18 thoughts on “Wednesday Open Thread”

1. The security breach story ain't over yet. Now we have the annotated text from the meeting: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html

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   1. But her emails.

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2. "Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive." Paul Krugman

   Both incompetent AND evil.

   Read the whole thing, and Paul Krugman should be on your subscribe list. He has been on fire since being unchained from the New York Times "balance" restrictions.

   The amount of damage the second Trump administration has already done on many fronts, from foreign policy to public health to America’s economic prospects, both for the months ahead and in the long run, is astonishing. And they’re just getting started.

   But whenever I talk with other people about one of these disasters, I find them arguing about how to think about what’s happening. Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it?

   The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.

   And here's more on the desire to evading government accountability. Remember that the government belongs to the people, not to DJT. 

   But why were they sharing highly sensitive information over a private messaging app rather than using secure channels? The most likely explanation is that they wanted to evade accountability: texts between government officials are supposed to remain part of the record, while Signal texts can be and in this case were set to disappear. As Phillips O’Brien notes, war planning aside, what the group chat reveals is top officials’ contempt for and hostility toward Europe; some of them opposed an operation against the Houthis because clearing the shipping lanes might help our (erstwhile?) allies.

   So the disaster reflected both stupidity and bad intentions. And the same is true of other ongoing disasters, including the shockingly rapid collapse of the Social Security Administration.

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3. Well, the Secretary of War was impeached in 1876. Of course, impeachment alone is just one step. The Secretary in question, Belknap, was impeached in the House even though he resigned before the vote, but oddly the Senate did not have the votes to convict. Obviously today's Senate wouldn't convict any right-winger for anything, and they probably couldn't get the votes in the House right now either.

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4. A Blatant Disregard for the Safety of our Troops

   Clowns with flamethrowers may be clowns, but they still have flamethrowers

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5. Anatomy of a Sociopath. Eileen Workman on DJT h/t Ken Gray

   Social Synthesist and author Eileen Workman provides answers to two pressing questions I have about Donald Trump. 1) Has he always been this abusive and cruel in his business and political dealings. And 2) while he is considered by many a laughing stock, serving up daily dose of clown-like horrors atop a vicious bullying narcissism, why then do even thoughtful republicans embrace him so completely even as he dispenses with law, order, and the American constitution. From her experience working close to Trump professionally, Workman provides some helpful context and analysis.

   [Eileen Workman] I know a little something that so many do not appreciate about Donald, but that those of us who worked with him in the financial services game have known for many decades—LONG before he ever made a run at politics.

   His stated motives rarely reveal his true agenda. His showmanship and charisma bedazzles the uninformed, which is exactly how he likes it. He never signed a contract or met an agreement he wouldn’t violate or wriggle out of if it suited his hidden agenda. He never met an investor whose purse he didn’t consider his own in some strategic way. And he never met a human being he wouldn’t screw in order to advance or satisfy himself.

   …]

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6. Karoline Leavitt is going to town right now putting blame for the breach squarely where it belongs in the eyes of the White House ….. on Joe Biden.

    

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   1. Wow – who knew Biden retains that much power.

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   2. Since professional ethics for reporters prohibit expressing opinions during briefings, perhaps news coverage of her press briefings should include a laugh track for the benefit of viewers at home.

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7. The Colorado Sun's Mike Littwin is my favorite political columnist (along with Paul Krugman who adds economic context with the political angle).  Another worthwhile read:

   Littwin: While I was on spring break, Trump and Musk were busy breaking everything in sight

   I was heartened by the huge and fearless Sanders/AOC rally at Civic Center park. But then came the Signal-gate scandal, and who isn’t afraid?

   And when I look back on the week, it becomes ever more clear that fear is the subject before us, and that the fear is real. Not just the fear of extortion. Not just the fear of the attack on American democracy. Not just the fear that the free press and freedom of speech and the rule of law might not survive Trump. Not just the fear that oligarchs have taken charge.

   But the greatest fear, as many of us warned, is this: That these are careless, and often dangerous, people who, with each passing day, prove they can never be trusted.

    

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   1. Littwin proves the point that sports journalists are much, much better than political journalists.

      At least a sports journalist is permitted to report that "the broncos lost", instead of saying, "some people say the broncos lost; others are not so sure."

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   2. Littwin is the best

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8. Via Noah Smith:

   Trump rounded up a bunch of random Hispanic guys with tattoos, and with zero due process, put them on a plane and shipped them to a hellish dungeon in El Salvador. 

   That is certainly not the worst thing a U.S. President has ever done. In fact, that sort of thing used to be a lot more common — consider the Trail of Tears, the Japanese internment, or the deportation of a vast number of Mexican Americans in the Depression. But the motivation seems different. Trump seems to be doing these things in order to deliberately test his limits — to see how far he can push the bounds of the law and of public opinion.

   Trump’s authoritarianism is like a liquid, pressing slowly at the cracks in America’s institutions, always searching for weak points. The pressure is higher in his second term than in his first, but the basic approach is the same.

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9. Short Thoughts Via Josh Marshall:

   A few days ago a friend told me that Chuck Schumer thinks he’s a minority leader but he’s actually an opposition leader. Or rather that’s the position into which history has placed him — and he doesn’t realize it or he doesn’t grasp the difference or he’s simply not able to be the latter thing. There are lots of ways to explain the disconnect or incapacity. But I thought this was a pretty good one.

   AND:

   Most people, including a lot of journalists, don’t understand what an executive order even is. It’s not a law or even a quasi-law. An executive order is really just a memo from the president to his staff (in this sense, his staff of two million civil servants) to take certain actions.

   In areas where presidents have a lot of power — say, in border and immigration enforcement, for instance — executive orders are a big deal. Courts can say: no, the law or the Constitution doesn’t empower you or allow you to do those things. But executives act and courts mostly react. So in this area of broad executive power, they’re a big deal. That’s also where you get into the territory of genuine constitutional crises and potential presidential dictatorship, because the outer limits of some of those powers aren’t clearly charted.

   Here’s the real problem:

   The country’s most prestigious news organizations rushed to report these as fait accomplis. The Times announced that, henceforth, Americans would have to provide proof of citizenship to vote. The Post was more or less the same.

   News organizations have deep muscle memory creating the default assumption that when the president speaks it is if not fully accurate (as to legal authority or interpretation) or true, at least in the general ballpark of the same. So we see adjectives like “audacious” and “aggressive.” Fuzzy words that scrum around something rumbly and tough because the territory is somehow too daunting for journalists to walk on to. It’s the difference between “this is an outrage” and “that won’t even work.” Ten years in, Trump is still able to gobble up the space between the traditional assumptions of the political press and their lack of an idiom and vocabulary to accurately describe what he’s actually doing.

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10. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit passed the test.  Now will the SCOTUS be as courageous?  Or will it once again misrule one for the ages?

    Appeals court upholds temporary block on Alien Enemies Act deportations

    The Trump administration asked an appeals court to overturn Judge James E. Boasberg’s temporary restraining order blocking the deportations.

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11. Team Trump is trying to prove they are even bigger idiots than is already suspected.

    Trump team keeps digging on Signal chat leak

    Its new conspiracy theory targets the journalist who revealed the Signal scandal. But that only reinforces how dangerous the administration’s actions could be.

    But Trump and his allies are really digging a hole with their latest conspiracy theory, which targets Goldberg. Indeed, it pretty sharply undermines their cause.

    The theory, promoted by Trump, national security adviser Michael Waltz, and some of their media allies: Goldberg might have found his way onto the Signal group chat through nefarious means.

    The key issue here isn’t so much that Goldberg was added to the chat. It’s that officials were discussing something highly sensitive — attack plans that, if they leaked to the wrong people, could have jeopardized the mission or even endangered American lives — on an app that is seemingly not authorized for such things. The fact that an unauthorized journalist was added only reinforces that danger.

    If, as the conspiracy theory has it, a U.S. journalist could so easily find his way into this chat, how difficult might that be for studied hackers from our adversaries?

     

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    1. Do they really have to try?  It all seems to come naturally to them.

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12. Say it ain't so, Big Balls:

    WILMINGTON, Delaware, March 26 (Reuters) – The best-known member of Elon Musk's U.S. DOGE Service team of technologists once provided support to a cybercrime gang that bragged about trafficking in stolen data and cyberstalking an FBI agent, according to digital records reviewed by Reuters.

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