Military Monday: March 1, 2021

Military Mondays pays tribute to local servicemen and servicewomen.

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  • Brazil’s COVID Patients Tied to Beds and Ventilated Without Sedatives

    MIGUEL SCHINCARIOLDoctors in hard-hit Brazil have resorted to tying COVID-19 patients to their hospital beds before ramming ventilators down their throats since they no longer have enough sedatives, according to doctors in Rio de Janeiro. “I never thought that I would be living through something like this after 20 years working in intensive care,” Aureo do Carmo Filho told Reuters. “Using mechanical restraints without sedatives is bad practice... the patient is submitted to a form of torture.”In hospitals where they do still have sedatives, health workers have resorted to diluting them to make supplies go further or using muscle relaxants to calm patients down while they are intubated. “They are awake, without sedatives, and they pop up, with their hands tied to the bed and begging us not to let them die,” one nurse said.The horrific admissions come on the heels of Doctors Without Borders naming Brazil’s response to the pandemic a “humanitarian catastrophe” that is likely to only get worse in the coming weeks. “I have to be very clear in this: the Brazilian authorities’ negligence is costing lives,” MSF international president Christos Christou said Thursday after Brazil’s death toll rose to 362,000.MSF general director Meinie Nicolai directly blamed Brazil’s right-wing leader Jair Bolsonaro, who, like former U.S. president Donald Trump, downplayed the pandemic and his own bout with COVID-19, causing many to take deadly risks by not believing the virus is as dangerous or as contagious as science proves it is.“There is no coordination in the response. There is no real acknowledgment of the severity of the disease. Science is put aside. Fake news is being distributed and health care workers are left on their own,” Nicolai said. “The government is failing the Brazilian people. All Brazilians can tell you that they have people around them that have been buried or intubated in places where there are no drugs and no oxygen. That is unacceptable.”The lack of medical supplies is coupled with resistance by government officials to even recognize the severity of the problem. The P1 variant first identified in Brazil has caused international concern and is now thought to be mutating. France blocked all flights from the country and other countries are now advising against all but essential travel to the beleaguered South American nation.The lack of proper medical supplies is now coupled with a disastrous vaccine rollout built on both denial and corruption. Just 12 percent of Brazil’s population has received a first dose of the Chinese vaccine Coronavac, which Chinese officials recently admitted is not very effective against stopping people from becoming severely sick.Earlier in the week, federal prosecutors in the Brazilian state of Roraima opened an investigation after reports emerged that rogue health workers were exchanging doses of the less-than-effective Chinese vaccine, which is primarily what is currently being offered in the country, for illegally mined gold. An advocate for the indigenous tribes that own the land where the gold is mined said health workers were vaccinating clandestine miners under the cover of nightfall, according to Reuters. “The Yanomami have long complained that materials and medicines intended for indigenous health are being diverted to wildcat miners,” the local leader said in a letter seen by Reuters.More Brazilians are dying every day than anywhere else in the world, with the country logging 3,560 deaths on Thursday alone. Brazil’s health ministry is currently in talks with Spain and other countries to try to get needed supplies to the overwhelmed hospitals. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro continues to fight against regional governments that have tried to mandate masks or institute lockdowns.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • How Democrats Who Lost in Deep-Red Places Might Have Helped Biden

    Ebony Carter faced an uphill climb when she decided to run for the Georgia state Senate last year. Her deeply Republican district south of Atlanta had not elected a Democrat since 2001, and a Democrat had not even bothered campaigning for the seat since 2014. State party officials told her that they no longer tried to compete for the seat because they did not think a Democrat could win it. That proved correct. Carter lost with 40% of the vote, the most for a liberal in years. But her run may have helped another candidate: Joe Biden. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times The president, who eked out a 12,000-vote victory in Georgia, received a small but potentially important boost from the state’s conservative areas if at least one local Democrat was running in a down-ballot race, according to a new study by Run for Something, an organization dedicated to recruiting and supporting liberal candidates. That finding extended even to the state’s reddest districts. The phenomenon appeared to hold nationally. Biden performed 0.3% to 1.5% better last year in conservative state legislative districts where Democrats put forward challengers than in districts where Republicans ran unopposed, the study found. The analysis was carried out using available precinct-level data in eight states — Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Kansas and New York — and controlling for factors like education to create a comparison between contested and uncontested districts. The study showed a reverse coattails effect: It was lower-level candidates running in nearly hopeless situations — red districts that Democrats had traditionally considered no-win, low-to-no-investment territory — who helped the national or statewide figures atop the ballot, instead of down-ballot candidates benefiting from a popular national candidate of the same party. “The whole theory behind it is that these candidates are supercharged organizers,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a co-founder of Run for Something. “They are folks in their community having one-on-one conversations with voters in ways that statewide campaigns can’t do.” The idea is not new, but it is the first time that a comprehensive study has been done on the possibility of such a reverse coattails effect, and it comes as the Democratic Party ramps up its strategizing for the midterm elections next year. In 2005, when Howard Dean became the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he tried to institute a “50-state strategy” to build up party infrastructure and candidate recruitment at every level and in every state — even in solidly Republican districts. The hope was that if there was at least one Democrat running in every county, it would help the party build a larger base for future elections. Dean was met with skepticism from national strategists who believed in a more conventional method of focusing limited campaign resources on swing districts. After his tenure, the strategy fell out of favor. What tends to derail any such 50-state, all-districts strategy are the limited resources that both parties have in any election, and the realpolitik considerations that inevitably lead them to pour disproportionate amounts of money into certain races seen as particularly important and winnable. “If you have candidates dedicated to ground game, then it could be helpful, but usually campaigns at the lower end of the spectrum don’t have that kind of money, and it’s certainly not done by parties as much anymore,” said Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster. He said that one reason for this could be that controlling messaging down the ballot is hard to do when campaigns at the top of the ticket have different approaches to issues from those of local candidates. For the last few cycles, Democrats’ major priorities have been retaking the House, the Senate and the presidency. Now, with the party in control of all three, down-ballot organizers want the party to shift some of its focus to state legislative races. Morales Rocketto expressed hope that the study would start a conversation among Democrats on how they invest in state and local races. During the 2020 election cycle, Democratic campaigns for the Senate, like Amy McGrath’s in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison’s in South Carolina, raised huge sums of money, in some cases topping $90 million for a single campaign. By comparison, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said it raised $51 million for legislative races in 86 chambers across 44 states. “Now that we’ve gotten through the 2020 election, we really need to make sure that this is what we’re focused on,” Morales Rocketto said. “We’ve elected Joe Biden, but Trump and Trumpism and the things he’s said and stood for are not gone, and we could lose everything again.” And what those losses look like is already known, Jessica Post, the president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, argued. “When Republicans took control of 21 state legislative chambers in 2010, we lost control for a near decade to win the United States Congress,” she said. “We now have a challenge with keeping the United States Senate, and Republicans are eroding our voting rights in these state legislatures.” Since the presidential election, Republican-run legislatures across the country have been drafting bills to restrict voting access, prompting Democratic calls for additional local party infrastructure. The way to get that investment and attention from the Democratic National Committee, Morales Rocketto said, is to highlight how a bottom-up approach can help the party at the national level, too. Post echoed that sentiment. “So much of the building blocks of American democracy are truly built in the state,” she said. Republicans have lapped Democrats in their legislative infrastructure for years, said Jim Hobart, a Republican pollster. “Democrats are pretty open at a legislative level that they’re playing catch-up,” he said. “For whatever reason, Democrats have gotten more fired up about federal races.” Hobart said that both parties should want to have strong candidates running for office up and down the ballot, because parties never know what districts will become competitive. For Republicans in 2020, some of those surprise districts were along the southern border of Texas, which had previously been a relatively blue region. “It came as a shock to everybody that Republicans ran as strong in those districts as they did,” Hobart said. “But if you have candidates on the ballot for everything, it means you’re primed to take advantage of that infrastructure on a good year.” The new study will be just one consideration as the DNC reviews its strategy for state legislative and other down-ballot races in the midterms. The committee is pledging to increase investment in such races, both to help win traditional battleground states and to grow more competitive in red-tinted states that are trending blue. Officials at the DNC, who declined to speak on the record about the study, pointed to Kansas, which has a Democratic governor but voted for former President Donald Trump by 15 percentage points, as an example of a state where they would like to put the study’s findings into action. Democrats in the state are gearing up to try to reelect Gov. Laura Kelly, and Ben Meers, the executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, said he hoped to test the theory. He said that having Democrats campaign in deep-red districts required a different type of field organizing. “There are some counties where if the state party can’t find a Democrat, we can’t have an organized county party, because the area is so red,” he said. “But if we can run even the lone Democrat we can find out there, and get a few of those votes to come out — you know the analogy: A rising tide lifts all Democratic ships.” Some Democratic strategists in Kansas noticed that phone-bank canvassers had more success with voters during the general election when they focused on congressional and local candidates, rather than headlining their calls with Biden. They’re hoping that building local connections in the state will help Kelly’s campaign. In Georgia, Run for Something believes that Carter’s presence on the ballot significantly helped Biden’s performance in her area of the state. While the group said that district-level data alone could be misleading, and needed to be combined with other factors taken into account in its analysis, Biden averaged 47% of the vote in the three counties — Newton, Butts and Henry — in which Carter’s district, the 110th, sits. That was 5 percentage points better than Hillary Clinton’s performance in 2016. Carter said she had tried to start grassroots momentum in the district. “For me, running for office was never an ambition,” she said. “It was more so out of the necessity for where I live.” Carter’s district has grown exponentially during the last decade, bringing with it changing demographics and different approaches to politics. She knew through previous political organizing and her own campaigning that many people in her district, including friends and family, did not know when local elections were, why they were important or what liberal or conservative stances could look like at a local level. Carter said she spent a lot of time during her campaign trying to educate people on the importance of voting, especially in local races that often have more bearing on day-to-day life, like school and police funding. “I thought it was a lot of the work that people didn’t want to do or felt like it wasn’t going to benefit them,” she said. “We are not going to win every race, but we could win if we just did the legwork.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company

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