He tightened the rules for deploying the Nat Guard and yes, he’s CYA now and very much to blame for how late the response from the military was on 1/6/21.
The core mission of any military is deterrence, not conflict.
You have knights at the castle and a strong set of men-at-arms so that your neighbor doesn’t decide that your fields are nicer and he’d like to take them.
Screening recruits for extremist sympathies is one thing, but what are they doing to combat those who become radicalized while in the service? When those members are mustered out, they can be radicalized, trained and ready to go. Many places where bases are located are hotbeds of radical beliefs. This is what they are exposed to in their off base free time.
Yeah, pretty much. Ginny’s lobbying biz is pretty dodgy, but there is no way whatsoever that anything close to $10 million has hit a Thomas Family bank account without the financial authorities taking notice. And if you’re positing that there’s an offshore account with tens of millions in it waiting for Thomas to retire in another 20 years or whatever, you have a poor sense of human patience.
ETA: If there were a Great Right Wing Plot to Keep Lunatics in the Majority, they would have paid Thomas and Alito to fuck off while Trump was in office so they could have more justices 30 years younger than them.
That caught my interest as well. The vaccines have been approved on an Emergency basis, so the military can’t require it. Once it goes through the regular process, the military will require it.
The military can order troops to get vaccines. That’s not an issue. The coronavirus vaccine has only been approved for emergency use. That’s the problem. They can’t require troops to take an experimental treatment.
Nope, I was on the Humanities side of the house – specifically, Russian. My advisor had a poster tacked up to his office door, with a picture of a scowling cartoon Russian (fur hat, beard, boots, tunic) and the inscription “RUSSIAN LITERATURE IS BETTER THAN SEX”.
Story goes that one of his colleagues from the English department once paused outside, looking at the poster, said “that is patently untrue”, and walked on.
One of the wags in our class, hearing the story, said “but … he’s only read it in the translation!”
Something that’s been given to a third of the population with excellent results is no longer “experimental.”
ETA: It’s been approved for “emergency use,” and Covid-19 in the military is an “emergency.” You’d be hard-pressed to argue that it doesn’t threaten readiness. Jab 'em!!
This is tough because lethality is the mission of the Armed Forces. You want them to be killing machines. Now, who they are willing to kill is another issue altogether and that’s where better screening could be useful. Decades ago my nephew was graduating from the Naval Academy and was approached to become a Seal. One of the screening questions asked if he could fatally shoot a child he thought might be armed. He said he could not. He was not selected to be a Seal but is still a career Navy Pilot today. I suspect there could be a well designed cadre of questions to identify who needs to be watched.
Maybe they should start at the Air Force Academy, where cadets are FORCED to become “Born Again Christian” or they are harassed out of the Academy, passed over for perks and promotions, and physically assaulted.