Daily Links #121: Trump’s trans military ban blocked yet again

Will you look at that: 500 posts. Do I win something?

• Trump’s trans military ban just keeps getting, er, banned by federal courts.
  (via @fark)

• The Supreme Court just made it a little harder for the Trump administration to deport immigrants.
  (via @Popehat)

• What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests; or, the importance of recognizing, and fighting against, implicit bias.

• You’d think a professional defender of the Catholic Church’s handling of child-diddling priests would know better than to weigh in on the David Silverman affair. (Yes, of course it’s Bill Donohue.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton presents: Eight Rules for Understanding Our Teenage President.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

US drones keep striking, innocents and children keep dying

Amer Ali al-Saqra Huraidan, 13
[source]

I just can’t for the life of me understand why they hate the US so much that they’d wish harm upon it, as if out of vengeance for some perceived wrongdoing:

On March 5, 13-year-old Amer Ali al-Saqra Huraidan and his cousin were on their way home from visiting relatives in al-Hudhi, a small town in the eastern Yemeni province of Hadramout. As they drove along a desert highway around 4 p.m. local time, a U.S. drone circled overhead. Somewhere thousands of miles away, the drone operator launched a strike.

A short time later, Amer’s cousin Hasan awoke to fire and smoke rising from the mangled pickup truck and heard the buzz of the drone overhead. He had wounds on his right hand, leg, and head; chunks of shrapnel would later be removed from his body. But Amer was barely recognizable. The strike had charred his body and torn it to pieces, killing him instantly.

In a phone interview with The Intercept, Hasan, 19, said first responders were reluctant to come to the scene because they were concerned about a possible second strike by the drone that still hovered overhead. He and his family have been left wondering how the U.S. military mistook a fifth grader for a militant.

[…]

The strike that killed Amer was the first of three attacks near al-Hudhi in the span of a week. Seven other people were killed in strikes on March 7 and March 9, according to members of the al-Mahashima tribe to which all of the dead belonged. Independent sources on the ground in Yemen, as well as the international rights group Reprieve, confirmed the tribe members’ accounts. The victims, they noted, were poor people displaced from al-Jawf province, their lives upended by fighting that has raged on since 2014. None of them were affiliated with the Islamic State or Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as AQAP, the sources said.

Two days after Amer was killed, a man named Saleh al-Wuhair stood on top of a hill in al-Hudhi, looking for cell service to make a call. At around 5 p.m., a missile came flying down and killed him, according to a member of his family and independent observers in Yemen.

Because the area was targeted twice in two days, tribe members drove out to al-Hudhi to urge residents to relocate to a safer place. On March 9, a half-dozen members of the tribe — three of them the adult children of Abdullah al-Qibli al-Wuhair, a local tribal leader, and three of them his adult grandchildren — were driving back to Marib when a drone targeted an area called al-Abr at around 5 p.m. All six of them were killed.

Collateral damage, people. Just a couple oopsies. Nothing to see here.

US Army veteran with PTSD deported over drug conviction

Miguel Perez

A man immigrates to the US as a child, founds a family, and later enlists in the Army and serves two tours in Afghanistan. His experiences there land him with PTSD, which he copes with through alcohol and drugs. The latter nets him a criminal conviction, and now he’s been kicked out of the country.

The deportation follows an earlier decision by US authorities to deny Miguel Perez's citizenship application because of a felony drug conviction, despite his service and the PTSD he says it caused.

Perez, 39, was escorted across the US-Mexico border from Texas and handed over to Mexican authorities Friday, ICE said in a statement.

Perez, his family and supporters, who include Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, had argued that his wartime service to the country had earned him the right to stay in the US and to receive mental health treatment for the PTSD and substance abuse.

He chose to fight for a country he wasn’t even a citizen of and came out of it traumatized enough he turned to drugs to cope with it. What he needs and deserves is medical care. What he’s getting is thrown out the door, into a country he hasn’t visited since childhood and where his life may be in danger.

America sure loves supporting its troops – so long as that doesn’t require anything more than waving flags and having grade-schoolers send letters.

Trump admin. enacts new trans military ban

The Pentagon had until tonight to institute Trump’s policy to ban trans servicemembers, and characteristically, Trump signed the order at the last minute. Months of legal challenges later, the trans military ban is now in place:

Following a Pentagon policy review after a tweet by President Donald Trump last year, the White House said the policy will say "transgender persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria -- individuals who the policies state may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery -- are disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances."

[…]

According to a Pentagon memo about the policy, exceptions to the ban include people who have been "stable for 36 consecutive months in their biological sex prior to accession," servicemembers who "do not require a change of gender" and troops who started serving under the Obama administration's policy prior to the new memo.

It doesn’t matter what excuse or rationale they bring up to bolster this move; it won’t hide the fact that this is no more than a gift to Trump’s regressive base, the same that has a conniption at the thought of trans people using the right bathrooms. The facts were already clear when Trump first tweeted the policy change last August and they’ve only been hammered home since: Thousands of trans troops are already in the US armed forces, they serve every bit as competently and professionally as their cisgender comrades, and throwing them out would only weaken the military, not strengthen it. (It’s never been made clear just how throwing out thousands of dedicated soldiers, trans or otherwise, is supposed to strengthen the military’s combat readiness.) This is discrimination in its plainest form.

The lawsuits are guaranteed to keep coming, so it’s anyone’s guess how it’ll turn out. But I’m not holding onto hope; in the end, the executive branch has the power to implement whatever conditions for enlistment it wants, barring anything blatantly unconstitutional. Trans people were already banned up to 2016; there’s little reason things couldn’t go back to that.

Daily Links #115: Homeland Security separates refugee families

Whoops – I’m so out of it today I almost forgot to give y’all your links.

• Last year, Homeland Security threatened to punish families that cross the border illegally by separating them. They’re now doing just that to refugees fleeing violence – only now they deny it’s meant as punishment. Because there must be a perfectly reasonable basis for wrenching a crying child out of their parents’ arms and detaining them in different states.
  (via @hiattf; retweet by @radleybalko)

• Baton Rouge, Louisiana officer goes 94 MPH on a 50 MPH road and plows into a woman’s car, killing her 1-year-old infant. So naturally, police arrest the mother and charge her with “negligent homicide”.

• Death meets Stephen Hawking at the edge of the Dark Desert over half a century later than expected.

• My guess is Trump heard about the sci-fi trope of space marines and decided, “I want that.” Includes a name only Trump (or a child) could come up with.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: Jesus jailed for saying he’d bomb the gays. (I’m so sorry.)
  (via Joe.My.God.)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Philippine president orders soldiers to shoot women in genitals

Trump likes to pal around with fellow fascists around the world, and one he’s praised in particular is Philippine President Duterte, who’s been waging war on his own people and gunning suspected drug users down in the streets by the thousands. Let’s check in on him, shall we?

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told soldiers last week to shoot female rebels in their genitals, the latest of several violent, misogynistic remarks.

Addressing a group of former communist rebels on Wednesday, Duterte, who served as a mayor before becoming president, appeared to encourage the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to target women in conflict.

“Tell the soldiers. ‘There’s a new order coming from the mayor. We won’t kill you. We will just shoot your vagina,’ ” he said.

“If there is no vagina, it would be useless,” Duterte continued, according to local media reports, appearing to imply that women are useless without their genitals.

You know, the Bible teaches that people are only as good as the company they keep. I wonder what that says about Trump, or the evangelicals who praise and defend him at every turn.

(via Pharyngula)

Very Late Links #98: Trump’s drone war is bloodier than ever

Predator drone

• “The first year of the Trump administration has resulted in more loss of life from drone strikes than all eight years of Obama’s presidency.”
  (via @ggreenwald)

• It really shouldn’t need to be explained why it’s wrong on multiple levels for a judge handing down a sexual assault conviction to wax wistful about how sexual assault isn’t a permitted punishment.

• Ireland has some of the toughest anti-abortion laws in the world, banning it even in cases of rape or fetal abnormality. Now the Irish government has scheduled a referendum for May to vote on whether to relax the restrictions.

• Meanwhile, a lawsuit by the Satanic Temple results in the Missouri Supreme Court striking down anti-abortion restrictions – all thanks to state Republicans’ Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
  (via @fark)

• Canadian privacy commissioner pushes for EU-style “right to be forgotten” policy, allowing Canadians to demand that websites change or take down any information about them they don’t approve of. Because that always works out so well.

• Finally, the Cleveland Indians will abandon their “Chief Wahoo” logo next year because are you even kidding me.
  (via @KFILE)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Trump admin. drops trans military ban for now

After months of repeated court losses, Trump & co. have now stopped trying to ban fully qualified US citizens from serving in the armed forces (and kick out the thousands who are already there) based only on their gender identity.

The Trump administration has abandoned its bid to prevent openly transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, the Pentagon announced late Friday night.

In July, the Trump administration attempted to delay an Obama-era Department of Defense ruling allowing openly transgender Americans to enlist in the military from January 1.

[…]

However the policy has met with several federal court challenges—with two federal appeals courts upholding rulings that the Trump administration could not enforce the ban.

In a statement to Reuters, the Department of Justice said it would not fight the January 1 deadline and was not challenging the court rulings, but that the Trump administration may consider other means of blocking transgender people enlisting.

"The Department of Defense has announced that it will be releasing an independent study of these issues in the coming weeks," the official said.

The move was so characteristically Trumpian in its pointless, petty cruelty to begin with. Trans service members are no less physically and psychologically capable than are cisgender troops; what medical requirements some of them have are comparatively minor, costing only a tenth of the military’s Viagra budget; thousands of them are already in service at home or overseas; and studies have confirmed that allowing them to serve openly has “no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness” – in short, kicking them out serves no real purpose whatsoever and would only weaken the military, all in order to get rid of trans people because the current White House leadership doesn’t like them (or is possibly pandering to the reliably bigoted White Evangelical crowd).

It’s almost as though letting naked bigotry direct decision-making makes for shitty and harmful policy. Who’d a’ thunk it?

(via Joe.My.God.)

Courts deal Trump double-whammy on sanctuary cities and trans military ban

Donald Trump

Amidst all the grim news hanging over us these days, it’s worth remembering that good things do happen. Here’s some: Trump just had a bad couple days in court. Now relax and enjoy the schadenfreude.

First, a federal judge yesterday killed one of Trump’s first executive orders wherein he tried to cut off funding to “sanctuary cities” that refuse to sell out undocumented immigrants to the federal government:

In a summary judgment ruling, U.S. District Judge William Orrick III found Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order violated the Constitution in multiple ways: by invoking spending powers that belong exclusively to Congress, and by placing unrelated conditions on federal grants in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

“Federal funding that bears no meaningful relationship to immigration enforcement cannot be threatened merely because a jurisdiction chooses an immigration enforcement strategy of which the President disapproves,” Orrick wrote in a 28-page ruling.

Orrick temporarily banned the executive order in April after San Francisco and Santa Clara County filed separate lawsuits against the presidential directive.

With billions in annual federal aid on the line, both jurisdictions cited the risk of major budget uncertainty. San Francisco receives $1.2 billion in annual federal aid and $800 million in multiyear grants, while Santa Clara County relies on $1.7 billion each year to fund essential services, including public health and child protective services.

And today, a second federal judge (following a similar ruling last month) has blocked the trans military ban from going into effect, citing the harm it would cause to trans troops who already face hardship:

In a 53-page ruling, US District Court Judge Marvin Garbis in Maryland concluded that transgender service members are "already suffering harmful consequences," and went a step further than an earlier ruling by specifically prohibiting the Trump administration from blocking those challenging the ban from completing their medically necessary surgeries.

"They have further demonstrated that they are already suffering harmful consequences such as the cancellation and postponements of surgeries, the stigma of being set apart as inherently unfit, facing the prospect of discharge and inability to commission as an officer, the inability to move forward with long-term medical plans, and the threat to their prospects of obtaining long-term assignments," Garbis wrote. "Waiting until after the directives have been implemented to challenge their alleged violation of constitutional rights only subjects them to substantial risk of even greater harms."

The judge, a Bush Sr. appointee, was “particularly unmoved” by the Justice Department’s claim that Trump’s Twitter-announcement of the ban totally didn’t count as a policy decision, and he did not mince words:

"A capricious, arbitrary, and unqualified tweet of new policy does not trump the methodical and systematic review by military stakeholders qualified to understand the ramifications of policy changes."

“Capricious”, “arbitrary” and “unqualified” … I think he just described the entire Trump presidency.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Federal court blocks trans military ban (for now)

Though overshadowed by today’s big news, another big development is the fact that federal judge has blocked Trump’s attempt to kick trans troops out of the armed forces:

Trump announced in an August memo that he intended to reverse course on a 2016 policy that allowed troops to serve openly as transgender individuals. He said he would order a return to the policy prior to June 2016, under which service members could be discharged for being transgender.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote Monday that transgender members of the military who had sued over the change were likely to win their lawsuit and barred the Trump administration from reversing course.

[…]

Kollar-Kotelly said in her opinion that the president’s directives are “not genuinely based on legitimate concerns regarding military effectiveness or budget constraints, but are instead driven by a desire to express disapproval of transgender people generally.”

When a judge smacks you down and says they can see through your pretense to the underlying bigotry, you should probably stop right there. Of course, there will almost inevitably be appeals and attempts to rewrite the ban, so this is hardly over. But it’s still satisfying to imagine the sort of nightmarish day Trump is having.

Daily Links: 10/29/17 – UK prosecutes man for owning a book

Josh Walker

• The UK prosecuted (and eventually cleared) a man ^[pictured] on terrorism charges for downloading a book.

• The Economist provides a much-needed critical look at the US’s borderline-unthinking infatuation with its armed forces. (As a clincher, the replies here reaffirm the article’s point.)
  (via @radleybalko)

• Sexual harassers are being exposed elsewhere, but they’re thriving in Congress, which makes its own laws for handling (i.e., hiding) misconduct.
  (via @radleybalko)

• US National Park Service cancels a Black Panther Party historical exhibit after whining from conservative groups and the Fraternal Order of Police.
  (via @JamilSmith; RT: @Popehat)

• Finally, Arkansas State Sen. Jason Rapert (R), last seen threatening a blogger for asking about his plans for an unconstitutional Christian monument, continues to make himself look like a total fool.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.