Clear and way-warm this noon Monday here in California’s Central Valley — we’re forecast to top 80 this afternoon for the first time this year/season and it makes me wonder out loud just how the shit-hot will be the coming summer.
Altogether too early for this.
How about those idiots running our country right now?
Scared-ass story of the new work week:
The fact that a reporter was inadvertently given access to this in real time shows that Pete Hegseth & the rest of this crew are bumbling incompetents who are going to get a lot of intelligence officials and others killed at some point. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc…
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-03-24T17:19:18.353Z
Details via MilitaryTimes this morning:
Senior national security officials coordinated airstrikes against Houthi targets in Yemen earlier this month using an unsecure group chat which accidentally included the top editor of The Atlantic, a move that appears to have broken a host of federal laws and protocols.
In a story released Monday titled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg said he was added to the group on Signal — an open-source, privacy-focused messaging app — earlier this month by someone identifying themself as Michael Waltz, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.
The conversation — which eventually included messages from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, among others — included “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” according to Goldberg.
Because of messages sent in the group chat, Goldberg learned of the airstrikes more than two hours before they were made public by government officials, he said.
“The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility,” Goldberg wrote.
U.S. military units struck more than 30 targets in Yemen over several days earlier this month as part of an ongoing campaign targeting Iran-backed Houthi rebels, a terrorist group that has halted international shipping for more than a year.
Defense Department officials referred questions on the issue to the National Security Council. NSC officials did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes said that “the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
He also asserted that the thread “is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our service members or our national security.”
But officials may have violated rules regarding sharing secure military information, sensitive operations data and preservation of government records, whether Goldberg was included on the list accidentally or intentionally.
Goldberg wrote that in addition to the sensitive military discussions, senior leaders discussed concerns with Trump’s strategy in the Middle East and complained about European allies’ lack of action in the region.
He also said that Hegseth assured chat participants that “we are currently clean on OPSEC” despite the accidental inclusion of a journalist in the conversation, and the use of an outside-of-government platform.
Not only are they cruel and lack any empathy for what they’re doing, but they’re stupid and horribly incompetent, too. Makes for a terrible, frightful view of the near future.
There’s a paywall at The Atlantic site, but Balloon Juice has a gift link. Go read the fine points of this shitstorm fuck-up by the dumb shits the T-Rump put in charge of some serious national operations. Journalist Goldberg was right in the loop as the attack started and continued, a nightmare of the worst sort — military hardware involved.
An early indication of where this story can go — Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) in response:
“Incompetence so severe that it could have gotten Americans killed. There is no world in which this information should have been shared in non-secure channels,” Moulton, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, wrote on X.
“Hegseth is in so far over his head that he is a danger to this country and our men and women in uniform,” he said.
Addressing the Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee, Moulton told the committee that Hegseth “needs to explain himself to Congress and be held accountable.”
The US is in a pickle — no shit!
Governed by imbeciles, or not, yet once again here we are …
(Illustration out front found here.)