Tag Archives: right

Trump: I Won the Popular Vote. I Did, I Did, I Did….

by OliverTrevino Posted on November 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I mentioned that the Trump campaign1 was pretty dedicated to sending Hillary Clinton’s popular vote win down the memory hole. To accomplish this, they began a gaslighting offensive to persuade the nation that Donald Trump was one of the biggest winners ever in presidential history. Kellyanne Conway kicked things off by telling Fox News, “This election was not close. It was not a squeaker.” Two days later, Trump himself defended his loss of the popular vote: “If the election were based on total popular vote I would have campaigned in N.Y. Florida and California and won even bigger and more easily.”

Then Corey Lewandowski upped the ante, claiming that Trump “won the election campaign by the largest majority since Ronald Reagan in 1984.” I guess this was a little too raw even for Trumpland, so Reince Priebus beavered away and finally found something to justify Lewandowski’s toadying: “Donald J. Trump won over 2,600 counties nationwide, the most since President Reagan in 1984.” But that still wasn’t enough. The whole popular vote thing is apparently a serious burr in Trump’s saddle, and he wasn’t happy with all this shilly-shallying. So today he decided to go for broke and insist that he just won, period:

So there you have it. It’s twisting Trump’s guts that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for him. And this whole recount thing in Wisconsin seems to have driven him bananas. The result is a tweet alleging that the Clinton campaign orchestrated millions of illegal votes in 2016.2 This message went out to all 16 million of his followers, who will surely pass it along to another 16 million or so—and then the media will pass it along to yet millions more.

This is an obvious lie, and it will probably take a few hours for Trump’s TV shills to figure out how to defend it. That’s how it worked with the “thousands of Muslims celebrating on 9/11” thing. In that case, his spear carriers eventually dug up a few internet factoids that provided them with a way to claim that Trump was right, and away they went. I’m sure the same thing will happen this time. I can’t wait to see how many will join in and exactly what dreck they’ll dredge up to justify it.

Alternatively, they could just admit that the Republican president-elect is an epically insecure liar who will say anything when his fragile ego is bruised. That’s not a very appealing alternative, is it?

1As near as I can tell, Trump is still running a campaign.

2Trump says he would have won if not for these votes, so they must have all been for Hillary. And if they were all for Hillary, then Democrats must have been the ones who did the vote rigging. Right?

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Trump: I Won the Popular Vote. I Did, I Did, I Did….

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Conservatives Discover That Racism Is Real After All

by Lavern49Swiybx Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

So here’s an interesting thing. Let’s start off with Newt Gingrich, asked about Steve Bannon’s advocacy of the alt-right:

The left is infuriated that anybody would challenge the legitimacy of their moral superiority. And so the left is hysterical…You get this with all the smears of Steve Bannon. I never heard about the alt-right until the nut cakes started writing about it.

Huh. It’s just a lefty smear. Let’s ask Bannon himself about this. Here is Sarah Posner:

“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July….During our interview, Bannon took credit for fomenting “this populist nationalist movement” long before Trump came on the scene. He credited Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)—a Trump endorser and confidant who has suggested that civil rights advocacy groups were “un-American” and “Communist-inspired”—with laying the movement’s groundwork.

I guess that clears things up. What’s interesting here is that a fair number of longtime conservatives were #NeverTrumpers during the presidential campaign, and they got a very up-close-and-personal look at just what the alt-right was like. National Review’s David French, for example, started a recent essay like this: “Trump’s alt-right trolls have subjected me and my family to an unending torrent of abuse that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.” Click the link if you have a strong stomach. Today, Ian Tuttle joins him:

Under Bannon’s aegis, something ugly has taken hold of the Right.

In March 2012, Bannon — an investment banker-turned-conservative documentarian — became chairman of Breitbart News….Under Bannon’s leadership…the site built up its viewer base by catering to the alt-right, a small but vocal fringe of white supremacists, anti-Semites, and Internet trolls.

….The alt-right is not a “fabrication” of the media….If ethnic and religious minorities are worried, it’s in part because Donald Trump and his intimates have spent the last several months winking at one of the ugliest political movements in America’s recent history.

….Furthermore, as some on the left have been more attuned to than their conservative counterparts, the problem is not whether Bannon himself subscribes to a noxious strain of political nuttery; it’s that his de facto endorsement of it enables it to spread and to claim legitimacy, and that what is now a vicious fringe could, over time, become mainstream….To conservative and liberal alike, that he has the ear of the next president of the United States (a man of no particular convictions, and loyal to no particular principles) should be a source of grave concern.

Under normal circumstances, the entire conservative movement would be in Newt Gingrich’s corner: Bannon is no racist and the alt-right is just a figment of the hysterical left. But during the campaign, lots of mainstream conservatives were targets of the alt-right. They saw firsthand just how vicious it is and just how real it is. This time, they can’t write it off.

Bannon is an ugly, ugly character. He promoted the alt-right; he loves the right-wing nationalist parties of Europe; and his ex-wife says that he’s personally anti-semitic. The movement he nurtured is dedicated to “white rights,” loudly and proudly. And that has consequences: the FBI announced today that hate crimes were up 6 percent in 2015, “fueled by attacks on Muslims.” Al Franken has this one right:

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Conservatives Discover That Racism Is Real After All

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Let’s Figure Out What Happened Before We Start the Purges

by CharmainCeja Posted on November 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Shorter Kelly Kleiman: Before Democrats devolve into internecine warfare, let’s actually figure out what happened on Tuesday. Was it a whitelash? Sulky Bernie supporters? Lack of enthusiasm from blacks and Latinos? Voter suppression? Right now, we’re flying blind, with only some crude data from exit polls and a few first attempts to make sense of the county-level data.

I’ll add one thing: whatever the answer turns out to be, it’s going to involve a shift of only a few percentage points. Everyone should be careful not to draw overly sweeping conclusions from this, even if it does make for good clickbait.

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Let’s Figure Out What Happened Before We Start the Purges

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NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

by Rita7799phdn Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

A few weeks ago the New York Times got hold of the first page of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax return. It showed a net operating loss of $916 million, which Trump was able to use to offset his income over the next 20 years, thus avoiding millions of dollars in income taxes. But while solving one mystery, it opened another: Just exactly how did Trump manage to declare such a big loss? Several theories made the rounds, but the Times now thinks it has the answer, thanks to a cache of “newly obtained documents.” Here’s the nutshell version of the Times’ explanation:

Trump was a terrible businessman and lost a huge amount of money on his casino operations in the early 90s.
As part of his bankruptcy negotiations in 1991, he persuaded banks to forgive hundred of millions of dollars in loans.
Forgiven loans count as “Cancellation of Debt” income, which should have offset his huge operating losses. But somehow they didn’t. Why?
The Times says it was because Trump used a legally dubious “equity-for-debt” swap. Basically, he swapped the bonds he couldn’t pay for new bonds that he classified as equity shares in the casino partnership.

The Times makes a good case that Trump’s own tax lawyers told him this plan was extremely risky (see the excerpt from the official tax opinion on the right) and would most likely be disallowed by the IRS. But we don’t know if it was. The trail stops cold in 1995.

If I’m reading this right, the basic story is that Trump gave his banks “New Bonds” in place of their old bonds and classified the new bonds as equity shares in the casino partnership. Trump then valued the equity as equal to the old debt, thus showing no net loan forgiveness and therefore no COD income. This despite the fact that, in reality, the equity was close to worthless.

So Trump then had $916 million in operating losses, but no debt forgiveness to offset it. “Even in the opaque, rarefied world of gaming impenetrable tax regulations,” says the Times, “this particular maneuver was about as close as a company could get to waving a magic wand and making taxes disappear.”

At this point, the question of how Trump gamed the tax system is mostly a matter of academic interest. Still, I’ve written about this before, and figured I should follow up with the latest theory. And this is it.

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NYT: We’ve Figured Out How Trump Gamed the Tax System

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Joss Whedon Explains Why Donald Trump Is America’s Scariest Big Bad

by LuellaHayman Posted on November 1, 2016

Mother Jones

The most emotionally devastating ad of the campaign hasn’t come from Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Rather, it was released by a filmmaker last seen directing The Avengers. The quiet, tense video, called “Verdict,” shows Latinos on Election Day listening to news of low voter turnout and a surprisingly close race. As the results are about to be announced, the ad closes with a young girl asking her family if they will be able to stay in the country.

It was the latest in a string of videos from Save the Day, a super-PAC started by Joss Whedon, the creator, writer, and director behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Cabin in the Woods, and The Avengers. Whedon isn’t entirely new to electoral politics; he made an amusing video in 2012 about how Mitt Romney would usher in the zombie apocalypse. But his latest project is a more all-consuming endeavor—a full-time, multimonth initiative with $1 million of his own money behind it.

Save the Day’s viral videos are too long for TV and aren’t intended to sway undecided voters. Instead, the aim is to rile up liberal-leaning millennials to make sure they show up and vote. “The ethos is there is this heroic act called voting,” Whedon says. “The world is scary, and things are overwhelming, and there’s a lot at stake. But this voting thing is actually beautiful.”

Some Save the Day videos are filled with the celebrities who populate Whedon’s popular films—Robert Downey Jr. (Ironman), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), Mark Ruffalo (The Hulk), Don Cheadle (War Machine), Neil Patrick Harris (Dr. Horrible). There are other big-name stars, as well, including Julianne Moore and Martin Sheen. To date, the group’s first spot has been watched more than 7.5 million times.

Last week Whedon spoke with Mother Jones about his super-PAC’s quest to defeat the GOP’s latest Big Bad; his plans for the long-promised Dr. Horrible II; the sexism Clinton has faced in her career; and the World War II script he’s planning to finish once the election is finally over.

Mother Jones: What’s your goal? It seems like you’re taking a couple of different paths, with some of the funnier joke ads and the recent “Verdict” ad that’s more chilling.

Joss Whedon: I got a bunch of people together to talk about doing a lot and decided that I really want to throw my hand in and do as much as I can. We talked about various aspects of what we wanted to talk about, Hillary and Trump and down-ballot stuff, various issues. One of the things that it showed was you’ve got to use fear. People only respond to fear. You’ve got to hit one message over and over and over. But I’m not great at fear. I made the least frightening vampire show ever on TV. I’m pretty much good at heroic narratives and making people laugh, and that’s pretty much it.

Apart from a couple that were just having fun with the concept and making fun of Trump—like the one we did with Keegan Michael-Key—they really are little hero narratives. The whole “Save the Day”—it’s called that, specifically, for a reason—ethos is there is this heroic act called voting. And the world is scary, and things are overwhelming, and there’s a lot at stake. But this voting thing is actually beautiful. Not just necessary—it’s a wonderful thing and it makes you powerful. And we’ve forgotten that in the most negative campaign in history. The process has been so degraded.

We did the first one, “Important,” and what surprised me—what I didn’t really understand, but then I thought this makes perfect sense, as well—was how many people responded to it by being like, “It was just so nice to take a break.” Because even the humor—the great stuff that Samantha Bee and John Oliver and Seth Meyers are doing—it’s all anger humor. And for somebody to say, “Hey, we’re all idiots,” and just be able to laugh at ourselves and be able to connect through that. It’s always about connecting with someone, never about scolding them. The only thing I knew right upfront is we’re not going after Trump supporters. That’s a very complicated issue. There’s things going on with people that we’re not privy to, we don’t understand. These aren’t just a bunch of bad people. That isn’t how it works.

MJ: Your work has often featured feminist messages. Especially in Buffy and Dollhouse, you tackled sexual assault and violence against women. What do you think of the tenor of the conversation on that this year?

JW: I think it’s wonderful that we’re having it. I think there’s the opportunity for—I almost said President Clinton, and soon I will—but for Hillary Clinton to address that, and for the public sphere to address that in a way that they haven’t. We started a conversation in the last few years on race that we desperately needed to have. Right now it’s still an argument, but it will become a conversation, I believe. The only bitterness I had is: Where is the conversation on gender? That’s been going on since there have been men and women, and still we’re not hearing about what they’re going through.

So inevitably it’s going to cause some terrible misogynist backlash, and I assume we’ll look forward to eight years of jaw-droppingly sexist statements—the way we listened to eight years of racism around the presidency. It will be an argument before it’s a conversation. But at least it’s being had.

MJ: Trump’s a product of the entertainment industry. Do you think the industry needs any self-reflection after this?

JW: I’ve never watched reality shows, except for the Great British Bake Off, which is magnificent.

MJ: Slightly different than The Apprentice.

JW: A little bit different. Although Paul Hollywood’s “You’re under baked” is even better than “You’re fired.” Ugh, terrifying. Anyway, I’ve seen Trump appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he’s a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. But other people fell in love with him as a reality star. So does that mean that the entertainment industry is doing something wrong? I think reality TV answered that question a long time ago: Yes, it’s doing something terribly wrong. But there’s some great reality TV, and I’m not bagging on it completely.

The fact of the matter is fame predates even the age of cinema. There’s always been fame, there’s always been the caveman who’s prettier or killed a bigger lion, or somebody started a story about a guy. The fact that a TV star can become president should be old news since Reagan, and old news since the Nixon-Kennedy debates—which the famous story, whether or not you agree, is that if you listened on the radio, Nixon won; if you listened on TV, Kennedy won. This is part of it. Politics, glamor, fame—they’re all mixed up together, and they always have been.

I think the Trump thing is particularly egregious, and I think he’s as much a product of the GOP lie machine in the era of Roger Ailes as he is of television. And also, of the Twitter era. Of the everything-is-as-reductive-as-it-can-be. To me, the most telling thing is we have a man who cannot complete a sentence. Certainly could never get to 140 characters, or past it. He thinks in tiny little bursts—the way he tweets.

MJ: I saw that he got you to go back on Twitter.

JW: Yeah, he got me back. That definitely happened. I had imagined I would come back at some point. But yeah, that was for a very specific reason. I will be very excited when I can tweet things that are just stupid puns and not be political for a while.

MJ: One of my editors made a comparison that there’s a little Captain Hammer in Trump sometimes.

JW: Well, they’re both idiots and they’re both bullies. So yeah, that’s fair. And they both like to brag about their dick. But Captain Hammer can actually punch things. But I do think that’s not unfair.

MJ: I imagine if you promised Dr. Horrible II would come out if a certain percentage of millennials voted, the voting booths would be completely filled up.

JW: You know, it crossed my mind. How much am I willing to commit to this? I said, “You know, tell you what, we can get this many people—is that cheating, is that bribery?”

MJ: You’ve mentioned that this isn’t just an anti-Trump message, but this is a pro-Hillary effort. Why is this pro-Clinton or not just about Trump?

JW: Because I think Hillary Clinton is vastly intelligent and good-hearted and extremely qualified. She’s more in the center of things than I am, but she also knows how to work with the opposition, which is a necessary talent in politics right now.

I think she’s a goddamn stud for having put up with this shit all this time. Everything she’s ever done has been investigated by a committee, and it’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s all deliberate attempts by the GOP to discredit her.

It’s so offensive that we have a man that has been accused by more than 10 women of sexual misconduct, not to mention fraud and bribery and all the other things that he’s being investigated for, and he gets a total pass. It has to do with people being tired of politicians, although unfortunately for Hillary she’s a competent politician, which means she seldom says anything in less than three paragraphs. So people like the guy who just goes, “Nuh-uh, no puppet, no puppet, you’re the puppet.”

The double standard is beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Woman all live a double standard, but this is actually sort of a beautifully grotesque parody of it. There’s a weird kind of joy that I have in seeing her trounce this essence of male bullshit.

MJ: It seems almost out of a show or a comic book or video game, that the final enemy the first female president has to vanquish before becoming president is this personification of all of that.

JW: Right. A hundred eyes and a hundred hands, and they’re all groping.

MJ: So what are you up to once Save the Day is done? Future shows or films in the works? Or is Donald all you have on your mind?

JW: Everything has been for the election for the last couple of months. Since the Democratic National Convention, it’s been a dead run to get out as much content as possible and do as much as possible. Then, I go back to writing the screenplay I was working on, which is an original piece—a period piece that I will hopefully finish a couple of months after that, and hopefully I can convince some unsuspecting fool studio to buy.

MJ: What period is the piece?

JW: It’s World War II.

MJ: Does that ever feel fitting to be exploring the politics of that era compared to now?

JW: It’s very weird. I went to Berlin and Warsaw and Kraków to do research. Right after we got started, I had already booked this trip, so I went. Seeing the history and the posters, and hearing from the guy certain phrases and words and images, it’s stunning how much they’re playing from the handbook of the little mustache that isn’t Chaplin. With Rudy Giuliani as Mussolini.

MJ: Thanks for taking the time. The videos have been a nice respite in this depressing election.

JW: We’ve got a couple more coming. Hopefully they’ll get people to register, which is the point. And we have things to say about Congress and all of that. I think we may have our magnum opus coming yet. It’s a piece called “Leonard” that I’m very excited about, and I think we’re going to see a side of Chris Pine that people haven’t really seen yet. That’s all I’m going to say, but I’m proud of it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Joss Whedon Explains Why Donald Trump Is America’s Scariest Big Bad

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

by FrancisFinch Posted on October 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Gavin Grimm Steve Helber/AP

For the first time, the Supreme Court will weigh in on the question of whether transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms matching their gender identity, rather than the sex listed on their birth certificates.

On Friday, the justices announced they would hear the case of 17-year-old Gavin Grimm, a trans boy in Virginia who sued his school board last year after it blocked him from using the boys’ bathroom at his school. In 2014, doctors diagnosed Grimm, who was born female, with gender dysphoria and recommended that he live and be treated as a boy. Grimm argues that the school board’s bathroom policy singles him out for being different and violates Title IX, a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding.

The case comes as the national debate about transgender bathroom access has reached a fever pitch. The Obama administration, which has thrown its support behind Grimm, told public schools in May that they could lose federal funding if they blocked trans kids from the bathrooms of their choice. Twenty-three states have since sued the Department of Education over this directive. They argue that Title IX applies only to sex discrimination, not gender identity discrimination, and that allowing trans kids to use the bathrooms of their choice could violate the privacy rights of other children.

Grimm, who is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, initially lost his case in district court. But in April, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, kicking the case back to the lower court and urging it to respect the Obama administration’s trans-friendly guidance on bathroom access. The district court then granted an injunction allowing Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom while it considered his case again.

In July, the school board filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, asking the justices to temporarily block Grimm from the boys’ room while they decided whether to review the appeals court decision; otherwise, the school board argued, parents might pull their kids out of school. In August, the Supreme Court agreed and temporarily blocked Grimm from the boys’ room. That decision remains in place until the case is resolved.

If the justices are divided and the case results in a 4-4 split, the appeals court’s ruling in Grimm’s favor would stand.

For Grimm, the decision can’t come soon enough. Right now, he has two options: use a single-stall bathroom or visit the bathroom in the nurse’s office. “I feel the humiliation every time I need to use the restroom and every minute I try to ‘hold it’ in the hopes of avoiding the long walk to the nurse’s office,” he wrote recently. A few weeks ago, he had to go to the bathroom at an evening school football game. “Suddenly a night out with friends was marred by the realization that someone was going to have to take me to a gas station if I needed to use the restroom,” he wrote.

He continued, “If you told me two years ago that the Supreme Court was going to have to approve whether I could use the school restroom, I would have thought you were joking…If the Supreme Court does take up my case, I hope the justices can see me and the rest of the transgender community for who we are—just people—and rule accordingly.”

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Supreme Court Will Weigh In on Transgender Bathroom Use

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Have Men Recovered From the Great Recession?

by InesDowling3 Posted on October 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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Did prime-age men leave the labor force in huge numbers during the Great Recession and then never come back? One way to test this is to look at the trend from 1976-2007 and then extend the line to 2016. If it matches the actual data from 2016, then nothing special happened. The labor market just kept following the same long-term trend as always. Via Brad DeLong, the chart on the right shows what this looks like.

For most age groups, the extended trendline matches the 2016 data. Nothing special happened during the Great Recession and the recovery. There are two exceptions: the blue line and the purple line, which are for men aged 25-34. In that age group, men left the labor force in big numbers during the recession and then stayed out. But why did they stay out? Gabriel Chodorow-Reich has some data to share:

The plurality of the decline in participation is due to increased schooling. This seems benign. The increase in those reporting disability is less so. Using 2000 as a benchmark, the transition rates back into employment for this group also seem more elastic to a tighter labor market, which is consistent with other evidence.

I’m not sure the increase in schooling is all that benign. If it’s real, that’s fine. But to the extent that it reflects young men hanging out in school merely because they can’t find a job, it’s not so fine. If that represents half the school total, then we have about half a percent of young men in school waiting for a job to come along; another half percent who want a job and can’t find one; and nearly a full percent who are—or claim to be—disabled. All by themselves, those add up to two full points of non-recovery from the Great Recession.

But why only young men, and not any age group over 35, all of whom have recovered to trend levels? The answer is almost certainly not, “Because millennials are treated like crap, you idiot. What do you expect?” But what is the answer? It is a mystery.

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Have Men Recovered From the Great Recession?

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Obama Just Signed a Bill of Rights for Sexual-Assault Survivors

by AngelSwanzedehs Posted on October 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that guarantees specific rights for people who have been victimized by a sexual assault.

The measure focuses on collecting and preserving rape kits, the forensic evidence collected in a medical examination after a suspected sexual assault. Police enter the DNA collected from rape kits into state and national databases, sometimes identifying and solving other crimes in addition to the initial rape case. Rape kits—more than 100,000 of them, as of 2014—have often languished for years in police warehouses and crime labs, going untested due to a lack of funds and, some argue, contempt for victims. The new law is the first at the federal level to address these problems, protecting survivors’ access to the initial forensic medical examination and instituting measures to ensure evidence of rape is appropriately preserved and tested.

Survivors can no longer be charged fees or prevented from getting a rape kit examination, even if they have not yet decided to file a police report. Once the medical examination is completed, the kits must be preserved, at no cost to the survivor, until the applicable statute of limitations runs out. Survivors will now be able to request that authorities notify them before destroying their rape kits, and they have the right to request that the evidence be preserved. Once the kit is tested, they’ll also have the right to be notified of important results —including a DNA profile match and toxicology report.

Survivors must also be informed of these rights, regardless of whether they decide to pursue legal action against an assailant. The law also creates a task force to examine how well the new regulations work.

The act was spearheaded by Rise, a nonprofit led by Amanda Nguyen, who became an advocate after her rape almost three years ago when she learned that her rape kit would be destroyed by the state of Massachusetts within six months unless she filed repeated “extension requests.”

“The system essentially makes me live my life by date of rape,” Nguyen told the Guardian in February.

Nguyen then contacted Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who began working with her to craft the bill, eventually introducing it in February. “Beginning today, our nation’s laws stand firmly on the side of survivors of sexual assault,” Shaheen said in a statement Friday. “I hope that these basic rights will encourage more survivors to come forward and pursue justice.”

The act passed unanimously in the House last month and by voice vote in the Senate last week. Obama signed the bill on Friday, two weeks after the White House launched a new effort to combat sexual assault for the youngest survivors—those in K-12 schools.

This story has been updated.

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Obama Just Signed a Bill of Rights for Sexual-Assault Survivors

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The Pentagon Is Reversing Its Long-Standing Policy on Sex Reassignment Surgery

by AngelinMurdoch Posted on September 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Starting next week, the Pentagon will pay for gender reassignment surgery for eligible soldiers, a change that comes after the military lifted its long-standing ban on transgender service members earlier this summer.

Soldiers will be eligible for the surgery if they have a medical condition related to their gender identity, such as gender dysphoria, that has hindered their ability to serve, a Defense Department spokesman told USA Today. The military will also cover hormone therapy for eligible soldiers.

“The Secretary of Defense has made clear that service members with a diagnosis from a military medical provider indicating that gender transition is medically necessary will be provided medical care and treatment for the diagnosed medical condition,” Air Force Major Ben Sakrisson, a Pentagon spokesman, told Stars and Stripes.

Out of a total force of about 1.3 million active-duty service members, an estimated 1,320 to 6,630 are transgender, according to a recent study by RAND Corp., which analyzed the health care needs of trans soldiers at the request of Defense Secretary Ash Carter. But “only a small portion of service members would likely seek gender transition-related medical treatments that would affect their deployability or health care costs,” RAND concluded. It estimated that 25 to 130 active-duty soldiers would have gender reassignment surgery annually, while 30 to 140 soldiers would begin hormone treatment every year. That would translate to an additional annual cost of between $2.4 million and $8.4 million, or a 0.13 percent increase in current spending.

Critics of the new policy worry that too many soldiers will be unqualified for deployment for long periods of time because of gender reassignment surgery. But RAND estimated that only 10 to 130 active-duty service members would have reduced deployability every year, and it described this amount as “negligible” compared with the 50,000 active-duty soldiers in the Army who are nondeployable.

For decades, the military had discharged soldiers who received medical treatment for a gender transition. But in June, the Defense Department announced it would allow openly transgender people to serve, and that soldiers would be allowed to transition genders during their service. “We can’t allow barriers unrelated to a person’s qualifications to prevent us from recruiting and retaining those who can best accomplish the mission,” Carter said. But at the time of the announcement, it wasn’t clear whether the Pentagon would agree to pay for gender reassignment surgery as a medically necessary procedure, or if it would instead treat the surgery as an elective, cosmetic procedure.

In September, the Army agreed to provide gender reassignment surgery to Chelsea Manning, a transgender soldier serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified documents. Days later, the Defense Department announced it would begin covering the surgeries for eligible active-duty soldiers, too, starting in October.

“I am unendingly relieved that the military is finally doing the right thing,” Manning said of the Army’s decision, which came after she attempted to commit suicide and went on a hunger strike. “I applaud them for that. This is all that I wanted—for them to let me be me.”

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The Pentagon Is Reversing Its Long-Standing Policy on Sex Reassignment Surgery

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US Army Ends Decades of Bias Against Left-Handers

by JennifeCalabres Posted on September 21, 2016

Mother Jones

You can buy left-handed scissors, left-handed pens, and left-handed can openers. Life is good these days for left-handed civilians. But what about left-handed soldiers? Enter the ET-MP:

Unlike traditional grenades, the Enhanced Tactical Multi-Purpose (ET-MP) hand grenade is designed to be thrown with either the right or left hand. “Current grenades require a different arming procedure for left-handed users,” said a statement by the US Army.

It’s about damn time. And speaking of lefties, I was chatting with a left-handed friend the other day and he said that the final frontier for southpaws was cameras. Everything is on the right, and needless to say, nobody makes left-handed cameras. Even after decades of using cameras, he says it’s still a pain. Do other lefties concur? And how expensive would it be for Nikon or Canon to gear up the injection molding for a lefty version of a few of their cameras? Maybe they could corner the market.

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US Army Ends Decades of Bias Against Left-Handers

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