Quite right that “he put his hands on him” can mean a whole bunch of things, but, eh... details are everything here. “Put his hands on him” can mean anything from “twisted arm to the edge of breaking” or, being as it was on a plane and all, “bearhugging child to keep him from yanking the emergency-exit lever.”

This is just something of a running joke. Cf. Joe Kelly and Scott Van Slyke in 2013, i.e. those innocent days before black people invented racism.

Well, at least possibly-crazy lady has good muzzle and trigger discipline.

Yeah, sorry, your original comment was above the fold and I didn’t see the clarifications until after I hit “publish.”

Uh, love ya but I think you’ve got the who-offended-whom backwards on the Gene Simmons issue. He, in discussing success, went in unprompted with something along the lines of “you, as a woman, can never quite be as economically depleted as a man can be because you always have the option of selling sex.” Which I think…

This is a brand new hotel and THAT’S how they decorated? This is okay if you’re the Willard and have been around since the Van Buren administration or something but rococo is just not rocokay in the 21st Century.

Sigh. Yes, Donald, it WOULD be nice if we got along with Russia, but that’s a bit tricky when ya boy Vlad’s whole foreign policy is “the opposite of whatever America does.”

Dear U.S. Soccer,

I don’t really see how he can get offended after saying “I heard you get sodomized quite often”.

From here it kinda seems like the Internet has MLP porn (because of course it does) and iOS 10 accesses the Internet.

I can’t condone today’s Trump analogy, as it maligns the good name of dildos, which unlike Trump have some value to society.

You’re making a case for non-criminal transgender people to be able to get the treatment they need, not for Manning to be refused same.

I agree that it’s grasping at straws as a defense. As a defense, it didn’t work. Now she’s in prison and will be for a very long time. The questions of what put her there and how we treat her there are distinct from one another.

And if you never meant to imply that her gender dysmorphia was a motive, then why has your whole argument centered on the moral hazard about “well if you want government funded gender reassignment, just join the Army and then make with the spying and getting caught! Foolproof!” eh?

Stipulated that she’s a neurotic BPD asshole. Doesn’t mean she has to be kept as a suicidal neurotic asshole for the rest of her life. Sometimes when you’re responsible for someone’s welfare, you just give them the care they need whether they deserve it or not.

So? Defense attorneys representing a client caught dead to rights adopt the spaghetti defense i.e. throw the whole pot at the wall and hope something sticks. Again, if this is all a ruse, she is really fucking committed to the bit.

She was sentenced to 35 years (which is a long time). For the charges on which she was convicted, she could’ve gotten 90. For the charges actually brought against her prior to her plea bargain, she could’ve been executed. I have to think there are easier ways to get gender reassignment surgery, even as a broke-ass E-3.

If you have evidence that Manning committed her crimes as phase one in a nefarious scheme to get the government to pay for her surgery (where phases two through ten involve intense suffering for the better part of a decade), I’d be interested to see it.

But the military tends to give a flying fuck about enlisted members up and quitting while stationed in a war zone. Didn’t I say she deserves to be in jail? What on God’s green earth is gained by being obstinate to the point of inhumanity while she’s in there?

Okay. And? She wasn’t really free to transition, anyway, as at the time transgender people were not permitted to serve in the military.