Last Call For The Good Package, Con't

Both Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are "advising" House moderates to do the dirty work of stabbing Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the back on the infrastructure bill, so that the two senators don't have to take the fall for killing The Good Package™.

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) are privately advising the nine House centrist lawmakers trying to force Speaker Nancy Pelosi to hold a quick vote on the Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure deal, lawmakers and aides tell Axios.

Why it matters: The two moderates who've stirred the biggest frustrations and held the most sway in their party over the infrastructure negotiations are helping allies in the House to stake out — and defend — their centrist position. They're offering encouragement and advice on how to negotiate with the White House and congressional leadership. 

Their behind-the-scenes support also indicates the degree to which Manchin and Sinema have prioritized getting the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal to final passage and in front of Biden for his signature.

The big picture: The conversations are bolstering House centrists' resolve. Since publicly demanding last Friday that Pelosi first bring the infrastructure bill to the floor before considering a larger package through a $3.5 trillion budget plan, the nine lawmakers have been subject to a combination of private scorn and public pressure. Pelosi referred to their tactics as “amateur hour” in a leadership call earlier this week, Politico reports. 

On Tuesday, the White House released a statement endorsing Pelosi’s approach, expressing “hope that every Democratic member supports this effort to advance these important legislative actions.” Pelosi quoted from that statement in a “Dear Colleague” letter she sent to reiterate her position. 

Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, and Louisa Terrell, the head of legislative affairs, Shuwanza Goff, the House liaison, as well as Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, have been contacting lawmakers, urging them to vote for the rule.
So far, the nine lawmakers are withstanding pressure and remain committed to their strategy.

Between the lines: Both Manchin and Sinema have longstanding relationships with some of the centrist lawmakers including members of the "Problem Solvers" who worked together on COVID-19 relief bills in 2020.

Go deeper: The nonpartisan group "No Labels" is launching a six-figure ad by on national cable to give some air cover to the nine lawmakers."This unbreakable nine is showing America that we can still do amazing things," says the ad's narrator.

 

The poor bastards don't even hear the train coming. 

 

Killing The Good Package™ is the entire point, so that furious House progressives then turn around and murder the bipartisan bill, Democrats take 100% of the blame for turning a deal in hand into a flaming dumpster fire, and Democrats lose 60+ seats in the House next year and Pelosi retires.  There are plenty of forces in Washington that want to make this happen, and not all of them are Republicans.

Nothing good is going to come from this.

Don't Make Me Turn This Airplane Around, Kids

The FAA is getting extremely serious about levying civil fines against nasty, violent airline passengers in 2021, to the tune of a cool million dollars total, more than $10,000 per incident, and Democrats in Congress and airline unions want even harsher penalties.

The Federal Aviation Administration's announcement Thursday of $531,545 in fines against 34 passengers accused of being unruly on board is the single largest announcement of federal fines since the start of a nationwide crackdown earlier this year, bringing this year's total to more than $1 million. 

Of the incidents detailed by federal investigators for the first time, nearly two-thirds involve passengers accused of violating the federal transportation-wide mask mandate, which was just extended by the Transportation Security Administration to remain in place through January 18. 

Federal documents show that nine of the 34 incidents involve a passenger accused of touching or hitting another person on the plane, including crew members. Eight passengers are accused of illegally drinking alcohol they brought on board the plane. Half of the incidents involve flights to or from vacation destinations in Florida. 

With this announcement, the FAA has now proposed fines against nearly 80 passengers after receiving nearly 3,900 reports of incidents. The FAA said on Tuesday that based on the reports, it has opened 682 investigations into possible violations of federal laws. 

House Transportation Chairman Peter DeFazio told CNN this week that he would like to see punishment that's even harsher than fines, with those accused of in-flight violence facing prison time. 

"The first time we take one of these jerks who is assaulting flight attendants or attempting to take an aircraft down -- and they go away for a few years and they get a massive fine-- I think that will send a message," the Oregon Democrat said. 

But the FAA points out it does not have the authority to file criminal charges. Instead, it proposes civil fines that the accused violators may pay or dispute. 

The largest flight attendant union, the Association of Flight Attendants, has also called for more prosecutions. 

"If you interfere with a crew member's duties and put the rest of the plane in jeopardy, or assault the crew member, you're facing $35,000 in fines for each incident and up to 20 years in prison," association President Sara Nelson told CNN. "People need to understand there are severe consequences here."

 

The biggest fine so far has been $45,000, but these incidents happen weekly. I have to agree with Rep. DeFazio and the union: the first time one of these assholes ends up facing a decade in federal prison or so, the number of incidents will drop like a rock.

Make it happen, guys.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

Two for one in today's edition of recent COVID-19 news, first, President Biden announced on Wednesday that nursing homes and other elder care facilities that cannot prove employees are vaccinated will lose Medicare/Medicaid eligibility, along with other policies that will be taking effect at the federal level.

Biden said he is directing the Department of Health and Human Services to draw up new regulations making employee vaccination a condition for nursing homes to participate in Medicare and Medicaid. The decision on nursing home staff represents a significant escalation in Biden's campaign to get Americans vaccinated and the tools he is willing to use, marking the first time he has threatened to withhold federal funds in order to get people vaccinated. 

"Now, if you visit, live or work at a nursing home, you should not be at a high risk of contracting Covid from unvaccinated employees. While I'm mindful that my authority at the federal government is limited, I'm going to continue to look for ways to keep people safe and increase vaccination rates," the President said during a speech at the White House. 

Additionally, the President announced that he is directing Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to use "all of his oversight authorities and legal action, if appropriate, against governors who are trying to block and intimidate local school officials and educators" who want children to wear masks in the classroom. 

The President indicated that American Rescue Plan funds can be used to pay educators who have their paycheck cut by local and state governments if their schools implement mask mandates. 

The new actions announced by the President Wednesday afternoon come the same day the Biden administration said it would roll out a plan to provide booster shots to American adults beginning this fall.

 

Meanwhile in Florida, the state's largest school district, Miami-Dade County, is defying GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis's order against mask mandates and will order schools to enforce them for all students and staff.

The school board in Miami-Dade County voted to approve a face mask mandate that will be in place when the new school year begins next week.

The board voted 7-1 in a meeting Wednesday, creating a similar policy to the one in Broward County designed to protect students and faculty against COVID-19.

The policy allows for a medical exemption but defies Gov. Ron DeSantis’ order against mask mandates. It is DeSantis’ position, and that of the state board of education, that parents should have the choice whether their children wear masks at school.

Lubby Navarro was the only Miami-Dade school board member to vote against the mandate. Board member Christi Fraga was not present.

Public school starts Monday in the largest school district in Florida.

 

This effectively means all of Florida's largest school systems have now called DeSantis's bluff on cutting education funding. We'll see if he follows through.

 

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

President Biden now admits that the "chaos" in Kabul was unavoidable as the US pulled out, and always would have been part of the result.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, and the president's first since the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, President Joe Biden stood firm in his defense of the United States' withdrawal, but asserted for the first time that he believes the chaos was unavoidable.

"So you don't think this could have been handled -- this exit could have been handled better in any way, no mistakes?" Stephanopoulos asked Biden.

"No, I don't think it could have been handled in a way that, we're gonna go back in hindsight and look -- but the idea that somehow, there's a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don't know how that happens. I don't know how that happened," Biden replied.

"So for you, that was always priced into the decision?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"Yes," Biden replied, but then amended his answer.

"Now exactly what happened, I've not priced in," he said. "But I knew that they're going to have an enormous -- Look, one of the things we didn't know is what the Taliban would do in terms of trying to keep people from getting out. What they would do. What are they doing now? They're cooperating, letting American citizens get out, American personnel get out, embassies get out, et cetera, but they're having -- we're having some more difficulty having those who helped us when we were in there."

Biden's decision to withdraw has led to scenes of pandemonium in Afghanistan, with as many as 11,000 Americans and tens of thousands of endangered Afghans scrambling to evacuate the country. Scenes of civilians swamping planes on the runway at the Kabul airport, desperate for escape, have triggered bipartisan criticism that the Biden administration handled the hasty exit poorly.

Biden grew defensive when Stephanopoulos referred to the scenes of distress.

"We've all seen the pictures. We've seen those hundreds of people packed in a C-17. We've seen Afghans falling --"

"That was four days ago, five days ago!" Biden interjected.

"What did you think when you first saw those pictures?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"What I thought was, we have to gain control of this. We have to move this more quickly. We have to move in a way in which we can take control of that airport. And we did," Biden said.

The U.S. said late Tuesday it has successfully evacuated 3,200 people from Afghanistan, including all U.S. Embassy personnel, except for a core group of diplomats at the Kabul airport. Officials have said they hope to ramp up to being able to evacuate 9,000 people each day.

But the U.S. government is not currently providing American citizens in Afghanistan with safe transport to the airport, and it remains unclear how many will be able to safely reach the airport, as Taliban checkpoints continue to harden.

So the continued success of the Biden administration's Kabul airlift depends on a lot of factors. Republicans of course want to see the operation fail, because they believe it will help them in the midterms.

Pay very close attention who is publicly hoping for a disaster to capitalize off of.

 

The Vax Of Life, Kentucky Edition

As the court battles over mask mandates and emergency powers continues here in Kentucky, with local Republicans trying to slaughter as many Kentuckians as possible to blame Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear, our state's hospitals are now starting to run out of room.

Issuing yet another plea for Kentuckians to get vaccinated against COVID-19 as hospitals fill with unvaccinated patients around the state, Gov. Andy Beshear on Tuesday said the state is nearing a tipping point.

“The Delta variant continues to burn through our population here in Kentucky,” the governor said at the state Capitol, adding that the state is seeing the “most rapid rise in cases that we have seen to date. We’re at an alarming point, and we’re rapidly approaching critical.”

Hospitals across the state continue to fill with largely unvaccinated coronavirus patients. Some, including in western Kentucky, are nearing or have hit capacity, Beshear said, adding that the Bowling Green Medical Center is reporting a full intensive care unit; the coronavirus patient influx at Jennie Stuart Health Center in Hopkinsville has grown by roughly 500% over the last two weeks; and Baptist Health hospitals in Paducah and Madisonville are nearing capacity.

As the virus rages and further burdens the state’s health care systems, Beshear said he’s not considering “any type of shutdown or capacity restrictions,” but reinstituting a statewide mask mandate is “under active consideration.”

The state is on track to exceed its mid-December record of 1,817 people hospitalized with coronavirus later this week. “By the end of the week, we expect to have more Kentuckians in the hospital battling covid than at any point in this pandemic,” Beshear said.

On Monday, 1,528 had been admitted to health care systems across the state — an increase of more than 100 over the weekend. Intensive care units are also nearing record capacity. At most during the winter surge, 460 people filled Kentucky’s ICUs. On Monday, that number was up to 429.

“There’s no sign it’s abating,” Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack said, adding that a record 17 children or teenagers under age 18 are currently hospitalized with coronavirus in Kentucky. The incidence rate in younger Kentuckians has exploded by more than 400% over the last month, from 133 on July 16 to 548 on August 16. “What we’re finding across the state is this version of [COVID-19] is hitting people harder, they are getting sicker, and they are younger,” Stack said.

Many hospitals are taking steps they didn’t have to take last year, when vaccines weren’t yet available and the virus hit its peak. Over the weekend at St. Claire Healthcare in Morehead, hospital staff needed to “make room” for a continued influx of coronavirus patients, so they repurposed a post-anesthesia care unit into a COVID-19 ICU surge unit — a step the hospital did not have to take in the winter.

Increasingly in the coming weeks, hospitals will be forced to retrofit spaces and resources to accommodate a projected influx of patients. “The health care capacity is going to get really difficult here in the weeks ahead,” Stack said. “This will cascade and it will get worse.”

 

Kentucky, like Louisiana, is a southern state with a Democratic governor, and like Louisiana, Kentucky's biggest problem is a GOP legislature fighting tooth and nail for the "right" to not wear masks and not get vaccinated, and ending up in the hospital, lungs drowning in fluid.

Beshear is already asking the Biden administration for help, but only 54% of Kentuckians have had even one shot, and that number isn't expected to get much better. In the rural west and Appalachian east, these figures are below 30%, and we're seeing delta crush county after county here.

Beshear needs to issue a mask mandate. Biden needs to issue a vaccine mandate and a mask mandate. People are dying, and the deaths are preventable.

The Good Package, Con't

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling the collective bluffs of both the Squad and the Blue Dogs by cutting short the House's August recess and bringing the $3.5 trillion infrastructure reconciliation bill to the floor next week for a vote.

 

House Democratic leaders told members of their caucus on Tuesday that they plan to press ahead with a vote advancing a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint next week, disregarding warnings from moderate Democrats who said they will oppose that legislation without first voting on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The House is set to return to Washington in the middle of a scheduled August recess in part to advance the budget, after the Senate passed both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the budget plan earlier this month.

The budget resolution would allow Democrats to craft a subsequent economic package with funding for health care, child care and education provisions and tax increases on wealthy corporations and people, without fear of a Republican filibuster. But in a statement on Sunday, nine moderate Democrats remained adamant that “we simply can’t afford any delays,” saying they first wanted a vote on the bipartisan deal.

But liberal lawmakers have repeatedly emphasized that their support for the $1 trillion bipartisan deal is contingent on passage of the final social policy package, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi has publicly said she will wait to take up the bipartisan bill until the far more expansive package clears the Senate. That package is not expected to be finalized until the fall, provided the House approves the budget blueprint.

Should all nine moderates — a group that includes Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Jared Golden of Maine and Henry Cuellar of Texas — vote against the budget blueprint, it will fail, given that all Republicans are expected to oppose the package. Despite just a three-vote margin, Ms. Pelosi has shown little willingness to change her plans, telling her top deputies privately on Monday that “this is no time for amateur hour,” according to a person familiar with the comments, which were first reported by Politico.

“For the first time America’s children have leverage — I will not surrender that leverage,” she added. “There is no way we can pass those bills unless we do so in the order that we originally planned.”

In a private call on Tuesday, she again insisted that “we must build consensus,” according to a person on the call who disclosed the comments on condition of anonymity. She has instead proposed a procedural move that could allow the House to advance both the budget blueprint and the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Monday with one vote.

“I know that we have some arguments about who goes first, and the fact of the matter is that we will be doing all of the above,” Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, told Democrats, according to a person on the call, who disclosed the comments on condition of anonymity. “Remember the psychology of consensus.”

 

So Pelosi is going ahead with the blueprint for the Good Package™ andtelling the Blue Dogs to stick it.

 

The problem of course is that they very well could stick it, and stick it right in Pelosi's back.

 

We'll see if there's one last magic gavel bang in her hand.

Last Call For The GOP's Race To The Bottom, Con't

Yet another white male Republican voter gets caught committing full-on intentional voter fraud, and gets a slap on the wrist for it, while Crystal Mason, a Black woman, continues to serve hard prison time for accidentally doing so.

 

In the wake of Donald Trump's defeat last fall, Republicans launched a desperate search for illegally cast ballots to help justify the GOP's conspiracy theories. But as regular readers know, despite all the hysterical rhetoric, only a handful of legitimate allegations have been raised -- and some of the most notable examples involve Republicans casting illegal ballots on behalf of dead relatives.

Take Pennsylvania's Robert Richard Lynn, for example. The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre reported yesterday:

A man from Forty Fort said he used "poor judgement" and regrets using his deceased mother's name on an application for an absentee ballot for the 2020 presidential election. Robert Richard Lynn, 68, of Center Street, pleaded guilty to a third-degree misdemeanor charge of violations relating to absentee or mail-in ballots during a court proceeding before Luzerne County Judge Michael T. Vough on Monday.

The recent pattern is pretty amazing. Revisiting our earlier coverage, we learned in May, for example, about Pennsylvania's Bruce Bartman, who cast an absentee ballot in support of Trump for his mother -- who died in 2008. Bartman pleaded guilty to unlawful voting, conceded he "listened to too much propaganda," and was sentenced to five years' probation.

About a month later, Edward Snodgrass, a local Republican official in Ohio, admitted to forging his dead father's signature on an absentee ballot and then voting again as himself. NBC News noted at the time that Snodgrass struck a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to three days in jail and a $500 fine.

This new example is notable in part because of the amount of effort the Republican voter in Pennsylvania invested in his scheme. This guy used a typewriter to complete an absentee ballot application -- pretending to be his deceased mother, Lynn claimed to be "visiting great grand kids" around the time of the election -- before signing the dead woman's name.

It wasn't long before election officials flagged the ballot, when a database showed that the voter in question died six years ago.

The defendant faced up to two years behind bars. He instead received a sentence of six months' probation.

As we've discussed, there are a handful of ways to look at incidents like these. My first thought is of Crystal Mason, who cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 while on supervised release for a federal conviction. She didn't know she was ineligible to vote, and her ballot was never counted, but Mason -- a Black woman -- was convicted of illegal voting and sentenced to five years in prison.

It's hard not to notice that White men like Robert Richard Lynn, Edward Snodgrass, and Bruce Bartman received vastly more lenient sentences, despite the fact that they knowingly hatched schemes to cast illegal ballots on behalf of dead relatives.

 

But of course, we know why. A Black former felon who served her time and voted because she didn't know that as a felon she had lost the vote (even though she was no longer a felon) was thrown back in prison, while white men who deliberately and fraudulently voted on purpose, with intent?

Slap on the wrist.

Food For Thought, Con't

Lost in all the noise about delta variant, Afghanistan, Haiti and Obama's birthday party, the Biden administration permanently increased SNAP benefits by 25% over pre-pandemic levels, which is a huge, huge boost for getting rid of poverty and food insecurity.

The Biden administration approved on Monday the biggest boost to food assistance benefits in the history of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a reform that could impact as many as 42 million Americans.

Starting in October, SNAP benefits will increase by an average of 25% above pre-pandemic levels. That will be the first time the purchasing power of the aid has changed since the program’s creation in 1975.

“Ensuring low-income families have access to a healthy diet helps prevent disease, supports children in the classroom, reduces health-care costs and more,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement. “And the additional money families will spend on groceries helps grow the food economy, creating thousands of new jobs along the way.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the updated benefits formula is based on current food prices, what Americans typically eat, dietary guidance and the nutrients in food items. A study by the government in June found that 88% of SNAP recipients were struggling to achieve a healthy diet.

The average benefit, which was $121 before Covid, will increase by $36 a month under the new policy, according to the USDA.

During the pandemic, all SNAP recipients got a 15% boost to their benefits, but that additional aid expires at the end of September.

Even as the economy improves from the worst of the pandemic, 10% of U.S. households continue to report not having enough food to eat, including 17% of Black families.

 

SNAP/food stamps are basically my age, and they're only now being updated with a better, more accurate formula. After 45 years.

 

But Biden did what had to be done, when Bush and Trump wouldn't, and Clinton and Obama couldn't.

 

 

The Vax Of Life, Con't

As expected with the delta variant of COVID-19 raging across the unvaccinated South and America as a whole crossing the million new cases per week mark again on Monday, the Biden administration today will be advising most vaccinated Americans to receive vaccine booster shots starting as early as next month.

The Biden administration has decided that most Americans should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, and could begin offering third shots as early as mid-September, according to administration officials familiar with the discussions.

Officials are planning to announce the decision as early as this week. Their goal is to let Americans who received the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines know now that they will need additional protection against the Delta variant that is causing caseloads to surge across much of the nation. The new policy will depend on the Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of additional shots.

Officials said they expect that recipients of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was authorized as a one-dose regimen, will also require an additional dose. But they are waiting for the results of that firm’s two-dose clinical trial, expected later this month.

The first boosters are likely to go to nursing home residents, health care workers and emergency workers. They would probably be followed by other older people who were near the front of the line when vaccinations began late last year, then by the general population. Officials envision giving people the same vaccine they originally received.

The decision comes as the Biden administration is struggling to regain control of a pandemic that it had claimed to have tamed little more than a month ago. President Biden had declared the nation reopened for normal life for the July 4 holiday, but the wildfire spread of the Delta variant has thwarted that. Covid-19 patients are again overwhelming hospitals in some states, and federal officials are worried about an increase in the number of children hospitalized just as the school year is set to begin.

For weeks, Biden administration officials have been analyzing the rise in Covid-19 cases, trying to figure out if the Delta variant is better able to evade the vaccines or if the vaccines have waned in strength over time. According to some administration experts, both could be true, a distressing combination that is re-energizing a pandemic that the nation fervently hoped had been curbed.

Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told “Fox News Sunday” that “there is a concern that the vaccine may start to wane.” That, combined with the Delta variant’s ferocity, could dictate boosters, he said.

Federal health officials have been particularly concerned about data from Israel suggesting that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’s protection against severe disease has fallen significantly for elderly people who got their second shot in January or February.

Israel can in some ways be viewed as a template for the United States because it vaccinated more of its population faster and has almost exclusively used the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that made up much of the U.S. stock. Unlike the United States, though, Israel has a nationalized health care system that allows it to systematically track patients.

The latest Israeli data, posted on the government’s website on Monday, shows what some experts described as continued erosion of the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine against mild or asymptomatic Covid-19 infections in general and against severe disease among the elderly who were vaccinated early in the year.

 

Extra protection against the delta variant is a good idea, and that means a booster shot early next winter for me. I hope we're in a situation where it's clerical work rather than a necessity, but I fear that another variant this winter could unleash this circus all over again because we have too many clowns in this country who refuse the vaccine.

 

At some point, we're going to have to make a choice: vaccinate people, mask mandates, and a national response, or live with the virus killing half a million of us a year or more.

 

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.