IF YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT, STOP PUNCHING LEFT

I'm back. Thank you, Yas and Tom, for some urgent posts while I was away.

Right now, I don't understand why any Democrat is talking about anything apart from the need to mount a massive opposition to Trumpism. Here's a news story about an 82-year-old Seattle man named Leonard A. (Ned) Johnson who was declared dead by Social Security, even though he's very much alive, at a time when headlines are reading, "DOGE Has 10 Staffers at Social Security in Hunt for Dead People":

Johnson’s strange trip through the netherworld began in February, when a letter from his bank arrived addressed to his wife, Pam.

“We recently received notification of LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s passing,” it began....

“We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”

“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”

... It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account.... That was for payments he’d received in December and January.

Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled.

Johnson fought back.

He called Social Security two or three times a day for two weeks, with each call put on hold and then eventually disconnected. Finally someone answered and gave him an appointment for March 13. Then he got a call delaying that to March 24. In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”

It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers.

Johnson waited four hours, then was told the situation would be resolved. Then:

... on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account.

However:

As of Friday morning he hadn’t received February or March’s benefits payments.

This isn't an isolated event. Here's another story, about a 66-year-old Oklahoma retiree whose Social Security benefits were also terminated:

The man, James McCaffrey, who was born to an active-duty U.S. soldier at an overseas Army base, said because of recent comments from DOGE leader Elon Musk, he’s worried his benefits were cut because of his foreign birthplace....

McCaffrey said he started to think something was often when he received an unexpected Medicare bill.

“It said that I needed to pay $740 before the 25th of this month or I was going to lose my Medicare,” McCaffrey said.

That seemed odd, since his Medicare payment is normally deducted from his Social Security check....

“The first person I talked to at the Social Security Administration told me that I was not an American citizen,” McCaffrey said.

His problem was eventually resolved -- but there must be other people going through what Johnson and McCaffrey have experienced who are too frail or too busy to fight.

If you're a Democrat right now, you shouldn't be palling around with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon, the way Gavin Newsom is. You shouldn't be putting the Democratic imprimatur on a medium-term continuing budget resolution, like Chuck Schumer and his group of appeasers. You shouldn't be constantly punching left, like John Fetterman:

Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who announced days ago that he would vote for a House-passed funding bill to avoid a government shutdown, said he doesn’t care about firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) harsh criticism of Democratic senators who will vote to advance the controversial bill....

“I hope you can relay how little I care about her views on this,” Fetterman said when asked about Ocasio-Cortez’s comments that Senate Democrats who vote to advance the bill are betraying their Democratic House colleagues.

Maybe Fetterman, who's married to an immigrant, could say something about Fabian Schmidt, a green card holder who was tortured when he flew in to Boston after visiting his family in Luxembourg:

“It was just said that his green card was flagged,” said Astrid Senior, his mother. She said she didn’t hear from her son directly until Tuesday, when she learned he’d been hospitalized.

Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.

She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.

“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.

He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital....

On Tuesday, Schmidt was transported to the regional headquarters for ICE in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the Wyatt [detention] facility [in Central Falls, Rhode Island]

Oh, and here's a doctor on an H-1B visa -- you know, the visas Elon Musk and Donald Trump vigorously defended late last year -- who was also detained at Logan Airport:

A Rhode Island doctor who traveled home to Lebanon to visit family was prevented by U.S. Customs officials from reentering the country on Thursday at Boston's Logan International Airport and told she was being deported back to her home country....

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 35, had been studying and working in the U.S. for the last six years and had been in Rhode Island, working for Brown Medicine in the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension, since last July....

... lawyer Thomas S. Brown, who handles immigration and visa issues for doctors affiliated with Brown Medicine ... said there had been some “wrinkle” with her visa application that had been “relatively easy” to work out....

“She was clear to return. She had the visa, she had the right passport. Everything was looking good," he continued.

A federal court order that would have halted the immediate deportation of a Rhode Island doctor was issued Friday evening while the doctor’s departing plane sat on the tarmac at Boston's Logan Airport....

But the plane ultimately took off, carrying Dr. Rasha Alawieh out of the country for reasons still unclear....

Maybe appeaser Democrats, for some reason, believe that voters will like them more if they punch their own party-mates rather than Trump. But we can see clearly that the "Let's not fight" approach is extremely unpopular. A Quinnipiac poll made that obvious a month ago:

Twenty-one percent of voters approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, which is an all-time low.... The Quinnipiac University Poll first asked this question of registered voters in March 2009.

... 40 percent of Democrats approve of the way the Democrats in Congress are handling their job, while 49 percent disapprove....

Forty percent of voters approve of the way the Republicans in Congress are handling their job, which is a record high, while 52 percent disapprove and 8 percent did not offer an opinion.

And a new NBC poll confirms this:

The Democratic Party has reached an all-time low in popularity in the latest national NBC News poll....

Just over a quarter of registered voters (27%) say they have positive views of the party, which is the party’s lowest positive rating in NBC News polling dating back to 1990. Just 7% say those views are “very” positive....

The slump is partially driven by fed-up Democrats.... And now, in a reversal from Trump’s first term, self-identified Democratic voters say they want their party to hold the line on their positions even if it leads to gridlock, rather than focus on finding areas of compromise with the president.

Almost two-thirds of Democrats, 65%, say they want congressional Democrats to stick to their positions even if that risks sacrificing bipartisan progress, and just 32% want them to make legislative compromises with Trump.

Stand up and fight back -- or quit and let someone else do the fighting that you won't do. Talk about what Trump and his regime are doing now, not about a fellow Democrat who might have said "Latinx" once five years ago.