August 19, 2021

Shows won't book voices supportive of withdrawal on TV says communication professional

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1428363331916599315?s=20




Yesterday's newsletter detailed how the media is largely overlooking voices that supported Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead media reports are almost exclusively highlighting criticism of the withdrawal — often from people complicit in two decades of failed policy in Afghanistan.

We have reason to believe that this is not an accident. On Wednesday, Popular Information spoke to a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible:



https://popular.info/p/where-are-the-anti-war-voices

August 19, 2021

If N.Texas runs out of ICU hospital beds, doctors can consider a patient's vaccination status

North Texas doctors have quietly developed a plan that seeks to prepare for the possibility that due to the COVID-19 surge the region will run out of intensive-care beds.

If that happens, for the first time, doctors officially will be allowed to take vaccination status of sick patients into account along with other triage factors to see who gets a bed.

A copy of an internal memo written by Dr. Robert Fine, co-chair of the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guideline Task Force, was sent to members of the task force -- and leaked to The Watchdog. It summarizes the latest work by the task force, a volunteer group that periodically updates medical guidelines for hospitals in our region. There are about 50 members from various hospitals in the group. Although their recommendations are not enforceable, the guidelines are generally followed.

One important note: A non-vaccinated person will not necessarily be denied care when competing with a vaccinated patient for an ICU bed, doctors say. Other medical factors come into play, such as underlying conditions and the likelihood that a patient will get better and leave the hospital.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/08/19/if-north-texas-runs-out-of-icu-hospital-beds-doctors-can-consider-a-patients-vaccination-status/

August 19, 2021

Roseberry's (Y'all Qaeda) been a registered Republican since 2016

Investigators said Roseberry had a propane tank in his truck but said they aren't sure if there are any explosive devices in the vehicle.

Roseberry posted multiple videos to a now-removed Facebook page Thursday, demanding to speak with President Joe Biden. Officials have not determined Roseberry's motive at this time. During a lengthy Facebook live video, Roseberry said, "the revolution is on" and that he'd "die for this land."

WCNC Charlotte confirmed that Roseberry is a registered Republican voter since 2016.

Investigators said Roseberry's criminal history was "nothing that serious." In the late 1980s, Roseberry was charged with larceny over $200 and driving without a license. He was given probation for those offenses. U.S. Capitol Police said Roseberry's mother recently passed away. Members of Roseberry's family told police he was dealing with "other issues."


https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/crime/floyd-ray-roseberry-washington-dc-bomb-suspect/275-bcca45ff-e9ed-4126-a5c8-3bff662023eb

August 19, 2021

Larry David went off on Alan Dershowitz in Martha's Vineyard

According to a “spy” for Page Six, the Seinfeld co-creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm maven let the famed lawyer have it on the porch of a convenience store on the wealthy New England island. The snoop even wrote down the exchange, as it was too surreal to not be documented:

Dershowitz — who described himself as a “liberal Democrat” who “voted for Biden just as enthusiastically as Larry did — confirmed the incident to Page Six, saying that he and David used to be friends but that David broke up with him after he started working for Trump. And he’s not the only one. Heated exchanges, he said, are “typical of what happens now on the Vineyard.” He added, “People won’t talk to each other if they don’t agree with their politics.” People like David screaming at him in public is, he said, “the price of principle,” adding that he believed Trump’s first impeachment was unconstitutional. (Hence the T-shirt.)

Dershowitz dismissed David as a “knee-jerk radical,” claiming he “takes his politics from Hollywood. He doesn’t read a lot. He doesn’t think a lot.” He also said David was “guilty of contemporary McCarthyism,” and that “[Joseph] McCarthy would have been proud of him.”

https://uproxx.com/tv/larry-david-alan-dershowitz-trump-screaming/

August 18, 2021

Nobody Cares Who Lost Afghanistan It's not a political liability for Joe Biden - Bill Scher

https://twitter.com/billscher/status/1428080113774628866?s=20


Reagan's approval stayed steady after the Lebanon withdrawal

Ford's approval went up after the Fall of Saigon

JFK's approval was stratospheric after Bay of Pigs

Why Biden's fate likely isn't tied to Afghanistan. My
@monthly
latest:



“We did train—and there was no attention paid to this—our army had a unit in there training,” the president said, “and made a very capable military.” But “some units of the army refused to take up arms against some of their same ethnic background, or religious background.” And so “it was agreed that there was no longer any point… and we withdrew.”

That isn’t President Joe Biden in his Monday address about the Afghanistan withdrawal. It’s President Ronald Reagan in his April 1984 press conference after the U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon. Seven months later, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide.

The only difference between what Reagan said in April 1984 and what Biden said Monday is that Biden put it even more straightforwardly than the president remembered as the Great Communicator. “The Afghan military collapsed,” Biden said,

It’s a cold political truth that voters don’t punish American presidents for policy failures beyond American borders so long as the failures don’t hurt Americans directly. Even in the 1952 election, when Dwight D. Eisenhower famously echoed Sen. Joe McCarthy’s accusation that the Democrats “lost” China, his knockout blow against Adlai Stevenson wasn’t that half a billion people in a far-off country were now subject to Communist rule. It was that nearly two million U.S. soldiers fought in Korea, and more than 36,000 of them died there. Ike pledged to bring the troops home.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/08/18/nobody-cares-who-lost-afghanistan/

August 18, 2021

Pakistan's Pyrrhic Victory in Afghanistan Islamabad Will Come to Regret Aiding the Taliban's Resur

Pakistan’s security establishment is cheering the Taliban’s recent military gains in Afghanistan. The country’s hard-liners have funneled support to the Taliban for decades, and they can now envision their allies firmly ensconced in Kabul. Pakistan got what it wished for—but will come to regret it. A Taliban takeover will leave Pakistan more vulnerable to extremism at home and potentially more isolated on the world stage.


The end of the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan also promises to mark a turning point in its relationship with Islamabad. Pakistan has long veiled its ambitions in Afghanistan to maintain relations with Washington, but that balancing act—seen in Washington as a double game—will prove impossible in the event that a reconstituted Islamic emirate is established in Kabul. This would not be the vindication that Pakistan’s military is expecting: the Taliban are less likely to defer to Pakistan in their moment of triumph, and the Americans are not likely to reconcile with the group over the long term. Pakistan’s nightmare scenario would be to find itself caught between an uncontrollable Taliban and international demands to rein them in.

The Taliban’s victory will have an equally disastrous effect on Pakistan’s domestic peace and security. Islamist extremism has already divided Pakistani society along sectarian lines, and the ascendance of Afghan Islamists next door will only embolden radicals at home. Efforts to force the Taliban’s hand might result in violent blowback, with Pakistani Taliban attacking targets inside Pakistan. And if fighting between the Taliban and their opponents worsens, Pakistan will have to deal with a new flow of refugees. A civil war next door would further damage the country’s struggling economy. Pakistani critics of their country’s involvement with the Taliban have long feared and predicted this scenario. But Pakistan’s generals see the Taliban as an important partner in their competition with India. Weak civilian leaders in Islamabad, meanwhile, have acquiesced to a policy that prioritizes the elimination of real or perceived Indian influence in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s security establishment has long obsessed about imposing a friendly government in Kabul. That fixation is rooted in the belief that India is plotting to break up Pakistan along ethnic lines and that Afghanistan will be the launching pad for antigovernment insurgencies in Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa regions. These fears have their roots in the fact that Afghanistan claimed parts of Balochistan and Pakistan’s Pashtun regions at the time of Pakistan’s creation in August 1947. Afghanistan recognized Pakistan and established diplomatic relations a few days later but did not acknowledge the British-drawn Durand Line as an international border until 1976. Afghanistan also remained friendly with India, leading Pakistan to allow Afghan Islamists to organize on its territory even before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/afghanistan/2021-07-22/pakistans-pyrrhic-victory-afghanistan?utm_campaign=tw_daily_soc&utm_source=twitter_posts&utm_medium=social

August 17, 2021

There are now 3 Dem led subcommittees on the withdrawal from Afghanistan

https://twitter.com/AndrewDesiderio/status/1427691039750565898?s=20


New: Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Menendez (D-N.J.) says he’ll “seek a full accounting” of the Biden admin’s “flawed execution of the U.S. withdrawal.”

That makes *three* Dem-led Senate committees vowing oversight of how the Biden team bungled the withdrawal.


Menendez: “I am disappointed that the Biden administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal. We are now witnessing the horrifying results of many years of policy and intelligence failures.”

Menendez says the review will also look at how the Afghan army “collapsed so quickly,” calling it “astounding.”

“Congress was told repeatedly that the Afghan Defense and Security Forces were up to the task… The American and Afghan people clearly have not been told the truth…”




I hope they investigate Trump and Ghani as well . Why put the blame entirely on Biden when they don't know what happened?

August 17, 2021

This comment about the press is the truth

https://twitter.com/ArmandoNDK/status/1427616835080441856?s=20

MSNBC not happy that evacuation today is orderly and not chaotic.



https://twitter.com/andy_farquhar/status/1427623870983458822?s=20

Early this morning the Washington Post quietly downgraded the situation from catastrophic to "eerie tension."

August 17, 2021

CNN and MSNBC are no better this morning. From a Marine who served in Afghanistan

From a marine, who served in Afghanistan



https://twitter.com/STEMthebleeding/status/1427458730212438025?s=20



Man, I picked a good day to mostly stay off this site today.

The number of bad takes by people who couldn't find Afghanistan on a map were coming fast and thick, and simultaneously ignoring the actual experts, ie those of us who survived by understanding Afghanistan is NOT the west


"We trained the army for 20 years!"

The average ANA service time was measured in weeks and months before they'd disappear, not years.

Very few "veterans" in the ANA, and those who did exist were often reassigned to be VIP guards or other non-infantry roles


"They had planes and helicopters!"

Most of them are decades old, lacking crucial maintenance, and trained crews to repair them. There was talk of the ANA getting maintained in Qatar, but that's obviously not a viable strategy.


"We should've trained them better!"

We taught them to read and write, drive, talk on comms, AND how to fight. Largely, they ignored our lessons, preferring to look "manly" on Liveleak vs being combat effective.

Plus it turns out they weren't getting paid by the Afghan govt.

"But the govt has fallen!"

For most people outside of Kabul and Kandahar, life doesn't change much. They're a tribal people, the Imam is their "leader", and his words ARE the law.

There is no patriotism in Afghanistan as we know it, their loyalty is to their village and Imam.


"We should've trained women to fight!"

The Afghani people never would've recognized a military force comprised of women regardless of their effectiveness. The Afghan govt would actively sabotage them, and it would embolden the Taliban that we were corrupting the country.


"We should've evacuated refugees sooner!"

You can't start an evacuation of a nation's citizens until the govt allows it. We've learned that Ghani refused, which isn't surprising, given what it would've resulted in: his death at the hands of the Taliban.


I can keep going, but the fact is there were 3 options:

1) we left in May, fewer refugees get out, Taliban retake Afghanistan in days

2) We leave now, packing 800 refugees into a C17 made for 100, meaning more refugees survive, Taliban take the country.

3) 200k more US troops.


2500 US troops since January didn't "hold the Taliban", because there were no engagements. It wasn't a deterrent, because most of those forces were transpo and support, not infantry.

It would take 50-75x that much to actually secure the country. 150-200k infantry forces.

And let's just say for giggles, the US takes the country back.

Then what? We put in another puppet govt that the Taliban can buy off while they're rebuilding in Pakistan?

Train another force that the corrupt govt won't pay so they can be bribed to surrender immediately?

Or the alternative, Afghanistan becomes a "US protectorate", mimicking the Philippines for the next 50 years.

But that ignores the rub: The Afghani people, unlike the Philippines, Koreans, Tawainese- didn't ask for democracy.

we just showed up

August 17, 2021

I'm Seeing Healthy People Die Every Day': COVID Spirals in Mississippi

On Monday, Aug. 2, a 34-year-old woman in Gulfport, Mississippi, started feeling dizzy at work. She tested positive for COVID-19 a few days after that.

By the next Sunday, she was dead. Her husband, also in his mid-thirties, died from coronavirus this past Saturday, according to Brian Switzer, the local coroner.

“These are deaths I wouldn’t have seen a month or two ago,” Switzer, the Harrison County Coroner, told The Daily Beast. “I’m seeing significantly younger folks this time around, but there’s still this idea that if you’re young and don’t have comorbidities, you’re not going to die.”

But as the Delta variant pushes the state’s entire health-care system to the brink of collapse, those coming face-to-face with COVID’s victims say the virus’ target has changed dramatically, from older to younger Mississippians—often healthy, and virtually always unvaccinated.


https://www.thedailybeast.com/coroners-say-covid-19-is-spiraling-in-mississippi-and-younger-unvaccinated-people-are-the-ones-dying?source=articles&via=rss