White supremacist Stephen Miller calls President Biden a liar, while he lies about Trump's surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/5iEHpbK5fa
Miller: Well, we know that president Biden is an inveterate liar, and it is preposterous to say that President Trump — who kept our troops from harm without any Taliban attacks against them from the moment that he began the peace negotiations in early 2020 — to blame him for the Biden debacle is outrageous and an offense to human reason.
President Trump had a peace plan and a peace process in place that was conditions-based, and the Taliban knew that if they crossed any red line, if our people were hurt on their watch, if they moved on our airbase, if they moved on our embassy, if they moved on any American asset, they would pay with their lives, and they knew this. And when Biden came in, he took the Trump peace plan — like Nancy Pelosi took Trump’s state of the union — and he ripped it to shreds. And he and the same team of people that brought up the disasters in Libya and Syria and Egypt, they brought us the disaster in Afghanistan, and they alone are responsible for the greatest strategic humiliation in our history.
Miller is adept at tickling the racist lizard brain but this is a subject he knows nothing about. Nonetheless, I’m sure the MAGA crowd is hearing exactly what it wants to hear.
He is lying outrageously, of course.
“President Trump had a peace plan and a peace process in place that was conditions-based, and the Taliban knew that if they crossed any red line, if our people were hurt on their watch, if they moved on our airbase, if they moved on our embassy, if they moved on any American asset, they would pay with their lives” — all lies. The deal was that the Taliban would not kill any Americans before they could withdraw and would not attack the homeland (which the Taliban have never done.) That was it. There was nothing about the airbase or the embassy or people being hurt “on their watch” at all. Nada.
The Taliban adhered to their end of the deal. It wasn’t hard since all they had to do was not kill Americans. (They killed hundreds if not thousands of Afghans ever since the so-called “peace deal.”) Nobody expected that the government would fall instantly or that they would take Kabul in such a short time, not even them. But they did and the withdrawal was a mad rush. But nothing in Trump’s deal with the Taliban would have prevented that. In fact, Trump’s abrupt drawdow to 2500 troops at the very end of his term made it much more likely, dumping the decision whether to re-escalate in Biden’s lap. If he wasn’t such a moron I’d think it was sabotage.
The only thing Biden changed was the exit date, buying some time to cobble together some kind of plan and possibly get a real peace deal, which proved impossible. All of this mess was preordained by Trump’s deal and the circumstances that followed. Miller is full of it. As usual.
If nothing else, the prospect of two unprecedentedly catastrophic hurricanes hitting New Orleans in `the span of 15 years, should wake people up to the threat of climate change. This is, of course, on top of the unprecedented wildfires, flooding and other frightening weather events happening more frequently all over the world but that doesn’t provide quite the sustained attention as these dangerous storms.
It’s vitally important that we take action. We cannot wait any longer.
[T]he reconciliation package … contains a host of climate policies. But the crux of Democratic hopes — the largest slice of the pie — is the clunkily-named Clean Electricity Payment Program, or CEPP, and a suite of separate but complementary clean energy tax incentives that work with it. Crafting the policies has consumed congressional offices and outside advocates alike for months.
Sen. Tina Smith’s office (D-MN), which has been championing the policy, started batting ideas around before the November election. Her staff got to work crafting the policy in earnest on January 6 — not just the day of the insurrection, but also when the race for Georgia’s second Senate seat was called for Jon Ossoff, locking in Democrats’ effective Senate majority and making passing climate legislation a real possibility.
They’ve coalesced behind the idea of “greening up” the electrical grid: making it more — ultimately completely — reliant on clean energy sources. The idea is that, when it comes time to electrify other sectors of the economy like cars, all of that electricity will be generated by an energy sector that produces far fewer carbon emissions than the one on which America currently relies.
In devising this plan, policy wonks took their cue from the states.
“For the longest time, federal policy around climate was consumed by discussion especially around carbon pricing,” Sam Ricketts, cofounder of Evergreen Action, told TPM. “Then we looked at what’s happening in the states — 11 states have 100 percent carbon-free electricity requirements with different timelines, and the policies are working. So we take those tried-and-true policies, turn up the ambition and use federal investments.”
Devising the CEPP has been an experiment in creative thinking constrained by the idiosyncrasies of Senate rules, as a coalition of invested parties constructed a policy to both achieve historic climate goals and survive the Byrd Rule that governs what can be included in reconciliation. The specifics are still in flux, as congressional staff hammers out the legislative language.
The CEPP is basically a clean energy standard remixed to pass the Byrd Rule, which mandates that everything involved in a reconciliation package must directly impact the budget. Clean energy standards, which are already used by many states, are regulatory — power utilities must meet a certain threshold of electricity production from cleaner sources.
The CEPP takes the same goal of decarbonizing the electrical grid, but gets there with a set of sticks and carrots: penalty taxes for utilities who don’t increase their share of clean energy by a predetermined amount each year, and credits for those who do.
It would be “technology-neutral,” meaning that all “clean” sources count towards increasing that share: hydropower, renewables like wind and solar, and nuclear facilities. The plan would also allow for fossil fuel power plants that manage their emissions through the use of carbon capture technologies.
The reason Democrats and climate advocates have rallied around the policy is not just because it’s tailored to survive reconciliation — it would also have a transformational effect on the country’s climate change-causing emissions. President Joe Biden’s goal is to achieve 80 percent clean electricity by 2030, on track to be 100 percent clean by 2035. Cutting power plant emissions on that scale would accomplish at least half of Biden’s bigger goal, to reduce the country’s economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent by 2030.
As Ricketts pointed out, greening the electrical grid does critical work on two fronts: zeroing out pollution from the power sector itself, which is responsible for a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, but also building out renewable sources of energy to ensure that other sectors of the economy can go clean too. That’s where the tax credits work in concert with the CEPP — as utilities are incentivized to increase the share of their electricity derived from cleaner sources, the tax credits help fund the expansion of less-carbon-intensive energy production.
“It’s the biggest bang for your buck, so we can make sure the juice we swap in for the oil and gas used for cars and appliances is also clean,” Ricketts said.
The CEPP and its complementary tax credits — which are “vitally important to incentivize new projects and ensure that renewables are the least-cost resource,” Ricketts said — are the beating heart of Democrats’ climate plan.
To work most effectively, the rates of the CEPP’s credits and penalties, along with the annual targets for clean electricity sales, must be sufficiently high. Whether they are will be determined by policymakers in the weeks and months ahead.
There’s also, perennially, the fear that someone like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) from a state with a legacy of coal production could balk at the policy when push comes to shove next month. While the CEPP does make room for fossil fuel plants equipped with carbon capture, that technology is still burdensome and expensive — the clear intent of the policy is to economically squeeze out the dirtier producers as renewable energy sources become built out further and even cheaper to use.
But Sen. Smith has expressed confidence that the CEPP is crafted in a way to keep all 50 senators on board. The country’s largest coal mining union has also endorsed Biden’s energy policies, asking for “good-paying jobs” — like those that would be created by a national explosion in the production of renewable resources — in return.
“After many, many months, we are now on the precipice of being able to move transformational policy through reconciliation,” Ricketts said.
It couldn’t be more important. And it might actually happen despite the uniform opposition of the GOP nihilists. Fingers crossed.
As host of “The Marc Bernier Show,” Bernier had expressed anti-vaccine sentiment less than a week before his hospitalization. On July 30, he quote-tweeted a Fox News PSA urging people to be vaccinated with, “Should say, ‘Now the US Government is acting like Nazi’s. Get the shot!’”
A conservative radio host in Nashville who derided vaccines and spread misinformation about the coronavirus has died of COVID-19. Phil Valentine was 61.
Though Valentine downplayed the efficacy of vaccines and even went so far as to record a parody song mocking them, he reversed his opinion while in the hospital, advising his family members to get the jab.
In February, DeYoung published an interview promoting the conspiracy theories that the Pfizer vaccine would make women sterile and that world governments were using the virus and vaccine to centralize power. DeYoung’s guest at the time, Sam Rohrer, said that very few people who were infected lost their lives, calling the vaccine only a “purported solution” and “not truly a vaccine.”
Dick Farrell who called Dr. Anthony Fauci a “lying freak” and said Covid vaccines are “poisonous” died August 6.
Dick Farrel, a longtime conservative radio host based in Palm Beach County, Florida, who was skeptical of the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic and refused to get vaccinated, has died of COVID-19.
People keep saying that the right-wing vaccine refusniks will change their minds if someone they trusts tells them to get the vaccines. Maybe they will trust these fellows’ deathbed entreaties to get the vaccines? Let’s hope so.
The National Weather Service of New Orleans issued a series of warnings on Sunday, including an ominous warning that they “can’t bear to see” the storm on satellite imagery. “We have hard times ahead, but we will all persevere,” the service tweeted. “Take all messages we, public officials and broadcast media are saying SERIOUSLY. Stay tuned for more frequent updates.”
Unfortunately, the most intense/destructive part of #Ida, the right front/NE quadrant, will pass very near or over parts of the New Orleans metro area, bringing w/ it, the full brunt of her winds/torrential rain.
For me, one of the most heinous acts of the Trump presidency was pardoning and then extolling the virtues of war criminals, particularly the psychopath Eddie Gallagher.
It turns out that he and Gallagher have the same character:
Remember that whole narrative from some folks about Eddie Gallagher being the ultimate warrior?
Well, they left out the part where he accidentally stabbed himself with a hatchet and tried to get a Purple Heart.
Or the part where he told his team an area was clear when it wasn’t and someone immediately got shot. And he wouldn’t call in a casevac because he lied about the unit’s location and didn’t want to get in trouble, and told the dude who got shot to lie about it, too.
Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23, of Roseville, Calif. escorts evacuees to a military transport in Kabul. Photo released by the U.S. Department of Defense via the New York Times.
Jesus, that picture I shared a few days ago of a U.S. servicewoman at the Kabul airport escorting two Afghan women to a military transport? She was one of those killed in the suicide bombing: Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, 23, of of Roseville, Calif.
News coverage Tuesday showed an armed U.S. servicewoman chatting with female Afghan evacuees as she escorted them to a transport in Kabul. Two worlds are separated only by barbed wire and walls around the airport: the medieval one these Afghan women are fleeing and the modern one the American soldier inhabits. On one side, women are men’s prisoners.
One of the last photos that Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee shared with her family from Afghanistan shows her in dusty body armor with a rifle, her long blond hair pulled back, her hands in tactical gloves. Amid the chaos of Kabul, those hands are carefully cradling a baby.
It was a moment captured on the front lines of the airport, where Marines worked feverishly to shepherd tens of thousands of evacuees through chaotic and dangerous razor wire gates. It showed how, even in the tumult, many took time to comfort the families who made it through.
In a short message posted with the photo, the sergeant said, “I love my job🤘🏼”
Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee in Kabul prior to the suicide attack this week in a photo she sent to her family.
Marine Sgt. Johanny Rosario Pichardo, 25, of Lawrence, Mass. was killed as well, along with eleven more U.S. troops and almost 200 others.
The two female sergeants volunteered for a job that in culturally conservative Afghanistan could have been carried out only by women: searching other women and children as they passed through the gates. But the two sergeants were also standout Marines in a force that is slowly changing, putting more women in combat roles and positions of leadership.
An armed U.S. servicewoman excorts female Afghan evacuees to a transport. Screen cap from NBC News.
Louisiana hospitals full of Delta patients are just starting to empty after a record surge of Covid infections. Now come evacuations ahead of the storm surge from powerful Hurricane Ida. But not for hospitals. There is nowhere to send patients (Associated Press):
Gov. John Bel Edwards said evacuation of hospitals in threatened areas is something that would normally be considered under other scenarios, but it’s impractical as COVID-19 patients fill beds in Louisiana and elsewhere.
“That isn’t possible. We don’t have any place to bring those patients. Not in state, not out of state,” Edwards explained.
Officials at Ochsner Health, which runs the largest hospital network in the state, said Saturday that they considered evacuating some of their facilities closer to the coast but that wasn’t possible considering how packed other hospitals are in their network. Roughly 15 of their hospitals are in areas potentially affected by Ida. But they did evacuate some individual patients with particular medical needs from smaller hospitals in more rural areas to their larger facilities.
Hurricane Ida is expected to make landfall as a Category 4 (or perhaps 5) hurricane (CNN):
Hurricane Ida became a Category 4 storm early Sunday morning, rapidly intensifying to sustained winds of 150 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.
That’s just 7 mph from making Ida a Category 5 storm. It was 60 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River, NHC forecasters said in a 7 a.m. ET update, as the storm continued its march toward Louisiana and the Gulf Coast at 15 mph.
The hurricane has quickly increased in intensity since striking Cuba on Friday, threatening to be an “extremely dangerous major hurricane” when it makes its projected landfall along the Louisiana coast Sunday afternoon.
It will be the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in 2005 as a Category 3.
In New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, Audrey Perkins was all packed and set to evacuate with relatives to Texas when her 96-year-old mother, who has dementia, announced that she wouldn’t be leaving. So Perkins, in tears, decided to stay with her. In 2005, Perkins left her father in the city during Katrina.
“He didn’t want to go, and we all just pulled off and left him,” Perkins said, as tears began running down her cheek. “He said he would be all right, but then he went on to heaven and drowned during Katrina.
“So if she ain’t going, I’m going with her,” Perkins said of her mother, as she glanced up at the sky. “I’m not going to leave her here alone like they did my daddy.”
Katrina killed 1,833 people and displaced millions in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. Perkins’ father was among many to drown in the city during the storm.”
I’m just waiting for some jackass preacher to blame what’s coming on God’s judgment for whatever grievance the reverend has against whomever for whatever.
Via National Hurricane Center.
Rental cars are gone. The highways are clogged. Some filling stations are out of gas. The airport in New Orleans is shut down.
This hurricane looks to be a living nightmare. I went through a bad one in the same area in 1965 — Hurricane Betsy — and these things are scary. My father was working on a NASA test site in Mississippi and had word that the storm was going to be bad so he moved us up north before it hit — ahead of everyone else. We were lucky. The town we lived in was pretty devastated.
I was just a kid, and the creepiest thing I remember about it was that when we returned to our house there were snakes all over the place. And we had a rather large boat in our front yard — that had been in the bay several blocks away.
Man, I hate to see New Orleans get hit. It’s one of the greatest cities in the world with some of the greatest people in the world. Let’s hope this thing isn’t as bad as they say it’s going to be.
I called Mama Marisol, got her on her cell phone. She had her crystal ball in the front seat, and she was ‘leavin-leavin, cher.’
Heading up Basin Street past St. Louis 1, she saw all the skeletons sitting on top of their tombs, rolling their bones and readin’ em, shakin’ their heads at her.
This won’t end well.
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break And the water gonna come in, have no place to stay
Well all last night I sat on the levee and moan Thinkin’ ’bout my baby and my happy home
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break And all these people have no place to stay
Now look here mama what am I to do I ain’t got nobody to tell my troubles to
I works on the levee mama both night and day I ain’t got nobody, keep the water away
Oh cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do no good When the levee breaks, mama, you got to lose
I works on the levee, mama both night and day I works so hard, to keep the water away
I had a woman, she wouldn’t do for me I’m goin’ back to my used to be
I’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan Gonna leave my baby, and my happy home
*by Kansas Joe McCoy and famously covered by Led Zeppelin.
Fingers crossed for a better outcome for New Orleans in 2021.
“The Taliban is the enemy. I dealt with the leader of the Taliban … this is a tough, hardened person that’s been fighting us for many years, and we’re using them now to protect us? Look what happened with their protection, 100 people — much more, they say, than 100 people — were killed and 13 of our incredible military were killed, and that’s just the beginning.”
Trump also sought to defend the cease-fire deal his administration forged with the Taliban in February 2020. He argued that it did not commit the US to a firm withdrawal date, contrary to Biden’s claims.
“We had plenty of time. They [the Taliban] weren’t gonna move. We had them under total control,” he said. “We had the airplanes, we had the Air Force, they had nothing … There was no reason to expedite. I could have taken two years, three years to get [US forces] out. We were gonna get ‘em out fast, but … we were in no rush. We controlled everything, and they were afraid to move.”
“They wouldn’t have done a thing without my approval,” Trump went on. “Everything they did was conditions-based, and the biggest condition [was] you can’t kill Americans. And they can go back to their civil war after we’re gone, they can do whatever they want to do, but you can’t ever kill Americans and you can never come to our homeland, and he [Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Baradar] knew what was going to happen if they ever did it.”
“He didn’t do anything, and then they took over and we ran out and we’ve just destroyed the image of our great country, of our incredible warriors — and they are incredible warriors, but they need leadership at the top and they don’t have it … He talks like a tough guy, and he’s not a tough guy. He’s just the opposite and the world knows it.”
It’s painful to try to deconstruct that pile of rhetorical offal, but I’ll give it a go.
Actually, Trump had one brief conversation with the leader of the Taliban after the deal ws already signed. The negotiating was done by the state department, overseen by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump’s main contribution to the talks was to invite them to Camp David so he could hold a surrender to the Taliban ceremony on September 11th. Thankfully, they talked him out of it.
He was the one who drew down troop levels to 2500 before he left office, in anticipation of a May withdrawal without any plan at all. In fact, he had been agitating to leave before the end of 2020:
The May 1st deadline was never seen as a loose date. Biden was able to get the Taliban to agree not to kill any Americans for an extra couple of months, but the small force of 2500 would have been in great danger if either Trump or Biden had just ignored it as Trump is suggesting he would have done. There would had to be an escalation of troops into the country and a continuation of the war. Trump is very dumb but I’m sure he knows this. He is just lying.
He says that everything he did was conditions based. True. The conditions were, as he says, that they could not kill Americans and could not attack the US homeland. They did not do either of those things. So his conditions were met. I don’t know what he’s talking about.
Trump’s tough talk was always seen as ridiculous because it was. Nobody took him seriously at all. He likes to talk about how he kept the world from nuclear disaster at the hands of North Korea but, of course, he simply gave North Korea even more room to develop their nuclear capability. I guess it could have been even worse but he proved to the world that he was sucker for grand pageants and would give up the store if they gave him one. And so they did.
President Obama chose the escalation path in 2009 in the vain hope that something would change and the Afghan project would finally work out. Trump mortgaged the future by making a deal he didn’t have to fulfill. This left Biden with the decision of whether to go back on his promise to get out by surging more troops into the country — the only option under the circumstances he was left with — or fulfilling the agreement, with all the risk that entailed (including the political risk of having the national security establishment and the political press react exactly as they have.) He chose to get out.
Trump is, as always, living in an alternate universe where facts and evidence don’t matter — where reality doesn’t matter. And it works:
Monica Crowley used to be a semi-rational conservative. She lost her mind a couple of years ago and hasn’t found her way back. She is representative of millions and millions of our fellow Americans.
Days after his administration signed a deal with the Taliban, President Donald Trump spoke to its co-founder and senior leader in a historic call — the first known conversation between an American president and the militant group that harbored the al Qaeda operatives responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The conversation, after which Trump said he had a “very good” relationship with the Taliban’s co-founder, comes as that agreement to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and begin Afghan peace negotiations seems threatened by renewed violence and a dispute over releasing Taliban prisoners.
Trump spoke to Abdul Ghani Baradar, who serves as the group’s chief negotiator and also goes by Mullah Baradar, according to the militant group’s spokesperson, who said the call lasted 35 minutes.
Afterward, he told reporters that his “relationship” with Baradar is “very good … we had a good, long conversation today, and, you know, they want to cease the violence. They’d like to cease violence also.”
That’s not true. On Monday, the group’s spokesperson said attacks would resume on Afghan government forces but not U.S. forces, and Monday into Tuesday, there were 33 attacks in 16 provinces, killing six people and wounding 14, an Afghan Interior Ministry spokesperson told ABC News. Five Afghan policemen also were reportedly killed during an attack on a security checkpoint, according to Reuters.
In the last two days, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have urged calm and patience, saying some level of violence is still expected. But senior administration officials who briefed reporters last week specifically said that the Taliban would continue to keep levels of violence reduced, and it hasn’t.
Instead, the militant group seems focused on steering clear of the U.S. and pushing toward a full American withdrawal.
“If the United States honors the agreement concluded with us, then we will have positive future bilateral relations,” Baradar told Trump, according to his spokesperson.
According to the Taliban, Trump told Baradar, “It is a pleasure to talk to you. You are a tough people and have a great country, and I understand that you are fighting for your homeland. We have been there for 19 years, and that is a very long time, and withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan now is in the interest of everyone.”
The White House has not provided a readout of the call.
The agreement signed Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where chief U.S. negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, spent a year and a half negotiating with Baradar and others, lays out a full U.S. withdrawal, if the Taliban meets certain commitments — to engage in national peace negotiations with other Afghans and to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven to terror groups, specifically al Qaeda.
To kick that process off, the U.S. agreed to draw down its forces from approximately 13,000 to 8,600 and close its five major military bases within 135 days, while the Taliban agreed to meet an Afghan national delegation for negotiations on March 10. The militant group does not recognize the government of President Ashraf Ghani, decrying it as a U.S. puppet, but members of the government will join civil society, tribal leaders and women in a “personal” capacity to make up the Afghan national team.
But in the days since the agreement was signed by Baradar and Khalilzad, with Pompeo as a witness, there’s growing concern those intra-Afghan negotiations won’t happen.
In addition to the renewed violence against Afghan security forces, there is a discrepancy between the two agreements the administration signed over releasing Taliban prisoners.
The U.S.-Taliban agreement says the U.S. will facilitate the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners held by the Afghan government and up to 1,000 from the “other side” held by the Taliban, all of whom “will be released” by March 10, when negotiations begin. But a separate joint statement signed by the U.S. and Afghan governments on Saturday says only Ghani’s government will discuss the “feasibility of releasing significant numbers of prisoners on both sides,” without committing to any number or time frame.
“We have not made a commitment to release them. It’s a sovereign Afghan decision. We will discuss the question of prisoners as part of a peace deal, which has to be comprehensive,” Ghani told CNN on Sunday, refusing to release any Taliban prisoners — a key leverage point for the government and potential security risk — until those negotiations begin.
But the Taliban spokesperson said Monday the militant group will not participate in the negotiations until prisoners are released, leaving talks up in the air.
“Do not allow anyone to take actions that violate the terms of the agreement, thus embroiling you even further in this prolonged war,” Baradar told Trump in their call, according to his spokesperson — urging him to pressure Ghani to release prisoners.
Trump seemed to agree, reportedly telling Baradar that Pompeo “shall soon talk with Ashraf Ghani in order to remove all hurdles facing the intra-Afghan negotiations.”
Asked about Ghani’s hesitation, Trump said Ghani “may be reluctant,” then denounced the Afghan government for doing “very well with the United States for many years, far beyond military, if you look at all the money that we’ve spent.”
The State Department did not respond to questions about whether Pompeo called Ghani, but he was dismissive of Ghani’s statements on Monday: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the habits of old days are hard to be break and this will be a bumpy road going forward,” he told Fox News in an interview.
Khalilzad, the chief U.S. negotiator seen with Baradar during the Trump call in a photo released by the Taliban, had been conducting some shuttle diplomacy between the rival Afghan political factions to push them along in their roles in the peace process. Pompeo alluded to that, saying the U.S. was “determined to get there” and push the process forward.
Amid all the issues, some Republicans in Congress have grown vocal about their opposition to the agreement.
The US did pressure the government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
The right’s rewriting of the events leading up to the events of the last couple of weeks have affected the coverage. And it’s not good. It’s going to take a herculean effort on the part of good-faith journalists and future historians to sort it out properly.
This account of what it’s like inside a COVID ICU in Tallahassee, Florida is chilling. I don’t know how they do it:
The curtain divides every patient room in two. On one side, a man gasps for air every 20 seconds as nurses gather around his bedside. They hold hands, hug one another and comfort the man as best they can.
“Knowing that their family can’t be there at that time, you (the nurse) are the one that is combing hair, playing music,” says registered nurse Emily Brown, who works at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare. “We’re praying; we’re holding their hands.”
One nurse uses a rag to wipe his eyes. From the other side of the curtain, another man asks for a glass of water. A nurse chuckles. She says, “I think we can get you that.” He doesn’t know his roommate was just given morphine to provide comfort in his final moments.
TMH has three levels of COVID patients cared for in different areas of the hospital. Green level patients have the least severe cases and should soon return home. Yellow level patients have moderate cases and typically need some form of oxygen. Red level is for those most likely on ventilators and considered COVID intensive care patients. Red level, most often, is where people die. And people are dying. Daily. At a faster rate than ever before.
At least two people have succumbed to the virus each day this week at TMH. More than 60 people have died so far in August.This week, Tallahassee has experienced the largest surge in cases and hospitalizations since the start of the pandemic in March 2020. […]
Brown, 23, is from Bristol, a rural town where being vaccinated is uncommon.She started as a nurse at TMH in February of 2020, not knowing what was in store as she began her career. “COVID is all I know as a new nurse,” Brown says. “I don’t even know if I would know how to take care of a regular person at this point. If a patient can breathe, that’s good for me.”
Brown recruited best friend Sally Fowler, 21, to join her at TMH. Fowler’s experience was similar to Brown’s. She began as a nurse when the COVID floor had reopened into a normal hospital floor. About a month later, the second surge hit.
“For this to be my first dose of nursing, it was a shell shock, because you don’t learn about COVID in nursing school,” Brown says. “You don’t learn how to take care of these patients or what lab values to look for.”Just last week, Fowler lost her first patient. The woman had been on a ventilator. “Patients get tired. That is a lot of oxygen coming at them all the time,” Brown says. “They get irritable, they get anxious and the meds we give them for anxiety and irritability mess with oxygenation.”
Brown was in the room with Fowler as she consoled her patient. They helped her make one last call to her family. Brown moved her oxygen mask just enough so she could talk to them. They recall the woman begging her family — “Please, just let me go. I can’t do this anymore.”The family told her, “You’re the strongest mother I know. Thank you for fighting this long.” But the family asked the nurses, “Can you please make this quick?” “I remember that conversation and that’s something I will remember 10 years from now,” Brown says.
The two best friends have come to terms with working in the COVID unit. They do their best to be a bright spot in their patients’ days and find hope in some of the heaviest days.
“One patient walking out of here to three bad patients is so rewarding, to see that one patient that we’ve made a difference in. Because this thing is scary.”
At this point in the narrative we have another story of two people who didn’t think they could get COVID winding up in the ICU. We’ve all read so many of those stories.
Regina Bolde, 50, has been a nurse for almost half of her life. She’s worked at TMH on the same floor since 2015. Since the start of the pandemic, Bolde’s view of her career has shifted. “I never saw myself being a hospice nurse,” she says in the bustling yellow level COVID hall. “When COVID came, we started doing everything.”
Last Christmas, Bolde had a patient who was rapidly deteriorating. The man, about 60, begged Bolde to stay and help him as his anxiety mounted. Bolde held his hand till he was transferred to the COVID ICU floor. He didn’t make it. “It was heartbreaking,” she recalls. “But we have no control over death and life.”
Bolde has helped patients with contacting their families to say goodbye in their final moments. She helped a father FaceTime his son; then she and the other nurses stepped out to give them privacy. From the other side of the door, Bolde could hear their conversation. “It’s OK, Dad. We’re gonna be all right. It’s OK to go.”
Bolde is praying for the pandemic to end. “People think it’s not real but I try to tell them that this is real and people suffer a lot and they die,” she says. “In one week we can have three or five people die.”
Bolde says she tells everyone who will listen: Get vaccinated. Wear a mask. Practice social distancing. Stop the spread.
Unfortunately, the Florida political leadership under Governor Death refuses to deal with this crisis in a responsible manner so it’s going to spread until the unvaccinated are either recovered or dead.
Get a load of what these nurses have to go through in the ICU all day:
The halls of the yellow level COVID unit are filled with nurses covered in PPE head to toe, without a patch of skin showing. They work from the halls rather than the nurses’ station to keep a close watch on all their charges. If a patient is low on oxygen, they can hear the beeping of the machines quicker.
Many stand at their computers with their elbows propped on the walls holding a portable fan towards their faces. Sweat drips from foreheads as they are suited up and masked to protect themselves. “It’s very physically draining,” says Kelly Clark, a former travel nurse who has since found a permanent place on staff at TMH. “We can’t leave the unit to use the restroom. We can’t drink anything unless we are outside.”
To leave the COVID unit, you have to “doff” (take off) your gown, booties, hair net, bunny suit, shield and gloves, sanitizing in between each piece removed. This must be done every time someone wants to eat, drink, or use the restroom. Then a new set of personal protective equipment must be “donned” (put on) before reentering the unit. […]
When it’s time for patients to eat a meal, the process is time-consuming. Nurses have to individually feed patients because of the oxygen masks on their faces. “During that whole time there’s typically someone crashing or we’re dealing with something else,” Clark says.
For Clark, it’s extremely difficult to see patients interact with family members through video calls and hearing the conversations they share. Imagine “having to tell them, ‘No, I can’t let you come up here and see your loved one,’ ” Clark says.
The younger the patient, the harder it is for Clark and other nurses to watch their health decline. Patients have respiratory systems that are ravaged by the virus; it can take them 20 days on average before they’re released. They’re not back to normal but they are no longer in isolation. They are no longer contagious but may have lingering side effects caused by COVID, including lung and other organ damage. […]
COVID patients are constantly being pumped with oxygen. It’s time-consuming and tiring. TMH Chief Clinical Officer Ryan Smith, also a registered nurse, had the opportunity to pick up a shift in one of the COVID units a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to experience firsthand what the nurses, respiratory therapists and staff go through.
That night he had four patients to tend to. “The first part of my shift, I had my first few patients look at me and say, ‘Don’t let me die,’ ” Smith says.
Smith took time to speak with nurses on shift with him and learned what all that oxygen did to patients. Some doctors came to the gut-wrenching conclusion that life in the COVID unit involves spending long periods of time among the “talking dead.”
“As soon as you remove them from the devices they no longer made it,” Smith recalls. “To watch how quickly they dwindle down is the hardest thing for me.”
Nurses and staff struggle daily to wean patients off oxygen. Too often, when it seems like patients are ready to breathe on their own, they quickly get worse. “The ‘talking dead’ didn’t make sense to me until I saw it firsthand,” Smith says. “It’s how quickly they decompensate when they don’t have that oxygen.”
Smith pauses. “The rest of the world can’t see what goes on behind these doors,” he says. “We want COVID to go away, but the reality is that it is here. It’s real. It impacts a lot more people than it should.”
No kidding. This is a living nightmare that should not be happening right now! There is no reason for all these people to be in the hospital and dying of COVID. Virtually all of them could all have been vaccinated by now — the shots are accessible, free and very effective. If everyone had gotten their shots Delta wouldn’t be spreading as it is!
It’s so tempting to just shrug and say they are getting what’s coming to them for being foolish. But what about these health care workers? They are going through hell with thing and for no good reason.
