Have you seen this one? ;)
Somehow Ron Perlman is getting younger and also sort of morphing into Josh Brolin.
You know you’re in a tailspin when your indecorous behavior is getting slammed by a guy who played a caveman.
He really doesn’t like Trump
Makes me <3 him all the more.
Exactly why he should have been Cable in Deadpool 2. :)
My favorite burn was something to the effect of, “It’s a shame your church was only built to shelter taxes.”
It’s going to open now, but he drug his feet as long as he could.
That’s really misleading, which I’d expect from USA Today. But the Washington Post is running the same headline. However, based on the actual statement released by the Pentagon, I don’t see any indication that Mattis is doing anything other than playing good soldier. He didn’t “freeze” anything. He just said in following the President’s directive, the DOD and DHS will collaborate to “develop a study and implementation plan”.
-Tom
The good news is that all our trans soldiers and other servicewomen and -men feel really great about their missions now.
In the interim, current policy with respect to currently serving members will remain in place.
I think it’s reasonable to call that a freeze.
That memo gives Mattis a huge amount of wiggle room in which to “study the issue and determine how to implement Trump’s direction.” It also refers to the “soon arriving senior civilian leadership of DoD” specifically as being the ones who are supposed to implement this stuff, and the White House has been blocking Mattis’ appointments for those positions for months (for partisan reasons). My guess is he’ll ignore/stall it. Edit: I see Tom has already linked to the statement.
So basically Mattis is ignoring Trump’s order and doing what he was doing before Trump made it.
Pretty much!
Since June 2016, the Pentagon has been studying how to implement Obama’s directive to allow transgender folks in the service. They are no longer doing that. According to their official statement, they are now studying how to implement Trump’s directive. Perhaps that’s just lip service, but it’s 180 degrees from their previous lip service.
I have no idea how anyone reads that statement and conclude Mattis has “frozen” anything. I guess since this is the optimism thread, we’re supposed to be grateful Mattis didn’t immediately round up the however many thousand transgender folks and kick them to the curb. Yay, Mattis! What a maverick!
-Tom
And as far as I can tell, any “freeze” doesn’t apply to new recruits. The ban applies to them already.
I don’t believe anything in Trump’s order took effect until 2018, did it? So we aren’t really seeing anything directlu opposing the order.
Lifting the transgender ban was announced in 2015 and formally took effect in 2016. After that, DoD policy stated that transgender personnel could serve openly and could not be involuntarily separated solely because they were transgender.
Yes, I think this is exactly what many people feared when Trump announced the change in policy. I think it was a reasonable fear, and so one should be relieved that it hasn’t yet come to pass.
Ah, Slate clarified things for me.
In his Tuesday announcement, Mattis declared that he will do precisely what the memo requires of him. He is not suspending the ban or disobeying Trump, but simply following orders. Moreover, as Nathaniel Frank explained in Slate, the memo does not give Mattis real discretion in executing the ban. He can, theoretically, provide a recommendation that Trump scrap it. But barring a reversal by the president, Mattis lacks any real ability to protect trans troops.
The strategy laid out in Friday’s memo is designed to lend legitimacy to an arbitrary and capricious policy that is motivated solely by politics. In fact, the Pentagon already commissioned a study which concluded that open transgender service will have no negative effects on the military while costing very little. Mattis’ new “study,” by contrast, will almost certainly provide some pseudo-factual cover for the trans ban.
[…]
Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney who co-authored that group’s lawsuit against the ban, agrees. “Though Defense Secretary Mattis appears rightly troubled by the President’s action, his statements do not change the directive nor has he been given the power to retain transgender service members indefinitely.”These reports of a “freeze” on the ban—which many outlets, including Slate, have picked up and framed as USA Today did—serve the administration’s narrative in two ways: They legitimize a “study” that is designed to reach a foregone conclusion, and they falsely portray the ban as more lenient or unsettled than it really is. Absent court intervention, the trans ban will take effect next year. And unless Trump changes his mind, there is virtually nothing Mattis can do to stop it.