monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

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The military "is there to kill people and blow stuff up. They're not there to be socially-engineered" -@SebGorka on transgender military ban

Does any pro-gay, pro-trans person think it is folly to sign up people who are planning gender reassignment surgery and therapy?

In the hours after the bill died, social media buzzed with criticisms of how the Trump administration handled - or, rather, mishandled - the legislative push.
Maybe Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke shouldn't have threatened Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski - an early no vote - with political retribution and cuts to federal funding to her home state.
The senator had won re-election in 2010 as an independent write-in candidate after losing to a grass-roots conservative in the Republican primary. She was probably immune to angry Trump tweets or warnings of populist uprisings among her base.
Maybe Susan Collins of Maine, the lone Republican to vote against Obamacare repeal back in 2015 when it was a symbolic effort, should have been brought into Senate legislative negotiations from the beginning, rather than shrugged off as an unneeded vote.
Perhaps Mr Trump's tweet that Mr McCain was an American hero when he flew to Washington after brain surgery to vote on the healthcare bill wasn't enough to outweigh the time, two years ago, when candidate Trump questioned the Arizona senator's military heroism.
In the end the White House's "closing arguments" for the Senate bill - a smattering of presidential tweets, a staged "victims of Obamacare" event and some last-minute lobbying by vice-president Mike Pence - weren't enough. Not nearly enough.
Instead of beating the drum for healthcare reform, the administration had been all over the map.
A hastily announced ban on transgender individuals in the armed forces, issued by presidential tweet. A press conference to herald efforts to combat gang violence. A campaign-style rally in Ohio with a focus on the threats of illegal immigration. A speech to a Boy Scouts gathering that was heavy on media bashing.
In case that wasn't enough, over the past week the administration has been beset by internecine warfare. Mr Trump publicly questioned the effectiveness of his former campaign confidant, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, subjecting him to an increasingly angry barrage of tweets.
Mr Trump's newly installed communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, spent most of his time communicating his differences with White House chief-of-staff Reince Priebus and other presidential aides in particularly colourful language.
The president, we are told, thrives on chaos. As Mr Scaramucci likes to say, Mr Trump is a disruptor, sent to Washington to shake up the establishment.
The disruption, however, is coming with a price.
Although healthcare reform could always crawl its way out of the grave, that seems unlikely anytime soon.
The Senate has to move on to more pressing business - passing appropriations to keep the government running, raising the debt ceiling, and confirming the backlog of Trump's administrative and judicial appointments.
Then there are the other Republican legislative priorities, tax reform in particular. The longer the party tilts at the healthcare windmill, the more unlikely any serious effort can be mounted before legislators have to turn their focus to re-election in the 2018 congressional mid-terms in November.
Any talk of new legislative goals or efforts is of questionable utility, however, if the Trump White House doesn't learn some hard lessons from this recent failure.
Stay focused and on message. Build relationships with sometimes prickly members of Congress. Don't assume that a president with approval ratings in the high 30s can bully recalcitrant opponents.
On Friday morning Mr Trump tweeted about doing away with the legislative filibuster in the Senate, which requires 60 votes for the passage of major bills. On Friday morning, however, his party couldn't get to 50 with its bare-minimum "skinny" bill.
Losers gripe about the rules of the game. Winners find a way to prevail.
So far, winning for the Trump administration has been in short supply.

EXCLUSIVE-Majority of Americans support transgender military service (REUTERS)

Among Republicans, 32 percent said transgender Americans should be allowed to serve, while 49 percent said they should not.

What about you?

On Twitter this morning, President Trump announced a ban on transgender people serving in the military, citing “medical costs” as the primary driver of the decision.

“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” the president wrote.

While Trump didn't offer any numbers to support this claim, a Defense Department-commissioned study published last year by the Rand Corp. provides exhaustive estimates of transgender servicemembers' potential medical costs.

Considering the prevalence of transgender servicemembers among the active duty military and the typical health-care costs for gender-transition-related medical treatment, the Rand study estimated that these treatments would cost the military between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually.

The study didn't include estimates of these costs for reservists, because of their “highly limited military health care eligibility.” It also didn't include estimates for retirees or military family members, because many of those individuals may also have “limited eligibility” for care via military treatment facilities.
“The implication is that even in the most extreme scenario that we were able to identify … we expect only a 0.13-percent ($8.4 million out of $6.2 billion) increase in health care spending,” Rand's authors concluded.

By contrast, total military spending on erectile dysfunction medicines amounts to $84 million annually, according to an analysis by the Military Times — 10 times the cost of annual transition-related medical care for active duty transgender servicemembers.
The military spends $41.6 million annually on Viagra alone

A federal judge has blocked Arkansas from enforcing four new abortion restrictions, including a ban on a common second trimester procedure and a fetal remains law that opponents say would effectively require a partner’s consent before a woman could get an abortion.

U.S. District Court Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction late Friday night against the new restrictions, three of which were set to take effect Tuesday. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Reproductive Rights had challenged the measures, suing on behalf of Dr. Frederick Hopkins, a Little Rock abortion provider

I can't help but see similarities in the arguments used when there were discussion about letting women in combat.