

 

We've already seen some violence. We're going to see a lot more in the months ahead.

 

Retribution Execution, Con't

I called this seven months ago when it happened, but it was dead obvious in January that Donald Trump had then US Attorney for Northern Georgia, Byung J. Pak, fired for not investigating Trump's false election fraud claims in Atlanta/Fulton County so that Trump could then say the Georgia election was under federal investigation.

Now we learn that Pak has testified that's exactly what happened.

 

Byung J. Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, told congressional investigators on Wednesday that his abrupt resignation in January had been prompted by Justice Department officials’ warning that President Donald J. Trump intended to fire him for refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia, according to a person familiar with his testimony.

Mr. Pak, who provided more than three hours of closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, stepped down with no notice on Jan. 4, saying that he had done his best “to be thoughtful and consistent, and to provide justice for my fellow citizens in a fair, effective and efficient manner.”

While he did not discuss Mr. Trump’s role in his decision to resign at the time, he told the Senate panel that the president had been dismayed that Mr. Pak had investigated allegations of voter fraud in Fulton County, Ga., and not found evidence to support them, according to the person familiar with the statements.

Mr. Pak testified that top department officials had made clear that Mr. Trump intended to fire him over his refusal to say that the results in Georgia had been undermined by voter fraud, the person said. Resigning would pre-empt a public dismissal.

He also described work done by state officials and the F.B.I. to vet Mr. Trump’s claims of voter fraud, and said they had not found evidence to support those allegations.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is examining Mr. Pak’s departure as part of its broader investigation into the final weeks of the Trump administration and the White House’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to falsely assert that the election was corrupt. The Justice Department’s inspector general is also looking at Mr. Pak’s resignation.

During a phone call with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger of Georgia on Jan. 2, two days before Mr. Pak resigned, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to find enough votes to reverse the state’s presidential election results and described fraud allegations that Mr. Raffensperger said were not supported by facts, according to leaked audio of the call.

Mr. Pak had refused to support similar election fraud claims because of the lack of evidence, according to two people familiar with his investigation. “You have your never-Trumper U.S. attorney there,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger during their phone call.

Audio of that call was leaked to The Washington Post on Sunday, Jan. 3, just hours before Mr. Trump met with top Justice Department officials to discuss the possibility of replacing the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, with Jeffrey Clark, a department leader who was willing to falsely tell Georgia officials that fraud might have affected the election outcome.

 

Pak resigned because Trump was going to fire him for not lying about election fraud.  He resigned because Trump ordered him to say the election was fraudulent. It was not. He quit rather than doing so, two days before the January 6th insurrection.

Trump has to pay for his crimes, folks.

Or we're done.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Mississippi's hospital system is headed towards collapse, possibly early as next week, if COVID Delta variant hospitalization numbers don't change. Federal disaster officials are already saying they'll need to respond, and Mississippi will only be the first of many states where the Biden administration will need to intervene to save lives because Republican state governors have all failed.

With COVID-19 patients overflowing at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, including in its pediatric center, hospital leaders are warning that the medical system statewide could be on the verge of failing without drastic intervention. Two days ago, Mississippi health officials announced that zero intensive-care beds remained available in hospitals statewide.

“Since the pandemic began, I think the thing that hospitals have feared the most is total failure of the hospital system. And if we track back a week or so when we look at the case positivity rate, the rate of new cases, the rate of hospitalizations—If we continue that trajectory within the next five to seven to 10 days, I think we’re going to see failure of the hospital system in Mississippi,” UMMC Associate Vice Chancellor for Clinical Affairs Dr. Alan Jones said during an afternoon press conference.

“Hospitals are full from Memphis to Natchez to Gulfport. Hospitals are full.”

The dire pronouncement came as representatives from the federal government arrived in Jackson to assist with a field hospital in the medical center’s parking garage, news that Mississippi Free Press reporter broke early today. With UMMC short on staff and lacking in ICU care capacity, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is sending physicians, nurses, respiratory therapists and pharmacists to help. Mississippi has about 2,000 fewer nurses working than eight months ago, and UMMC officials said their teams that remain “are stretched very thin.”

“At the end of the day, we’re not only faced with not being able to hire enough staff because so many nurses have left the state, but today we have 70 hospital employees and another 20 clinic employees that are out on quarantine or have COVID,” Jones said during today’s press conference.

UMMC’s pediatric hospital, Children’s of Mississippi, is also full, Jones said today. In late July, UMMC officials said they did not expect the pediatric hospital to fill up, but a surge in cases among children is happening just as children return to school—in many cases with no mask mandates and fewer precautions than last fall. Children’s of Mississippi currently has 26 pediatric COVID-19 patients, Jones said, with six in ICU care and four on ventilators.

Gov. Tate Reeves has refused to mandate masks in schools, saying late last month that federal guidance to do so was “foolish and harmful.” The Mississippi State Department of Health reported that almost 1,000 schoolchildren tested positive for COVID-19 last week alone.

The garage basement field hospital will be able to hold a maximum of 50 patients, but that capacity could diminish depending on the severity of patients’ illness, UMMC officials said. But UMMC Vice Chancellor Dr. LouAnn Woodward said it was only part of the solution. UMMC officials said the field hospital could be ready as soon as Friday.

 

We've already seen Florida's Ron DeSantis beg for federal help, which was approved with lightning speed. But several other southern red states are in worse shape than Florida and don't have the state's resources, states like Mississippi, Alabama, Missouri and Arkansas, that are all getting crushed by COVID delta. 

It will take video of thousands dying in hospital parking lots before any of these monsters lift a finger, and by then it will be too late. COVID is going parabolic in these areas, worse than it was over the winter in cases and hospitalizations, and the deaths, well, the deaths will catch up very, very soon.