The information the IRS needs to send out the payments was finally delivered on Thursday morning after threatening letters sent to Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul and his Deputy David Black by leaders of the House Ways and Means and Oversight Committees. There is still no word on when the deposts/checks will go out. The latest estimate is that those of us in these categories will still have to wait at least 10 days to see the money.
Meanwhile, calls on Biden to fire Saul and Black are growing louder.
Weeks after the American Rescue Plan had been signed into law, while many Americans had already received payments, the Social Security Administration’s inaction was standing in the way of millions of beneficiaries receiving desperately needed cash aid. After escalating pressure on Saul to no avail, the letter gave him 24 hours to remedy the holdup. A few hours later, the SSA announced that they’d be sending the information the next day.
This delay is just the latest in an array of extremely troubling decisions under the leadership of the Social Security Administration’s commissioner Saul, and his deputy David Black….
Commissioner Saul and Deputy Commissioner Black were appointed by President Trump, alongside Deputy Commissioner for Retirement and Disability Policy Mark Warshawsky, to self-fulfill the Republican promise about the failure of government, and destroy the departments they were tasked with managing. Warshawsky, a veteran of the American Enterprise Institute, was pegged as an early candidate to be fired by the Biden administration for his work undercutting the program; he retired from the post in late January.
The Biden administration has set to work rolling back some of those Trump appointees’ designs on Social Security, including a proposed rule that would have subjected disability insurance recipients to even more frequent and stringent eligibility reviews, which would make an already challenging process even more difficult for people with disabilities to secure and maintain cash benefits. That move was widely celebrated among advocates. But President Biden has not heeded the call from those same advocates to fire Saul and Black, who have clear track records of working against the very department they’ve been tasked to head up, and against Democratic ambitions on Social Security.
Frank O’Sullivan
Now, a growing number of congressional Democrats are joining the chorus calling for Saul and Black’s ousters. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) called for their resignation as his first act as chair of the Social Security and Pensions Subcommittee, and has since urged Biden to fire them. He’s joined House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee Chairman John Larson, Worker and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Danny Davis, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Bill Pascrell Jr. in demanding Saul’s immediate removal. Both Saul and Black are serving terms that don’t expire until 2025….
On the campaign trail, Biden insisted (straining against historical fact) he had never and would never vouch for cuts to Social Security. He, and the Democratic Party broadly, have made protecting and expanding Social Security a main plank of the party’s policy platform going forward.
That ambition is irreconcilable with a leadership regime that has, as was reported by Yahoo News, put “illegitimate political pressure on Administrative Law Judges to reduce the rate of Social Security disability case approval,” as one such judge recently claimed. That alone should be scandal enough to imperil Saul and Black’s positions at the agency, and give the Biden administration the space to fire them for cause. But the Trump years have built up a tolerance for scandal, which means that the incident hasn’t even deterred them.
Meanwhile, Saul and Black have openly pursued a number of reforms aimed at aggressively curtailing benefits. Their attempted rule change, which the Biden administration rolled back, was a Reagan-era reform that would have led to tens of thousands of people losing benefits. When President Reagan enacted it, it led to a rash of suicides, and was deemed so cruel that it led to a unanimous Senate ruling to overturn it. Elsewhere, they’ve sought to deny benefits for older and severely disabled non–English speakers, resulting in an estimated 100,000 people being denied more than $5 billion in benefits.
See my Thursday post for more about Saul and Black’s efforts to destroy Social Security on Thursday.
Pressure is also building for Biden to get rid of Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy.
A group of House Democrats on Friday introduced legislation to prohibit the Postal Service from lengthening mail-delivery windows and require it to adhere to present service expectations. They named the bill the Delivering Envelopes Judiciously On-time Year-round Act, or DEJOY Act.
Carl Larsson: Brita, Cat and Sandwich
One House aide involved in postal reform legislation introduced in February said some members of the caucus are leery of proceeding with efforts to address the Postal Service’s financial obligations given that DeJoy’s 10-year plan includes sharp reductions in service, including slower timetables for mail delivery and reduced post office hours.
Separately, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) threatened to take legal action to block the service cuts. His office said in a statement Friday that it was encouraged that DeJoy recognizes the legal obligations to secure limited regulatory approvals, but said it remained concerned about timely mail delivery….
DeJoy hopes to save the Postal Service $160 billion over the next decade through a combination of austerity measures, postage price increases and projected package volume growth. But the largest single piece of his plan is dependent on Congress repealing its pre-funding mandate for retiree health care costs, which runs about $5 billion a year. Instead, the agency wants to wind down those payments and enroll future retirees in Medicare, a proposal worth $44 billion.
A bill introduced by Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, chair of the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee, includes both components.
But DeJoy’s designs to slow the mail — even as the Postal Service attempts to rebound from generationally poor service metrics in recent months — and perceived animus toward lawmakers in recent hearings have made those prospects more difficult.
Sometimes America’s legacy of white supremacy is hiding in plain sight, literally. When Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a hastily passed voter suppression law that many are calling the new, new Jim Crow on Thursday night, surrounded by a half-dozen white men, he did so in front of a painting of a plantation where more than 100 Black people had been enslaved.
Lady reading with cat-Albert Roosenboom
The fitting symbolism is somehow both shocking and unsurprising. In using the antebellum image of the notorious Callaway Plantation — in a region where enslaved Black people seeking freedom were hunted with hounds — in Wilkes County, Ga., as the backdrop for signing a bill that would make it a crime to hand water to a thirsty voter waiting on Georgia’s sometimes hours-long voter lines, the GOP governor was sending a clear message about race and human rights in the American South.
The portrait of the plantation was the starkest reminder of Georgia’s history of white racism that spans slavery, Jim Crow segregation, the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan, and today’s voter purges targeting Black and brown voters — but it wasn’t the only one. At the very moment that Kemp was signing the law with his all-white posse, a Black female Georgia lawmaker — Rep. Park Cannon — who’d knocked on the governor’s door in the hopes of watching the bill signing was instead dragged away and arrested by state troopers, in a scene that probably had the Deep South’s racist sheriffs of yesteryear like Bull Connor or Jim Clark smiling in whatever fiery hellhole they now inhabit.
Rep. Park Cannon (D-Atlanta) is placed in handcuffs by Georgia State Troopers after being asked to stop knocking on a door that lead to Gov. Brian Kemp’s office while Gov. Kemp was signing SB 202 behind closed doors at the Georgia State Capitol Building in Atlanta, Thursday, March 25, 2021.Alyssa Pointer / AP
Indeed, Twitter was on fire Thursday night with posters drawing the straight line from notorious past segregationists like George Wallace to the 2021 actions of Kemp and the GOP-led Georgia Legislature in passing — at great speed and with little debate — a lengthy bill that also limits easy-access drop boxes for ballots and places onerous voter-ID restrictions on voting by mail, and which the New York Times reports “will have an outsized effect on Black voters.”
On one level this new voter-suppression law — “voter integrity,” in the modern GOP’s Orwellian branding — is inspired by the current and possible future events of ex-President Donald Trump’s Big Lie about fraud in the 2020 election, the narrow upset wins in Georgia for President Biden and two new Democratic senators, and the threat that voting icon Stacey Abrams poses to Kemp in the 2022 election. But there’s also a powerful pull back to Georgia past. That link is made clear by the history hanging right behind Kemp on Thursday.
“Things have changed dramatically” in the South, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in 2013 when he authored the majority opinion gutting the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with a long history of discrimination no longer needed to have changes to their voting procedures approved by the federal government.
Voter suppression in Georgia is Exhibit A for why he is wrong.
After Joe Biden carried the state in November and Black voters turned out in record numbers in the January runoffs to elect Democrat Raphael Warnock as the state’s first Black senator and Democrat Jon Ossoff as the state’s first Jewish senator, Georgia Republicans passed a sweeping rewrite of the state’s election laws on Thursday to make it harder for Democratic constituencies to vote and have their ballots counted.
Though some Georgia Republicans, most notably Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, defended the integrity of the 2020 election, the “Election Integrity Act of 2021” heavily restricts mail ballot drop boxes, adds new ID requirements for mail-in voting, throws out ballots cast in the wrong precincts, and makes it a crime to give voters food and water while they’re waiting in line.
In addition to making it harder to vote, the new law allows the GOP-controlled legislature to appoint a majority of members of the state election board and gives the board the power to take over county election boards, making it easier for Republicans to challenge election results, take over election administration in large Democratic counties, and even decline to certify the results if Democrats win close races—which Trump tried and failed to get the state to do in 2020.
One of the small, rueful truths that many Americans held in the back of their minds throughout the pandemic year was that, for all of its horrors, it had at least reduced, or even eliminated, the spectacle of the gun massacre. School closings had momentarily ended school shootings; curbside delivery had, it seemed, halted in-store assaults. It is true that gun fatalities were disturbingly trending upward in big cities, for reasons that are as yet as mysterious as those for the great decline that preceded them, and that, according to the Gun Violence Archive, last year saw the highest number of shooting deaths in decades. In fact, keyed, perhaps, by a general sense of panic marked by the pandemic and a bizarrely unsettled election year—with that strange American certainty that they’re coming for you—gun sales soared, even amid groups that are not normally associated with buying firearms in numbers.
The gun massacre, however—five or twenty or fifty people murdered at a time—had, briefly, vanished. Yet, alongside the knowledge that mass shootings had gone stood the knowledge that they would, inevitably, reëmerge. And here they are, right on schedule, as the country “opens up,” and with a vengeance: seven in the past seven days, with eight people killed in three shootings in Atlanta, and ten in a grocery store in Boulder. With those shootings come back all the usual, understandable, and all-too-human reactions—above all, our urge to give them some kind of meaning by making them an index of a larger issue. Violence this blankly nihilistic needs a point projected into it, to redeem it as a subject of discussion….
Countries that resemble ours in every way except for the availability of guns have much lower levels of gun violence and far fewer gun massacres. Yet these truths, demonstrated again and again, meet the same resistance, over and over. The Second Amendment guarantees private ownership of even military-style weapons. (It doesn’t, or rather, until very recently, not even conservative Justices imagined that it did.) Guns are essential for self-protection. (They aren’t.) The way to stop mass shootings is to arm more people, such as teachers. (A “colossally stupid idea,” according to the co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.)
All this, even as the sheer psychic damage done by the omnipresence of guns in America is self-evident (no healthy society should have to train its children in active-shooter drills), while the social damage extends far beyond the immediate casualties. A reason for the prevalence of police shootings in America is that the police go about armed, in levels unique to our society, in order to deal with the uniquely over-armed civilians they fear encountering, with the frequently fatal results, we know too well, for the unarmed and the innocent.
Sorry this isn’t a more cheerful post. I’ll probably be up for something more upbeat if I finally get that promised $1400. What’s on your mind today?
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They really need to work harder to purge those Trump Appointees wherever they are … Nice cat paintings today … I’m assuming that’s a picasso at the bottom?
Thanks for letting us know. My heart is with the families and friends of the victims. Police are all around. This is one article.https://t.co/uv0BtQ7hYr
The only factor that I can think of for why these shootings are starting up again is that when people are staying home or six feet apart, it’s hard to get a high casualty count for a shooter. You need crowds, and now we’re getting crowds.
What a crazy country.
Somebody I know who’s gun-knowledgeable pointed out two things that the Dems could maybe do without triggering ammosexuals.
The military offloads their out of date ammunition at rock-bottom prices, which is why every yahoo can afford to buy the stuff and shoot it off in the town quarry … or mall … when their craziness takes them. It also accounts for the popularity of military-style weapons, which can use that cheap ammo. So, issue an order to stop the military selling off old ammo.
Another thing: (and the Repubs have been fighting this, but it’s maybe not a red-hottrigger) is make every bullet traceable to its manufacturer. That’s apparently easy to do. And would open the manufacturers to all kinds of suits. Which might make them a lot less enthusiastic about selling the stuff uncontrollably.
Does anyone here cook for their cats? I have two special needs kitties with ultra-sensitive digestion issues. They are now on probiotics and meds for loose stools and I’m stocking up on supplements in order to transition them to cooked (not raw) homemade diet – if they will eat it. Transition will be very slow and I may supplement with sensitive digest kibble.
Anyway, looking for recipes if anyone is experienced with this, Vet was no help but not opposed to it as long as it’s gradual transition.
I have a kitty who had chronic diarrhea/loose stools, and we tried all sorts of probiotics and food (the expensive foods from the natural-petfoods store) for him. Nothing worked. Finally a new vet tried an antibiotic with anti-inflammatory actions (metronidazole) for a week or so and he’s been fine since. Metronidazole is used to treat inflammation of the intestinal tract in dogs and cats. It’s also used topically in humans to treat skin inflammation. Consider asking your vet about this.
Thanks Luna! That’s the medication the vet did give me. I paid dearly to have it compounded and I’m rubbing a tiny amount inside their ear twice a day. The probiotic is a powder that I’m having marginal success getting into them.
I’m going to try cooking chicken for them. I have the supplements I need to make sure they’re getting everything. The more I paid for high-end canned food the less they liked it. I think they’ll love the real chicken. Canned cat food is nothing but cr@p.
Interesting that the vet wanted a topic formation. My cat had an oral form.
I don’t think all canned cat food is crap. We’re now on a brand called Tiki Cat which has just the tuna, chicken or other main meat and broth with sunflower seed oil, and vitamins and minerals.
"A day of terror and dishonour": Myanmar forces kill dozens of people, including children, in what may be the deadliest day since coup https://t.co/Rdlp80AnlI
The Social Security news is scary. And why would any normal governor keep a picture of such a plantation — where people were hunted with dogs — in his office. It’s like having a picture of torture chambers with nice landscaping. Tells you everything you need to know about this man.
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
Have a great weekend!!
They really need to work harder to purge those Trump Appointees wherever they are … Nice cat paintings today … I’m assuming that’s a picasso at the bottom?
I love the Brita, cat, and sandwich!
Never mind. I searched for it and added the name … Fernand Leger
Hang in there BB! I got my $1400 on Wednesday, the 24th via direct deposit. I had income from my former employer and SS last year.
Did you file a tax return?
No! I’m a world-class procrastinator on my tax returns even though I always get a refund.
You must have reported in 2019 then. That would have done it.
Yet another mass shooting
The only factor that I can think of for why these shootings are starting up again is that when people are staying home or six feet apart, it’s hard to get a high casualty count for a shooter. You need crowds, and now we’re getting crowds.
What a crazy country.
Somebody I know who’s gun-knowledgeable pointed out two things that the Dems could maybe do without triggering ammosexuals.
The military offloads their out of date ammunition at rock-bottom prices, which is why every yahoo can afford to buy the stuff and shoot it off in the town quarry … or mall … when their craziness takes them. It also accounts for the popularity of military-style weapons, which can use that cheap ammo. So, issue an order to stop the military selling off old ammo.
Another thing: (and the Repubs have been fighting this, but it’s maybe not a red-hottrigger) is make every bullet traceable to its manufacturer. That’s apparently easy to do. And would open the manufacturers to all kinds of suits. Which might make them a lot less enthusiastic about selling the stuff uncontrollably.
Does anyone here cook for their cats? I have two special needs kitties with ultra-sensitive digestion issues. They are now on probiotics and meds for loose stools and I’m stocking up on supplements in order to transition them to cooked (not raw) homemade diet – if they will eat it. Transition will be very slow and I may supplement with sensitive digest kibble.
Anyway, looking for recipes if anyone is experienced with this, Vet was no help but not opposed to it as long as it’s gradual transition.
I have a kitty who had chronic diarrhea/loose stools, and we tried all sorts of probiotics and food (the expensive foods from the natural-petfoods store) for him. Nothing worked. Finally a new vet tried an antibiotic with anti-inflammatory actions (metronidazole) for a week or so and he’s been fine since. Metronidazole is used to treat inflammation of the intestinal tract in dogs and cats. It’s also used topically in humans to treat skin inflammation. Consider asking your vet about this.
Thanks Luna! That’s the medication the vet did give me. I paid dearly to have it compounded and I’m rubbing a tiny amount inside their ear twice a day. The probiotic is a powder that I’m having marginal success getting into them.
I’m going to try cooking chicken for them. I have the supplements I need to make sure they’re getting everything. The more I paid for high-end canned food the less they liked it. I think they’ll love the real chicken. Canned cat food is nothing but cr@p.
Interesting that the vet wanted a topic formation. My cat had an oral form.
I don’t think all canned cat food is crap. We’re now on a brand called Tiki Cat which has just the tuna, chicken or other main meat and broth with sunflower seed oil, and vitamins and minerals.
I really would like to drop the people that do this kind of thing on to a tiny little island in the middle of no where and forget about them.
I’d be behind that too. Why are they so full of hate? Or send them off to a colony on Mars with no way to get back to Earth, if that’s possible.
Great news roundup and lovely cat pictures!
The Social Security news is scary. And why would any normal governor keep a picture of such a plantation — where people were hunted with dogs — in his office. It’s like having a picture of torture chambers with nice landscaping. Tells you everything you need to know about this man.