If Only, Indeed …

Petey Leaks by Clay Jones

The first mistake was giving classified information to Pete Hegseth Read on Substack

If only someone could have foreseen that being a host on Fox & Friends doesn’t make one qualified to be the Secretary of Defense.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was sitting in his car in a Safeway parking lot when he received a message about an upcoming military strike in Yemen. The message was part of a group chat in Signal, a messaging app, sent from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic, “I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.”

The world found out on March 15 at 2 p.m. Eastern time that the United States had bombed Houthi targets in Yemen, but Goldberg knew at 11:44 a.m. The message included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

Note that Goldberg didn’t expose this intel fiasco until yesterday, ten days after the strike. My question is: Did any of the group chat participants notice Goldberg was in the chat before yesterday?

After the National Security Council confirmed the legitimacy of the chat, Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard claimed there was no classified information in the chat. The White House also claimed no classified information or war plans were shared. Then, Pete Hegseth made the same claim, saying, “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”

Except, that wasn’t all he had to say about “that,” as he also said Goldberg is “a deceitful and highly discredited, so-called journalist who’s made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again.” Keep in mind that this guy who used to work for Fox News now works for Donald Trump, the king of discredited lies and conspiracy theories.

While interviewing Goldberg on CNN Monday night, Caitlin Collins said to Goldberg, “I want to start by getting your reaction to what we heard from Secretary Hegseth there, saying that ‘Nobody was texting war plans.’ Given you were privy to this group chat, is that how you saw it?”

Goldberg replied, “No, that’s a lie. He was texting war plans. He was texting attack plans. When targets were going to be targeted; how they were going to be targeted; who was at the targets; when the next sequence of attacks was happening.”

The only way the Trump administration can cover their ass on this is to lie.

In a quickly-called Senate hearing this morning, Gabbard refused to even admit she was part of the chat, saying she didn’t want to get into “specifics.” Senator Mark Warner asked, “Why aren’t you gonna get into the specifics? Is this—is it because it’s all classified?

Gabbard said she couldn’t get into specifics about the chat she claimed didn’t contain classified intel, and said she couldn’t “because this is currently under review by the National Security Council.”

That prompted Warner to ask, “Because it’s all classified? If it’s not classified, share the texts now.”

Gabbard, Hegseth, FBI Director Kash Patel, and CIA Director John Ratcliffe lacked the basic due diligence to check the group chat participants before spouting off about war plans. These people chosen by Trump are amateurs when it comes to their jobs and securing classified intelligence.

If only someone had pointed to these people’s lack of qualifications for their jobs. Oh, wait. We did.

Other members of the chat were National Security Advisor Mike Walz Veep JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, National Counterterrorism Center Director Nominee Joe Kent, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen “Baby Goebbels” Miller, and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff. Not one of these idiots noticed Goldberg’s name in the chat and asked, “Who’s that guy?”

Gabbard said there was a difference between the “inadvertent release” and “malicious leaks” of classified information before restating that there was no classified material in the chat, trying to have it both ways.

Unless the administration came out before the strike and said, “We’re going to start dropping bombs on Houthi rebels in Yemen at 2 p.m. on March 15, the information in the chat was classified.

This leak wasn’t malicious or inadvertent. It was inept. You would think if all the participants of this classified chat were competent, at least one of them would have spotted that one of the participants was a journalist, a journalist who did a better job of retaining the classified information better than the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Security, the FBI Director and the CIA Director.

Warner said Hegseth and National Security Adviser Mike Walz didn’t “conduct hygiene 101” in making sure the classified chat was secure.

Warner said, “If this was the case of a military officer or an intelligence officer and they had this kind of behavior, they would be fired” and “This is one more example of the kind of sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior, particularly towards classified information, that this is not a one-off or a first-time error.”

If you don’t remember this happening in the Biden administration, it’s because it never did. Biden hired competent and qualified people, not the Gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

Later, he called for the resignations of Hegseth and Walz, but I think everyone in that chat should resign, including the vice president (sic). Didn’t they all want Hillary Clinton “locked up” for risking the exposure of classified information?

The Trump administration talks a lot of shit about our national security, as though they take it seriously. If they really took it seriously, they wouldn’t hire jackasses like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Walz, Kash Patel, and John Ratcliffe. Hell, if Republicans took our nation seriously, they wouldn’t have nominated that racist idiot Donald Trump.

Mark Warner said, “When the stakes are this high, incompetence is not an option.”

Creative note: I had something else planned for today, but this story threw that out the window last night. I had more than one reader message me, “Can’t wait to see your Hegseth cartoon.” Fortunately, those messages weren’t classified.

Music note: I listened to everything on this cafe’s sound system. Unfortunately, it included a lot of John Mayer. I hate John Mayer.

Drawn in 30 seconds: (snip-go see)

Peace & Justice History for 3/26

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorymarch.htm#march26

Some Belle of the Ranch videos

This is One Heckuva Post,

with lots to read and to think about. Also an interesting video and transcript of an interview with Nate Vance. Have a nice beverage, and take in a longer read/watch.

𒅌👨‍✈️👮⌐╦̵̵̿ᡁ᠊╾━ A Tale of Two Soldiers: Pacifism, Activism or Armed Resistance in the Face of Aggression? 💨💥╾━╤デ╦︻ඞා🕊️☮️📢🪧💪🛡️

Some same Seder

Sam and Emma in the fun half. Normally there is only two ways to watch the fun half. You can be a member which they admit that some people can not afford which they have a way to get free membership if you need it. Or you can catch the first half while it is playing live and in the description box will be a link to the free fun half. If you click on that you can watch the entire thing. If you save it like I do for later you can go back and watch it at any time because if you don’t the link will disappear so you can’t see it. They make the second half private. Hugs

10,558 views Premiered 6 hours ago FUN HALF

Livestreamed on March 21, 2025:

00:00 – FUN HALF

00:22 – AOC/Bernie team-up

08:20 – “TAX THE RICH!”

14:17 – Trump’s war on libraries and museums

29:01 – Jesse Watters is Fox’s straw man

42:55 – DOGE lovin’ Republicans getting booed everywhere

Ep 250321

Watch the Majority Report live Monday–Friday at 12 p.m. EST on YouTube OR listen via daily podcast at http://www.Majority.FM …OR become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join

Some Women’s And Labor History

When They Jailed The Most Dangerous Woman In America, Mary ‘Mother’ Jones, For ‘First Amendment’ by Rebecca Schoenkopf (Eric Loomis on Wonkette)

March 22, 1914, in labor history! Read on Substack

Mother Jones, c. 1910, marching in Trinidad, Colo. Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago. Call # MMS Kerr Archives.

On March 22, 1914, Mary “Mother” Jones was arrested on a train in southern Colorado for her work in fighting for the coal miners on strike that area. This was her second arrest in this conflict, as she had previously been detained by the state militia in Trinidad and then sent to Denver. Upon release in Denver, she immediately went back to the coal fields, daring the mine owners and their bought police forces to arrest her again. Her work here was typical of the sacrifices this iconic organizer made in the second half of her life as she fought for the miners so badly exploited in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

Mother Jones is one of the most fascinating characters in American history. An Irish housewife who had little connection to political activism for much of her adult life, she emerged in middle age as a fiery agitator after her husband and all four of her children died of yellow fever in Memphis and her dress shop burned in the Chicago fire of 1871. She quickly became the voice of the mineworkers, especially in the coal country of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. She bridged generations of activism, being extremely close friends with Terence Powderly while also hailing the rise of the United Mine Workers and radical activists that Powderly could barely understand at his peak in the 1880s. She said she was much older than she actually was, which had both rhetorical powers and helped cement her in our historical memory, as she claimed to be 100 years old the year she died when in fact she was probably 93.

By 1897, she was known as Mother Jones, wearing out of style Victorian black dresses and using the mantle of motherhood as central to her organizing prowess. Calling her “mother” both established her as a maternal figure among the miners but also centered her emphasis on childhood and motherhood in organizing. For instance, she opposed women’s suffrage and ultimately believed that women should be taking care of their children rather than getting involved in politics. Her own life story made this stance not hypocritical. She also used children in her organizing, including the 1903 Children’s Crusade, a march of miners’ children from Pennsylvania to Theodore Roosevelt’s home in Oyster Bay, New York, where the children carried signs reading, “We want to go to School and not the mines.” Roosevelt refused to meet with them. She worked for the UMWA but attended the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 and worked as an organizer for the Socialist Party in the late 1900s, returning to the UMWA as a paid organizer in 1911.

Though all of these actions, Mother Jones became known as “the most dangerous woman in America,” a title given to her by a district attorney in West Virginia named Reese Blizzard. During a 1902 trial where she was charged with ignoring injunctions against miners holding union meetings (First Amendment in the coal fields indeed!), Blizzard pointed at her, saying, “There sits the most dangerous woman in America. She comes into a state where peace and prosperity reign … crooks her finger [and] twenty thousand contented men lay down their tools and walk out.” That wasn’t true and served the interests of the owners to say that their employees were actually good people but stupid and easily led astray by outside agitators, instead of admitting their employees had a bloody good reason to go on strike. Anyway, the nickname stuck and this attitude from employers was something Jones reveled in.

In the fall of 1913, Mother Jones traveled to Colorado to participate in mineworkers’ organizing in the coal fields in the southern part of that state. Conditions in the coal fields were all too typical of the time: complete industry control over a workforce that was polyglot and desperate. Working conditions were horribly dangerous. Between 1884 and 1912, 1,708 workers died in Colorado coal mines (over 42,000 nationwide). Companies controlled not only the mines but housing, stores, and education. Union organizing was met with brutality and murder. Effectively, the coal companies controlled workers’ lives in Colorado as they did in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. These were Mother Jones’s people.

The companies did not welcome Jones’s presence. She was thrown off company property several times. She was arrested twice. After the first arrest, she was placed in a comfortable hospital for a month. After all, she was an elderly woman and a bit harder to crack the whip on than the miners themselves. But on March 22, 1914, she was arrested again. This time, the companies were less kind. They threw her into the Huerfano County jail in Walsenburg. This was no nice hospital. She spent 23 days in the jail.

The United Mine Workers tried to capitalize on Jones’s arrest. They issued a pamphlet describing (and perhaps exaggerating a bit) the conditions this old woman had to suffer through as she lived her faith of defending the miners. The pamphlet discussed the filth, the rats in the cell, the snow pouring in a broken window, a guard jabbing her with a bayonet. On the other hand, the mine owners and their friends accused Mother Jones of having been a prostitute in a Denver brothel in 1904 and said her support for Coxey’s Army had consisted of procuring women for sex. On both sides, Mother Jones elicited strong opinions.

After her second release, Mother Jones went to Washington DC to testify on the conditions in the coal country. A few days later, the Colorado coal wars would see their most violent incident, with the Ludlow Massacre. Between Ludlow and the aftermath when enraged miners went on a rampage against anyone associated with the coal companies, up to 200 people died in this strike, possibly the most deadly in American history. John D. Rockefeller Jr. agreed to meet with her about the conditions of the miners as part of his public relations effort when he was savagely attacked for his role at Ludlow.

Mary Jones died in 1930. Earlier that year, on the day she supposedly turned 100, Mother Jones was filmed with sound about workers’ rights.

Sad, Indeed.

Gay MAGA Complain About Getting Banned From Gay Bars by God

Sad! Read on Substack

Dear Humans,

BEHOLD! Gay Republicans are finding out they cannot wear the red hat of hatred in LGBTQ+ nightclubs.

1. Gay Bar Bans Bigots

Last week, Badlands, a beloved LGBTQ+ nightclub in Sacramento, posted this heavenly announcement:

“Moving forward, MAGA-related attire will not be allowed in the venue. This decision is not about banning political beliefs — it is about ensuring that Badlands remains a space where our community feels comfortable and supported.”

That’s not censorship. That’s community care. And this is not the first bar to make the news for banning MAGA, either. Last week a bar in Indianapolis went viral for kicking out one of these bigots.

2. “What the Heck? Let’s See What Happens”

Steven Bourassa, the idiotic Trump supporter whose actions inspired the bar to make the change, told local news station KCRA:

“I’ve never worn a red [Make America Great Again] hat to the gay bars before. I said, ‘What the heck? Let’s see what happens.’ We were having drinks and hanging out, and it was a pleasant time. So I was really impressed. And I complimented security on the good job they did.”

What didst this imbecile think wouldst happen?!?

This is not a prank show. This is real life. And you’re not the main character.

3. “It’s About Bullying”

“This decision is not based upon protecting our community,” said Preston Romero, president of the Log Cabin Republicans of Sacramento.
“It’s about bullying and singling out one particular political ideology. And we believe that that’s unfair.”

WHAT HEINOUS HYPOCRISY!!! Because when trans kids are banned from sports, queer teachers are forced back into the closet, and drag queens are treated like criminals—they don’t say ONE DAMN WORD.

But when a gay bar sets a boundary to protect its patrons from symbols of literal hatred? Suddenly it’s bullying? Give God a damn break!

**Preston Romero**, president of the Log Cabin Republicans of Sacramento.

4. God’s Final Word

And after all the hypocritical outrage, Bourassa says he’ll still go to Badlands but he’ll just leave the hat at home.

“I didn’t have any problems,” he said. “I’ll still go back… but I’ll leave the hat at home now.”

This man got banned, agreed with the ban, and is going right back.

REJOICE, everyone! We finally found the thing that can break the MAGA cult…and apparently it’s gay sex.

5. We’re Fighting Back And It’s Working

This isn’t just a moment, it’s momentum.

And it’s building everywhere you look.

People are fighting back everywhere.

Here’s how we fight:

Keep people engaged & informed with truth, hope and laughter.
Rally thousands of voices to push back against fascism.
Build an independent platform where truth can’t be silenced.

And it’s working.

📈 LOOK AT THIS: (snip-go look. The clicks help God [the Substack.])

An Early Monday Brain Cleanser

From ‘Himalayan fur goblin’ to ‘teacup werewolf,’ these silly videos are helping dogs find homes

(I’m sorry you’ll have to click through to see the video; either the live headline above, or the link beneath the next graf. It won’t embed. It’s worth it, I promise!)

Nashville animal shelter volunteer Adrian Budnick was looking ideas to showcase the adoptable dogs on social media. Looking for a Himalayan fur goblin or a teacup werewolf? Her silly videos have increased both adoptions and donations. (AP video/Kristin M. Hall)Published 7:06 AM CDT, March 22, 2025

https://apnews.com/video/from-himalayan-fur-goblin-to-teacup-werewolf-these-silly-videos-are-helping-dogs-find-homes-0244d1b2f4df422ebe7e62304be87671

A Thing About Which I Feel Strongly;

the post along with the comments beneath it are important to read. There are ways to make our directions to our government known. Even if a person can’t show up, a person can send a pizza or some cold drinks to a group who’s out speaking out. We can each do a thing. Meanwhile, please read Tengrain’s post, and the comments, as they’re important to know.