Pres Trump has divided this great Country to the point that he has his followers ascribing "enemy" to those who disagree with him.

Oh, it's about to get a lot worse. Deportations and arrests lie ahead for those who are bold enough to disagree with him publicly:

Domestic Enemy Hat
@kenwhite.bsky.social

A reminder in dark times: kindness, mercy, decency, and respect towards the least of us enrages Trumpists. It burns them. It's like a mirror that shows them how they fall short of humanity.

Kindness and decency towards the people Trumpists hate is not just right; it torments Trumpists.

Oklahoma man says Social Security benefits terminated without warning or explanation

An Oklahoma City retiree said his Social Security benefits were suspended without warning " and with no explanation given when he reached out. He worries it may have to do with the place he was born, and ongoing Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks.

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.

"So I called Medicare," he said. "They returned my call after a wait and told me that they were unable to process it through my Social Security payment, that there was some problem with it. We talked for a bit. He kind of let it out that he thinks it's a possibility that my Social Security was suspended."

And yet another inexplicable deportation:

Brown Medicine doctor deported despite federal court order. What we know.

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 Logan International Airport, said a family friend and colleague.

But the plane ultimately took off, carrying Dr. Rasha Alawieh out of the country for reasons still unclear to her family, her lawyer and Brown Medicine colleagues such as Dr. Basma Merhi.

"They did not do anything to stop the plane," said Merhi, who was learning details of the event through information relayed by Alawieh family members. "So, clearly, they wanted to deport her regardless of if there was a judge's order or not. She didn't do anything wrong."

Alawieh 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.

She worked at Rhode Island Hospital evaluating potential transplant recipients and followed the progress of those patients after their procedures, Dr. George Bayliss, the transplant division's medical director, said Saturday.

the man with the nuclear codes, is angry, emotional and acting erratically

"A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons." Hillary Clinton on DonOLD Trump

The cruelty is the point.
Republicans are cruel, mean spirited people.
They show us their true colors every day.
#2 | Posted by snoofy

This man was fortunate that he had other income besides SS and that he was healthy enough to make the repeated daily phone calls, travel to the nearby SS office, which although scheduled to be closed hasn't shut down yet, and then wait for 4 hours in order to speak to someone. A lot of seniors are simply not healthy enough to do that.

A 37 year old architect from India, who was enrolled in a PHD program at Columbia and due to graduate in May, fled to Canada after the US recently revoked her Visa and sent ICE agents to her apartment:

Laura Seay
@texasinafrica.bsky.social

Before Mahmoud Khalil's detention last week, ICE came for a Columbia PhD student. She had nothing to do with the Gaza protests, but was arrested last spring during a roundup while trying to walk home. Charges were dismissed. The State Department still revoked her visa.

Every senior citizens' nightmare, and if the DOGE bros have theire way, I expect will hear more stories like this:

Johnson is 82 and still kicking. Yet sometime last month, someone or something led Social Security to both tag him as dead and start clawing back his benefits.

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 offer our sincerest condolences ... "

At first she figured it was a scam--her husband, after all, was sitting right there. But then the bank got to the point.

"We know this is a difficult time, and we're here to help," the bank wrote. "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."

Uh oh. It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn't justified to get those benefits--because he was dead. 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. . . .

What followed was a nearly three-week battle to resurrect himself. 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."

NEW: The family of Mahmoud Khalil have just released footage of his arrest. It's distressing.

"Stop resisting"

"He's not resisting"

The men who take him are in plain clothes and in unmarked cars. They refuse to give their names or even say what agency they're from.

Sounds like Gestapo tactics and for what reason?

FTA:

Schmidt had been visiting Luxembourg and flew back to the U.S. on Friday. His partner had gone to pick him up at Logan Airport, and waited four hours before calling authorities.

"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. He didn't know it at the time, but he also had influenza.

There was a rumor that the sad sacks who went to Boaz's Konservative Kry Klub shared their passwords with each other.
BullBringer has stated there are a few different people who access that username.
#19 | Posted by ClownShack

Yes, Eberly confirmed that to be the case with the Bellringer handle at least.

#17 Well, that's your side of the story anyway.

This is a ridiculous assertion, what does "fail" even mean?
#18 | Posted by oneironaut

Doesn't deliver for the American people. VA services that can't be accessed. Social Security checks that don't arrive. FEMA funding that isn't available. That kind of thing.

The Lincoln Project is a bunch of war mongering pedo ----.
#13 | Posted by Bluewaffles

Or did you just give the handle to someone else?

#13 | Posted by Bluewaffles

This is the sort of bigotry I expect from Elite Democrats, while the man on the street suffers.
#17 | Posted by oneironaut

She is not talking about women in general but about two specific women, who have been leading the House and Senate appropriations committees. This would probably be clear to you if you actually read Pelosi's statement in full:

"Democratic senators should listen to the women," she says, referring to Murray/DeLauro who want a 1-month stopgap bill instead.

This is a ridiculous assertion, what does "fail" even mean? You're basically saying Trump wants to fail himself out of a job.
Preposterous, no wonder no one takes you guys/gals seriously. Just lies upon hoaxes with "anon" sources.
#18 | Posted by oneironaut

He wants most of the federal government to fail, which will in turn will justify all the cuts he is making. He doesn't want the defense dept or homeland security to fail, but everything else that can be privatized and/or turned over to the states he doesn't care if it fails.

Full Pelosi statement a link:

Sahil Kapur
@sahilkapur.bsky.social

Extraordinary moment--Nancy Pelosi issues a statement calling on Democratic senators to reject the House funding bill, i.e. to defy Chuck Schumer.

"Democratic senators should listen to the women," she says, referring to Murray/DeLauro who want a 1-month stopgap bill instead.

Gotta keep in mind that, unlike pretty much every other prez in hisotry, Trump wants the economy to fail. It assists him in manipulating the stock market and profiting from shorting it.
#4 | Posted by censored

Trump also wants the government to fail. Hello? That way he can justify all the cuts and executive orders he has already written as well as the ones he has ready to go the moment he is able to declare even more emergency orders that will give him unlimited and unfettered power over just about everything and in such a way that not even the courts will be able to stop him.

President Trump is testing the limits of emergency powers--again

Goitein, of the Brennan Center, says determining those limits is crucial. "There are powers that are available in a national emergency that are far more potent, including powers to shut down communications facilities, to control domestic transportation, to freeze Americans' assets without any due process or any judicial [approval]," she says. "So this question of 'What are the limits on a president's ability to abuse emergency powers?' is an absolutely crucial one for not just our individual liberties but for our democracy."

The question is how emergency powers are used--and for how long and with what limits.

Scheppele has studied how democracies, like Hungary, can turn toward autocracy. For her, the key question about the use of emergency powers is not whether they are legal--because lawful powers can be abused, she notes.

"The question is, does it move the president toward using powers that make it very difficult for powers ever to be taken out of his hands?" she says. "Autocracy is really about the executive capturing power and not letting it go."

With that in mind, she's watching to see whether declaring emergencies becomes a routine way for the Trump administration to push through policies over the objections of Congress or the public, sidelining the debates, compromises and checks and balances baked into democracy.

I called Gillibrand and Schumer on Wed. and asked them to vote no on the Republican budget. I had one qualm, however: how would the shutdown affect the court cases being brought against Trump, Musk and OMP, some of which are starting to bear fruit? Two of my favorite online pundits have been weighing in on the topic: Josh Marshall and Marcy Wheeler.

Here are their latest takes, both of which are worth considering, IMO:

Looking Squarely at a Shutdown

It's hard to write clearly when you're being flooded with new information. But here goes. I've heard people arguing the "yes' on cloture" argument, essentially saying, "don't assume you can shut DOGE down, undo the damage. It's not a silver bullet." I can only speak for myself, but if anyone is thinking, based on the arguments I've made, that this is a silver bullet and if Democrats just do this we can shut this whole thing down, I haven't been clear. I will further say that while the things I've written over the last week or so make it pretty clear where I stand on this, I have several times over the last week had a hard think with myself: are you sure you're right about this? I'm not sure I'd say this is a close call. But it's a hard call, for me at least. Both options hold out possibilities of calamity and destruction I've never seriously contemplated before. That is simply where we are. I wish we weren't here. But we are here.

I often think about this: what were we talking about before 9/11? What was the political obsession that was dominating our airwaves? As far as I remember it was Gary Condit and Shandra Levy, who it turns out wasn't killed by him. So what are we talking about now? Making Canada the 51st state, taking over Greenland, turning the Gaza strip into a swanky tourist destination, drastically downsizing the federal work force in a foolish, hapazard way, billions of dollars of cuts to Medicaid, trillions of dollars in tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, adding trillions of dollars to the deficit and on and on and on. We are not a serious people. But, hey, at least we're not talking about immigrants eating the cats and dogs and geese.

I was thinking yesterday how this would be the perfect time for one of our adversaries to attack us--a terrorist bomb/cyber/biological attack. Think about it: we are so f---ed up right now in this country. We are being led by an erractic, senile malignant narcissist who has appointed the most unqualifed cabinet in our history (no one has ever seen anything like it!). Our federal agencies are being decimated by an unelected billionaire and his handpicked Lackeys. Tariffs are rising, the stock market is falling. Chaos and uncertainty are begining to swirl all around us. We are not at our best. We are vulnerable.

Everyone who voted for Trump is expecting him to carve out a special exception for them. This includes veterans, farmers, federal workers, the billionaires who endorsed him, red state voters, red district voters in swing or blue states. For the most part, they still don't care who he hurts as long as it's not them.

"They're still voting for a republican next time......assuming we are talking about rural red county residents. The ag community."

No, we're not necessarily. Sorry I confused the issue. I shouldn't have put the focus group info in this thread, so I started a new one about it.

Agreed, most farmers vote Republican and aren't swing voters. Unlike folks in the focus group who are and whose vote could flip:

"The online panels, conducted Tuesday night, were made up of Michigan voters who backed former President Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump last November. Eight were self-described independents, four were Republicans and one was a Democrat."