From B/R Football on TikTok via mike taddow on Blue Sky –
An amazing athlete:
Let’s climb up the mountain to our internet gurus:
- tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors is always entertainingly acerbic. In this case, sarcasm is especially justifiable, as tengrain lists a few ways accidentally revealing combat decisions to a reporter ahead of time reflects an unusual level of incompetence.
- The most public: That a reporter was included in a high level classified discussion of an impending military operation.
- That any highly classified discussion was held through a commercial chat group rather than routinely used government secured telephones.
- That the level of discussion itself was dopey. One topic was whether the attack would benefit Europeans.
Vice President JD Vance:
I just hate bailing Europe out againDefense Secretary Pete Hegseth:
I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.
- The most public: That a reporter was included in a high level classified discussion of an impending military operation.
- Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit points out why the security breach by Hegseth and company was likely much worse than reported.
Key danger:
Update: Steve Witkoff was in Moscow when he was added to the Signal chat group. So it is a pretty reasonable bet that the FSB was also reading the group’s texts. - Among the issues raised by this degree of carelessness with top secret information is the very real danger to those carrying out military missions. That this instance of sloppiness did not cost American lives was a matter of luck.
Tommy Christopher begins with combat veteran Senator Tammy Duckworth who knows, more than most, what is at stake.
Fighting for the US in Iraq, Lieutenant Colonel Duckworth lost both legs:
In a Fox interview, host Bret Baier drills down to the most critical issue:
Why the impolite language? - The submission of classified combat information to a commercial chat app has obvious results going beyond our borders.
For some U.S. allies, the leaked group chat about a planned Yemen attack casts doubt on intelligence-sharing with Washington.
— Defense News (@defensenews.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 4:37 PM
- Disaffected and it Feels So Good reminds us that chatting with a reporter about military plans is only one of many demonstrations of Hegseth incompetence.
Key priorities:
Hegseth’s ideas of leadership are like a grade school boys imagination,“It starts with the basic stuff, right?” Hegseth told the crowd. “It’s grooming standards and uniform standards and training standards, fitness standards, all of that matters.”Focusing on how a uniform fits and grooming is a facile take and literally the most superficial view of leading, which belongs in basic training and the parade deck but, not in a combat ready military. - Dave Dubya puts the focus on Trump intelligence about Intelligence, beginning with a couple of quotes.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard
(one day before the breach):Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of the law and will be treated as such.Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth:
Under the previous administration, we looked like fools. Not anymore.Dave goes back to December and a gleefully prescient Russian forecast on the Trump administration.
On Russian state TV – Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan:
They will quickly dismantle America, brick by brick.Key What the hell:
I’m pretty sure Putin still gets anything he wants straight from Trump. - PZ Myers reads the now public chat over the Signal app and is impressed by the quality of the exchanges: The administration is a mob of children:
He especially reacts to the giggling quality of the juvenile discussion of highly classified combat plans.Key resignation:
Four more years of this. Great. - Dave Columbo puts the entire military‑chat‑on‑a‑commercial‑app‑accidentally‑including‑a‑journalist controversy in context:
- Ant Farmer’s Almanac gets satiric (Okay, okay, it’s a satiric site) about the many and varied excuses the White House is contriving for using commercial chat to discuss classified combat details:
Yemen? What’s a Yemen? - And this is part of the administration’s later justification?
Reporter: Can you share how your information about war plans was shared with a journalist?
Hegseth: So you are talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes
So the defense is that it wasn't actually shared with a journalist.
Instead, the highly classified national security discussion was accidentally shared with a "deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who has made a profession of peddling hoaxes".
That's reassuring.
— burrland01.bsky.social (@burrland01.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 7:24 AM
- A common Trump-folk defense: what clearly happened didn’t really happen:
Brian Beutler has it about right.Impressively bold but stupid lying when there are receipts.
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler.bsky.social) March 24, 2025 at 6:46 PM
- Juliet at Decoding Fox News goes to podcast to cover how Fox covered the Pentagon texting scandal.
- Satiric magazine The Beaverton reveals how Trump officials accidentally texted Canadian invasion plans.
Key part of report:
I’m not sure what’s more shocking – that I was accidentally added to this Signal thread, or how many ‘muscle arm’ emojis JD Vance constantly uses… - @whiskeywhistle98 thinks about how the world now sees us:
- Vixen Strangely explores the strange world of Trump Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, in which Putin is a wonderful guy because he prayed for Trump and commissioned a portrait of him:
Key policy conclusion:
Key substance of Trump:
All Trump ever wanted to know about himself was that he oughta be in pictures. (Can someone help me with a thing where I wonder why Trump sees himself as Norma Desmond, Grizabella and Evita?) He’s a just a diva.Key characteristic of Trump Envoys:
Innocent as little fawns in a sunlight-gilded bower in the eye of a sniper rifle. - From The Borowitz Report, Greenland rejects Trump’s offer to trade JD Vance for rare earth minerals.
Andy Borowitz asks readers for input:
Where would you like JD Vance to be sent? - At The Moderate Voice retired U.S. Air Force Major Dorian de Wind calls our attention to this week’s National Medal of Honor Day, and the combat heroism of another victim of Trump’s anti-DEI campaign: Major General Charles Calvin Rogers.
The apparent problem that caused all references in Department of Defense archives to be removed: General Rogers was Black.
Key act of heroism:
Gen. Rogers was awarded the Medal in 1970 by President Richard Nixon for his “gallant defense of a firebase near South Vietnam’s border with Cambodia in 1968,” where then-Lt. Col. Rogers was wounded three times.In response to the resulting angry outcry, internet display of his portrait was resumed, minus some information. Specifically excluded were words from the citation accompanying the Medal of Honor and the fact that he fought against racial discrimination in the military.
- News Corpse reports on another great idea from Trump concerning those who assaulted police officers during the attempted January 6 insurrection. For the inconvenience of their arrests and convictions, they should be paid reparations.
- Julian Sanchez counts the ways Trump chaos produces costs we will be paying for years.
Key National Security dive:
How eager will our allies be to commit time and energy to negotiating treaties and trade agreements—especially those where they make up-front commitments in exchange for some longer-term reciprocal benefit—when the administration has proven so willing to treat past agreements as so much toilet paper? As habitual liars tend to eventually learn, it’s hard to strike deals with people who know you can’t be trusted to keep your end of the bargain.Key loss in federal skill:
Idealism has its limits. People may be willing to take a pay cut to work on a mission they find personally meaningful, but very few are going to be ready to upend their lives, possibly move to DC, to live in a state of perpetual anxiety about whether a billionaire on a ketamine trip or one of his teenaged sidekicks will decide their jobs can be done by ChatGPT.Key stock market plunge:
That’s why we’re not seeing the markets rebound as much as one might hope when Trump periodically announces that the latest round of tariffs is cancelled—no wait, delayed—no wait, back on again, and even higher, but only on alternate Tuesdays—no, wait, delayed again. If it’s a coin-flip whether your car is going to start normally or explode the next time you hit the ignition, most people are going to behave pretty much the same as they would if “explode” were a certainty.Key economic result:
… it’s risky for consumers to continue spending normally when unpredictable price increases might blow a hole in their budget at any time—doubly so if they’re drawing a government salary or other benefits that might evaporate without warning. - In Scotties Playtime, contributor blundersonword supports Trump actions to deport suspected gang members except for that pesky 4th Amendment.
Key caution:
- Aside from elemental unfairness and sheer immorality, why should Americans be concerned with arrests without due process of non-citizens?
David Woodruff and Timothy Snyder make one reason crystal clear:
A very old Soviet joke, from an especially dark time:
Foxes are fleeing the USSR in droves.
Q: Why are you running away?
Fox: The Soviets passed a new law that they’re going to arrest all camels.
Q: But you’re foxes!
Fox: Yeah, why don’t *you* try proving to the NKVD that you’re not a camel.— David Woodruff (@dmwoodruff.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 5:21 PM
- Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi tells Representative Jasmine Crockett she had better tread very carefully in criticizing Elon Musk.
M. Bouffant at Web of Evil has a citizen’s familiarity with the First Amendment and translates the threat.
- Never mind all those videos of Republican legislators encountering townhalls filled with angry constituents!
Right Wing Watch brings us House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has traveled pretty much everywhere in the US and finds nothing but euphoria from voters all over.
- Ted McLaughlin at jobsanger has the polling numbers. Most everyone of all ages, economic groups, education levels, ethnicities, and political persuasions, except for Republicans, don’t like what Trump is doing to the economy, or what Musk is doing to everything and, by wide margins, say Democrats are not doing enough to resist.
- Elon Musk is openly paying people to vote in next week’s Wisconsin election.
No, it’s not exactly legal.driftglass gets irritated as The New York Times gets gentle with yet another mellower than mellow headline, replacing clearly illegal with controversial.
- Infidel753 reminds us of what ought to have been obvious all along. Attacks on individual Tesla owners, from vandalism to personal intimidation are counter-productive and, more importantly, morally wrong.
- Jason Linkins reminds us that we sometimes need to keep from lapsing into lazy cynicism:
From @timothynoah.bsky.social: A sad truism is that political courage is often in short supply, but there are still people out there manifesting it
newrepublic.com/article/1931…
— Jason Linkins (@dceiver.bsky.social) March 25, 2025 at 7:57 AM
- Here in Missouri, Jess Piper describes herself as a Dirt Road Democrat, traveling around rural Missouri, even when it carries personal cost.
Key conflict for a grandmother whom grandkids call “Mimi”:
I can spend more time with my family or I can spend more time speaking out to keep my family safe.Mom guilt is bad. Mimi guilt is unbearable.Key mission:
I have had a plan since I started speaking regularly to rural people: empower rural Democrats to go into their own communities and reach their neighbors — even their Republican neighbors. Give them the rhetoric to speak to their local issues and the common sense points to speak back to the propaganda from the Trump administration.Key role:
A cheerleader for rural people. - Hackwhackers sees several unexpectedly large Democratic wins in special elections as not predictive, but indeed hopeful.
- My longtime conservative friend Darrell Michaels is back (Yay-y-y-y!) at Unabashedly American, with encouragement for healthy debate. The caveat is that it is not the worth time or effort to debate close minded ideologues mostly on the left (presumably like me).
Key censure:
Far too many of the other left of center folks (leftists) simply wanted to shout everyone down and expected nothing less than capitulation to their political beliefs.I am reminded of the late Republican Senator Everett Dirksen, delivering an especially harsh denunciation. He looked up from his written notes in puzzlement:
Do you know whom they’re talking about? They’re talking about me!. - Iron Knee at Political Irony brings us a take off on Trump marketing of cheap merchandise:
- North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz has a suggestion for Christians. We should hate the Religious Right’s theocracy. Especially since Jesus does.
Key scriptural documentation:
If you read any of the Gospels (even the ones in the Trump-autographed Bible), you realize pretty quickly that if Jesus’ feet were on the planet right now, the Conservative Church in America would be one of the first tables he’d flip over.You see, Christianity as modeled by Jesus was never meant to hold power. It was never about control or brute force or dictating the laws of the land or imposing itself on people’s lives. It was never intended to be a political or religious institution but a chosen community of like-hearted people working together for the common good. - In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce reacts understandably when one of my fellow Christians offers assurances that God wants him to suffer because it’s good for him.
- SilverAppleQueen, preparing for her mom’s funeral, takes a break with her cats (Nice photos).
- A young woman, visiting a friend, witnessed a massive human tragedy across the street as 119 young employees of a local sweatshop died in fire. It was 1911, and the young woman went on to change the nation.
In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson remembers Frances Perkins and her leadership in safe work conditions, Social Security, and much of the social safety net Trump/Musk and company are now working to destroy.
The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast. - In Happiness Between Tails da-AL guest hosts Fiona Ingram, who writes children’s adventure books as Fiona and romance novels under pen-name Arabella Sheraton. She shares her experience of writing in two genres under separate persona.
- The Journal of Improbable Research finds a study at Cornell University of possible moral questions that would arise from true artificial consciousness: What responsibility will we have toward the welfare of a new self-awareness?
I am reminded of the 2014 movie Transcendence, as a protagonist remembers success in tranfering engrams from the brain of a rhesus monkey into a computer:
You know what the computer did when he first turned it on? It screamed.The machine that thought it was a monkey never took a breath, never ate or slept. At first, I didn’t know what it meant. Pain, fear, rage.Then, I finally realized… it was begging us to stop. - Clickbait satirist Reductress reveals a groundbreaking new scientific anti-aging process that will transfer your consciousness to Anne Hathaway.
- The Onion brings startling video along with the announcement that the CIA has obtained the briefcase:
- In Georgia baseball, The Savanna Bananas are developing a revolutionary new way to improve batting stats:
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