Last Call For Doing The RIght Thing Yet Again

Good call from the White House for making a difference in the lives of trans* federal employees.

The federal government is telling insurers Friday that they can now provide transgender people with coverage for transition-related care — including sex-reassignment surgery — in federal employee health care plans, BuzzFeed has learned.

Two sources informed of the decision told BuzzFeed the longtime exclusion of transition-related care under the Federal Employees Health Benefits program is coming to an end on Friday in the form of a letter being sent to the insurance providers. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) officials would neither confirm nor provide comment to BuzzFeed about the decision.

The move comes two weeks after Medicare made a similar move. In the Medicare case, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Departmental Appeals Board issued a ruling that ended a ban on Medicare even considering the coverage of sex-reassignment surgery and related care because a fear of “serious complications” resulting from the “experimental” surgery.

The OPM change does not mean that federal employee health insurers must cover transition-related care, the sources said, but the change does permit the insurers to do so.

The move by OPM has been long sought by LGBT advocates and appears to be part of action taken by OPM to “update various nondiscrimination provisions … to provide greater consistency and reflect current law.”

Like any Republican executive branch would do this.  Well done, Mr. President.

Seriously, this is a great and long overdue change, and I hope more is coming.

Meet The New Monster, Same As The Old Monster

Republicans and the Village are screaming for President Obama to DO SOMETHING!!!11!! about ISIS in Iraq.  Because what we really need to do in order to solve our failed, unnecessary, and multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq from 12 years ago is to send another 200,000 troops right back in. The Washington Post:

The first thing you hear is the music. It lilts and sways. Then you see the Islamist militants. They’re knocking at a policeman’s door. It’s the middle of the night, but the cop soon answers. He’s blindfolded and cuffed. They take him to the bedroom. And then, reports say, they decapitate him with a knife.

Another video captures militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) herding hundreds of boys and Iraqi soldiers down a highway to an unknown fate. “Repent,” ISIS told inhabitants of its newly conquered territory on Thursday. “But anyone who insists upon apostasy faces death.” 

Death was everywhere in the sacked the city of Mosul, a strategically vital oil hub and Iraq’s largest northern city. One reporter said an Iraqi woman in Mosul claimed to have seen a “row of decapitated soldiers and policemen” on the street. Other reports spoke of “mass beheadings,” though The Washington Post was not able to confirm the tales. 

But the United Nations Human Rights chief, Navi Pillay, said the summary executions “may run into the hundreds” and that she was “extremely alarmed.”

Well, we can't confirm this story that will be used to justify military action in Iraq.  But we're printing it anyway, because military action in Iraq. Of course the man leading that charge is Johnny Volcano.

Sen. John McCain said Thursday that President Barack Obama’s entire national security team should resign over the resurgence of Islamic militants in Iraq. 

“Everybody in his national security team, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ought to be replaced,” the Arizona Republican told reporters ahead of a classified Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. “It’s a colossal failure of American security policy.”

Because the Iraq War itself was somehow not a colossal failure of American policy.   Jesus.  We'd be at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and South Sudan and Ukraine right now if McCain were president. Obama has kept us out of another bloody mess.

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Going Back To The Rez

President Obama will become only the fourth sitting US president to visit Indian Country as he plans to travel today to Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas.

Obama is set to become just the fourth sitting American president to visit an Indian reservation. Calvin Coolidge traveled to South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation in 1927, three years after he signed the Indian Citizenship Act that granted some Indians American citizenship. Franklin Roosevelt visited North Carolina’s Cherokee Nation in 1936. And in 1999, Bill Clinton also visited Pine Ridge, a little more than a century after U.S. soldiers massacred hundreds of Lakota men, women and children there at Wounded Knee.

The White House says Obama’s return trip to Indian Country will include meeting with young people, and that the president will focus his speech to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe on job creation, education and his administration’s commitment to “upholding our strong and crucial nation-to-nation relationship.”

President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama also plan on attending the reservation’s annual Cannon Ball Flag Day Celebration, which honors Native American veterans.

For some on Standing Rock, the president’s trip is a source of excitement and long overdue acknowledgement.

The last time Obama visited Indian country, as a candidate in 2008, he was welcomed with pounding drums and cheers. “Few have been ignored by Washington for as long as Native Americans – the first Americans,” Obama told the crowd that day, vowing to improve the health care and educational opportunities of American Indians. The Crow adopted Obama into the nation and into the Black Eagle family, giving him the name Awe Kooda Bilaxpak Kuuxshish or “One Who Helps People Throughout the Land.”

“It’s just encouraging as heck to have a visit like this,” said David Archambault Sr., a longtime educator from the Standing Rock reservation and father of the tribe’s chairman. “What the president has done is like night and day. Our history shows that it’s as if no one has any compassion for us. We are here and we have resources and throughout history people have wanted to take them from us. And for the first time we have someone looking out for us.”

Frankly the way reservations are treated and have been treated in the US is pretty terrible, but at least the last two Democratic presidents have tried to improve conditions. 

And yes, apparently Sen. Heidi Heitkamp will be on hand to meet the President. 

Heitkamp said she hopes the president’s visit will highlight the rich culture and history of the Lakota Sioux people, but also the tribe’s often invisible suffering.

“Native Americans were not given citizenship until the 20th Century and were only allowed to be able to vote if they renounced their tribal citizenship,” said Heitkamp. “That doesn’t get talked about a lot. For so many years they weren’t even considered American citizens and they’ve been invisible.”

For the better part of three decades since Heitkamp served as the state’s attorney general, she said she has worked as an advocate for Native Americans. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2013 and her first bill was aimed at creating a Commission on Native Children to study the issues disproportionately facing native children, including high rates of poverty, child abuse and suicide. Last month, the bill was passed unanimously in the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and moved one step closer to going before the Senate for a vote. She also introduced legislation to help preserve Native American languages and culture.

I hope she has the grace to keep her damn mouth shut about how many problems are on the reservations, especially involving ludicrous rates of domestic violence, after she voted with Republicans to kill President Obama's gun safety legislation in the Senate and again with Republicans to block President Obama's nominee to run the DoJ's civil rights division.  Maybe somebody can include her Senate votes as factors in that study as to why things are so bad on reservations for kids.

StupidiNews!

• Former Taliban POW Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is back in the US where he continues to receive medical care and will be reunited with his family.
• GOP Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas has given up his bid to replace outgoing House majority leader Eric Cantor, leaving California Republican Kevin McCarthy as the sole candidate for the job.
• ISIS militants continue to take territory in northern Iraq, while Iraqi Kurds are using the uprising to secure the oil-rich city of Kirkuk as President Obama weighs air strike options.
• After Croatia took a stunning lead 11 minutes into the opening World Cup match against Brazil with an own goal by Marcelo, striker Neymar led his team to a 3-1 victory with 2 goals.
• A new malware program in Japan is using Windows's own security protocols to block anti-virus programs from removing it.