April 17, 2025

Perhaps important for spouses receiving Social Security, I wanted to share my friend's recent experience

To restate at the beginning: I absolutely do not want to freak anyone out, and this situation may be a very particular one and not applicable to most spouses receiving Social Security. But I thought it was surprising and shocking and wanted to share the story FYI.

Near the end of February 2025, my friend’s husband passed away unexpectedly. He was 70, and she is turning 69 this year. She is extremely frail with multiple health conditions, so we stepped in, took her to our house to live while settling things, etc. We informed SSA and were given an appointment for March 26 to finalize the paperwork relating to his death.

Their Social Security checks were due to arrive on March 3, and we of course knew that his check might arrive but would be clawed back by the bank/Treasury. Our friend was living with us so had few expenses, and very luckily her husband had inherited some money in 2024, so she wasn’t entirely reliant on her Social Security. Because her lifetime earnings and check were about double that of her husband’s, she wasn’t expecting survivor benefits, etc. We assumed this would all be pretty straightforward.

Cut to about March 15. Imagine our surprise when not only was her husband’s March benefit removed from their bank account — SO WAS HERS. Days of calling SSA first thing in the morning to sit on hold literally all day resulted in never speaking to a live person. Finally a letter from the bank and a conversation with them gave us an answer of a sort.

Our friend had her husband listed as her “beneficiary” and “decision maker” on her SS account, just as he was on hers. The bank informed us that her money had been clawed back because it was listed under his name.

We couldn’t speak to SSA until the prearranged phone appointment on March 26. Then we learned that our friend would not be receiving her benefit until a new beneficiary/decision maker was assigned. This would be her daughter, who would be taking our friend in to live with her family in another state. A new in-office appointment needed to be made in that state; the next available appointment wasn’t until EARLY MAY.

This meant our friend would not receive her SSA money on April 3 or May 3. After the paperwork and dust cleared, she should retroactively receive money for those three months — I wouldn’t hold my breath until she sees the deposits in her bank account.

My friend luckily has the resources and help to survive without that money for a few months. If this had happened last year, she would have lost her ONLY INCOME for at least 1/4 of 2025. If she’d had no friends/family to take her in, she would have been homeless. I find it doubly distressing that an incapacitated spouse — precisely the person who relies on their husband for caregiving, food, and shelter — might have been left without income for several months after the death of their sole carer.

I do not know that this would have been different procedurally under President Biden’s administration. I’d like to think it might have been expedited, at the very least, but bureaucracy does necessarily turn slowly.

I also am not certain how much my friend’s various illnesses played a role in her husband’s designation as decision-maker/beneficiary. I don’t want to fear-monger, and this might not be an issue for other surviving spouses.

April 17, 2025

TLDR: I love my Congressperson: our family citizenship documentation drama and Congressmember constitutent services

I guess the first thing to note is that while my spouse is brilliant, their adult ADHD sometimes makes life much more “interesting.”

My spouse was born in Canada to an American mother and Canadian father. So they grew up with dual citizenship and both Canadian and American birth certificates and passports — no muss, no fuss.

Several years ago, my spouse’s American passport was stolen. We promptly reported the theft to the gov’t. But my spouse delayed going through the process to get a new one because… paperwork.

A short time later, in an effort to get them to begin the passport application, I pulled out their required U.S. Citizen Born Abroad certificate. When I looked at it, I got a shock. The birthdate listed was WRONG. By a few days, but it nonetheless didn’t match any of the other documentation. To this day, I’m still unsure how neither they nor their parents never noticed in 40+ years. Anyway…. I immediately contacted their American mother, who wrote a detailed affidavit, etc., that we’d need to amend the U.S. born abroad certificate. And then, my spouse delayed applying because… paperwork. In the meantime, my spouse traveled repeatedly to Canada on their Canadian passport without incident. But they obviously couldn’t apply for a U.S. passport or a REAL id without a birth certificate. They effectively had no proof they were an American citizen.

Cut to November 2024, the day after the election. I told my spouse they needed to file the paperwork IMMEDIATELY. And they did, receiving a notice that it had been received and a request for a further statement in November and December 2024. So far, so good.

Then, nothing. My spouse emailed for further clarification and got no response. As the new “administration” took over, the State Dept. was gutted, Canada became a target, and foreigners entering the U.S. were detained and/or deported, we became more concerned. My spouse really needed to travel to Canada to visit his elderly mother, now suffering from dementia and living in a care home (so in addition to everything else, if she was needed for further testimony she’d be unable to help my spouse). But we were extremely fearful of what might happen upon their return to the U.S. with their Canadian passport. How to explain their “reason” for “visiting” the U.S.? Without a green card or permanent resident status (of course completely unnecessary), would a U.S. immigration officer choose to deny them entry or detain them? It was a nightmare in the making.

In late February, my spouse again emailed the Dept of State and CRUCIALLY also contacted our Congressperson to request assistance. No response from State. The immediate email reply from our Congressperson via a live staff person stated they would personally work on our issue and get back to us in about a month. And lo and behold! Last Friday we received a note from our Congressperson (NOT STATE) that the document was on its way and requesting we inform them of its arrival. We missed the delivery on Tuesday but it is scheduled for redelivery today. And yesterday our Congressperson’s office even called to learn if we’d received it!

I’d forgotten that we can and should be able to call on our Congresspeople for help in resolving bureaucratic issues like this. In fact, it may be the first time my family has ever done so. And I guess I’ll break any anonymity I may have by giving a great SHOUT OUT TO CONGRESSPERSON LAURA FRIEDMAN AND STAFFPEOPLE!

April 17, 2025

"In unprecedented move, DNC official [David Hogg] to spend big to take down fellow Democrats"

May have been posted before, but I think it’s worthy of more attention and discussion.

“David Hogg, a controversial Democratic National Committee vice chair, is pledging to upend Democratic primaries by funding candidates who will challenge “ineffective, asleep-at-the-wheel” Democrats.

The move puts Hogg, the now 25-year-old who first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, on a collision course with his own party and some Democratic House members.

Leaders We Deserve, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday to spend $20 million in safe-blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents. In an interview with POLITICO, Hogg said the group will not back primary challenges in battleground districts because “I want us to win the majority,” nor will it target members solely based on their age.
“We have a culture of seniority politics that has created a litmus test of who deserves to be here,” Hogg said. “We need people, regardless of their age, that are here to fight.” < snip>

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/15/david-hogg-dnc-vice-chair-to-spend-big-to-take-down-safe-democratic-incumbents-00292535

March 15, 2025

Interesting mini-article about _Careless People_, the new book about Facebook (From the WaPo Book Review newsletter)

Pretty gobsmacking article in WaPo Book Review (still sound journos) about _Careless People_, a new book about Facebook:

“Near the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” Nick says, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”

“Careless People” is a brilliant title for the new exposé by former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams.

The book, subtitled “A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism,” reads like a spicy office memoir if your officemates travel by private jet and your boss asks for a rally of 1 million people. Wynn-Williams recounts her seven years in the social media empire now called Meta. Beginning in 2011, she worked as an adviser to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg “as they were inventing how the company would deal with governments around the world.”

“It started as a hopeful comedy and ended in darkness and regret,” Wynn-Williams writes. “I watched hopelessly as they sucked up to authoritarian regimes like China’s and casually misled the public.”


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Daisy Buchanan, you may remember, hit Myrtle with a car and then let Gatsby take the fall. From what Wynn-Williams describes, it sounds like Facebook ran over millions of Myrtles and then fled the scene to let parents, citizens and governments clean up the mess.

Working at Facebook, she claims, was “like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money,” but that’s not fair. Fourteen-year-olds would never behave like this.

Wynn-Williams’s tale of how she was allegedly treated by her boss while on maternity leave with life-threatening health problems is appalling.

But her complaints about the company’s reflexive secrecy and deceit are what should trouble the rest of us who still have to deal with the influence of Meta. She alleges, for instance, that senior managers devised “a cover-up” to contradict news reports that Facebook and Instagram allowed advertisers to exploit kids’ darkest insecurities.

Other allegations range from creepy instances of inappropriate behavior to dangerous acts of political interference. Speaking of her bosses, she writes: “They put staff in with the Trump campaign to help them stage the war of misinformation, trolling, and lies that won him the election” in 2016.

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Another terrifying section claims that Facebook’s “lethal carelessness” allowed the platform to be used to spread hate speech and propaganda that destabilized Myanmar and led to a frenzy of violence that killed 10,000 people (story).

Among Wynn-Williams’s most disturbing allegations is that Zuckerberg eagerly pursued a secret plan to make Facebook more palatable — and more useful! — to China’s repressive regime (story). According to “Careless People,” the plan involved using a Chinese private equity firm to “censor a blacklist of banned content and deliver user data that the Chinese government requested.” That user data would be enhanced with facial recognition technology and photo tagging developed by Facebook to “facilitate Chinese censorship.”

Wynn-Williams expresses her shock in the present tense: “The ugly fact is that these are many of the things Facebook has said are simply impossible when Congress and its own government have asked — on content, data sharing, privacy, censorship, and encryption — and yet its leadership are handing them all to China on a silver platter.”

Zuckerberg, she says, is “aggressively pushing every lever to get in, no matter how dodgy.”

Wynn-Williams writes that even as Facebook was devising this scheme, the company was preparing a contingency PR response. She quotes an internal risk assessment that imagines how the embarrassing news could get out: “A disgruntled current or former employee leaks additional details about how we are treating data to highlight differences in what we say to the public vs what we do.”

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Now, several years later, here we are reading that very PR nightmare: A disgruntled former employee — Wynn-Williams says she was fired soon after her harassment complaint against chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan was dismissed — has published a gobsmacking book that purports to highlight differences in what they say to the public vs. what they do.

Meta’s counterassault began even before “Careless People” was released on Tuesday.

Last Friday afternoon, I got my first message from Ryan Daniels, public affairs manager of strategic response at Meta. When I declined his invitation to talk by phone, he wrote back again: “I was wondering if the Washington Post was going to write a review about a book that’s coming out this upcoming week on Meta. Do you have a couple minutes to chat?”

So, I called. Daniels said, “We don’t have the book,” but the company had prepared “preliminary statements” about it. Although he didn’t share those with me, he wrote to me again on Saturday and again on Monday trying to get information about our review plans. (In my 27 years of reviewing and editing newspaper books sections, no company has ever done this with me.)

Meanwhile, other parts of the empire were working from different angles.

On March 7, the same day Daniels first reached out to me, the company filed an “emergency motion” with an arbitrator to silence Wynn-Williams on the grounds that her book violated the terms of a non-disparagement agreement she signed when she left Facebook.

On Wednesday, arbitrator Nicholas Gowen ruled that Wynn-Williams must temporarily stop promoting “Careless People” — “on a book tour or otherwise” — and stop publishing or distributing the book (story).

On social media, Meta communications director Andy Stone quickly celebrated the arbitrator’s decision: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn Williams’ false and defamatory book should never have been published.”

This effort to gag an author comes from a company that decided in January to end its fact-checking program in the U.S. because there was “too much censorship.” Where are those radical free-speech principles now, Mark?

In a statement, Wynn-Williams’s publisher said, “The arbitration order has no impact on Macmillan. However, we are appalled by Meta’s tactics to silence our author through the use of a non-disparagement clause in a severance agreement. To be clear, the arbitrator’s order makes no reference to the claims within ‘Careless People.’ The book went through a thorough editing and vetting process, and we remain committed to publishing important books such as this. We will absolutely continue to support and promote it.”

Yesterday, when I reached out to Daniels for a response from Meta, he wrote back: “Do you plan to write something about it, or are you just curious how we’re responding?”

It’s always about controlling the narrative. But apparently, that’s not going so well. This morning, “Careless People” is No. 3 on Amazon.

I know this is a long item, the longest I’ve ever written for the Book Club newsletter. But when one of the world’s most powerful media companies tries to snuff out a book — amid other alarming attacks on free speech in America like this — it’s time to pull out all the stops.”

February 17, 2025

This Small Rust-Belt City Holds the Secret to Democrats' Latino Woes: Reading, PA, Latinos

Latino voters shifted dramatically toward Trump in the last election. Reading, Pennsylvania offers a clue to how Democrats can claw them back.

During the final, frenzied week of the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both made campaign stops in a place whose significance in the election had largely been overlooked by observers: Reading, a city of around 95,000 people nestled between the Schuylkill River and Mount Penn in central Pennsylvania.

Reading does not boast many of the noncollege-educated white voters who were widely seen as pivotal to Trump’s chances. Nor is it one of the educated, affluent suburbs or large metropolitan areas where Harris had hoped to run up the immense margins needed to lift her to victory. Yet both campaigns saw Reading as strategically critical—because this little city, which is known to most people as the nineteenth-century birthplace of the Reading Railroad, ultimately memorialized in the game Monopoly, happens to be nearly 70 percent Latino.

Trump had already shocked some Democrats in Reading by contesting it with surprising aggressiveness. He held two rallies in the small city and dispatched running mate JD Vance to campaign there twice, a remarkable commitment of time and resources to a reliably Democratic stronghold filled with nonwhite voters. What surprised Democrats was the audacity of Trump’s bet on making inroads among Reading’s Hispanics—a bet that made the city a critical test case of whether Trump’s ability to move that demographic his way was more than just a fluke of 2020 and might have more durability than many Democrats expect.

https://newrepublic.com/article/190897/reading-pennsylvania-democrats-latino-voter-problem

February 12, 2025

Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions (an ongoing project)

https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal-challenges-trump-administration/

February 11, 2025

For everyone angry that Dems "are not planning on a government shutdown"

There’s a definite good cop-bad cop scenario playing out, I think. Rank-and-file is “open” to a shutdown; Schumer and leadership “aren’t planning” on it. Keep the GOP guessing and on their toes; they’re already in disarray.

Problems with preemptively announcing a shutdown:
—With reconciliation, the GOP wouldn’t need D votes to stop a shutdown. Promising it in advance is toothless.
—It’s better to come out of negotiations talking about how awful the GOP was — Dems had no choice. Announcing in advance makes it a Dem plan, and Dems get the blame beforehand.
—Dems are more likely to get decent concessions if GOP has to beg for help — especially if Dems haven’t already promised a shutdown.

February 11, 2025

A "Golden Girls" solution for Palestine?

Spoiler:
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Give Greenland to the Palestinians. I can’t believe this was a joke, even then. On the possible plus side, I guess Trump wouldn’t want Greenland any more .

February 11, 2025

EXCELLENT explanation about how red state/district voters can leverage daily calls to senators/reps

Call DAILY about ONE issue — either the economy or the power of Congress.
Act as an ally/advocate for your electeds; express concern and mention specific examples of effects on your district or state.
Use their language.
Call back until you get through, if possible. If you can’t get through and can request a call-back, do it.
IF YOU’RE IN A BLUE STATE OR DISTRICT, SHARE THIS WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY IN RED AREAS.

I do not normally share videos, but this really is well done. It’s about 15 minutes because it’s a bit repetitive, but I think that might be helpful for some voters.

&t=900s

February 10, 2025

What the Horrible Hostage Release Videos Say about an Important Israeli Failure

Part of the routine Israelis have become conditioned to over the past few weeks, are the ugly and deeply upsetting propoganda ceremonies that Hamas is putting the hostages through before they are released. However, these ceremonies are also signaling something much more strategic - Hamas still controls Gaza and Israel has likely failed in one of its most important war objectives of removing Hamas from power.

Why do I say this? To understand the dynamics of the war you have to return to the basics of insurgency and counterinsurgency 101, and lessons the United States has learned time and again in places like Vietnam and Iraq. If you are going to replace a terrorist organization or insurgent force who controls a territory with an alternative, you have to first clear it out but then also immediately establish an alternative security force or police and build out legitimate local governance that can replace it. If you don’t do these things quickly, the fighters you defeated just go underground and eventually come back and reestablish their authority. Unless what we are seeing on TV with these ceremonies is an incredibly impressive manipulation of smoke and mirrors, what it seems to be showing is that Hamas is still clearly in charge of Gaza and despite Israeli military operations has returned to key areas.

There are two basic ways to fight an insurgency. The first is what the U.S. did in Iraq in the early years 2003-2006 and in the key years of Vietnam. You go in to areas and search and destroy. You kill a lot of terrorists/insurgents using overwhelming firepower. You make a big deal of the huge body counts of terrorists killed. Then you leave and the bad guys come back, and you have to clear the area all over again. Sound familiar? It’s what Israel has done in Gaza. It doesn’t work.


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What is the alternative? From the beginning develop a plan where you clear, hold, and build. You have to defeat the insurgents and clear them out, but then you have a security force ready to go that can replace them and provide basic policing along with local governance structures that can start to provide basic services. This is what the United States did quite successfully during the counter-ISIS campaign in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. provided key military support, but worked from the beginning with Iraqi Security Forces in Iraq and the Kurds in Syria to have them both out in the lead, but more importantly quickly take over these areas and provide basic security. Then we helped them start to build local governance structures and provided surges in humanitarian and development assistance. This was a complicated and hard process and Northeast Syria and Western Iraq are from panaceas. ISIS remains a persistent problem in those areas, but it is not in charge.


https://ilangoldenberg.substack.com/p/what-the-horrible-hostage-release?publication_id=3741098&post_id=156850092&isFreemail=true&r=uc4h&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email