Thoughts for the Day, March 25, 2025: Opening day on Thursday with no centerfielder.
Opening Day
The Tigers open their season on Thursday at 7:00 PM on ESPN against the defending world champions Los Angeles Dodgers. The Tigers enter the season minus their top three centerfielders. Backup centerfielders Matt Vierling and Wenzell Perez will start the season on the 10-day injured list and regular centerfielder Parker Meadows is on the 60-day injured list. Losing Meadows is a major loss as the Tigers were 54-28 when Meadows was in the lineup last season and 32-48 when he was not in the lineup.
Further complicating the start of the season, the Tigers play 25 of their first 31 games against teams that made the 2024 playoffs. If the Tigers can get to Memorial Day somewhat close to a .500 won/loss record, they should be in good shape for the rest of the season.
I am excited for the opening of the season. The Tigers’ pitching staff should keep them in most games, and manager A.J. Hinch is sure to win some games by out managing the opponent.
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Breach
Per multiple media outlets Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted group chat that included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen. The White House confirmed on Monday the account in The Atlantic.
Here are excerpts from various media outlets.
On March 15, the messages told of the forthcoming attack. “I will not quote from this update, or from certain other subsequent texts,” Goldberg writes. “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. What I will say, in order to illustrate the shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation, is that the Hegseth post contained operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing.”
On the chat, reactions to the military strikes were emojis of a fist, an American flag, fire, praying hands, a flexed bicep, and “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” “Kudos to all…. Really great. God Bless,” and “Great work and effects!”
In the messages, with Goldberg on the line, Hegseth promised his colleagues he would “do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” or operations security. In a message to the team outlining the forthcoming attack, Hegseth wrote: “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”
This leads to my Quote of the Day: “Pete Hegseth isn’t qualified to oversee a garage sale, let alone helm the most sophisticated and important fighting force in the free world. He has no business having such power or influence and this kind of disaster is only surprising in that it occurred so quickly, and yet in the wake of a truly historic Constitutional fuck-up like this, these supposed America-loving zealots are suddenly silent and asking us to move along.” John Pavlovitz, The Beautiful Mess.
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“Lock Her UP” and say “It wasn’t Me”
As I read the stories about the leak of classified information and subsequent denial by Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth on the messaging app Signal, two phrases come to my mind; “Lock her up” and “it wasn’t me.”
“Lock her up,” was the rallying cry of the Trump campaign in 2016 after it was revealed Hillary Clinton stored government emails on her personal email server.
“It wasn’t me” comes from a song by Shaggy, in which a guy was caught by his girlfriend doing hanky-panky with his neighbor. The guy’s friend keeps telling him to say, “it wasn’t me.”
Since the breach, there has not been a peep from Republicans about “locking him up”. At the same time Pete Hegseth is doing his best “it isn’t me” by saying, “Nobody was texting war plans. That is all I have to say.”
When asked about the breach, President Trump responded: “I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of The Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business. I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what?”
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, also said no classified material was shared in the group chat, despite The Atlantic’s report that it had been given specific details of the Yemen strike before it took place, and she attacked the journalist who revealed as “sensationalist.”
Two of the Trump administration’s top intelligence officials denied in a frequently contentious Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday that classified information was shared in an encrypted group chat in which details of an attack on Yemen were discussed in the presence of a journalist who had been mistakenly added to the conversation.
Pressed repeatedly about the breach in the previously scheduled hearing, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, both denied that classified material had been shared in the chat in which they were included, and played down the seriousness of the revelation that it had taken place on a messaging system, Signal, not approved for such sensitive discussions.
This leads to my Question of the Day: Who are you going to believe, Jeffrey Goldberg, or Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration?
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Speak up and speak out: Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin has a different take.
From the Free Press, U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a former intelligence officer and acting assistant Defense Department secretary, roundly criticized top Trump administration officials for sharing classified military information on a publicly available messaging service, saying it could have been seen by America's enemies and resulted in U.S. fatalities.
"If these were regular soldiers or a civilian CIA officer like I was, they would be reprimanded, likely fired, prosecuted and possibly jailed," said Slotkin,
"I've worked at the White House for both Democrat and Republican Presidents and I've never seen this kind of mishandling of classified info," Slotkin wrote Monday night on social media platform X.
"It's sloppy at best and puts the military involved in these sensitive operations at risk," continued Slotkin, who noted in a string of posts that Signal is not set up to protect American secrets and the U.S. maintains a separate computer network on which it shares such confidential information. "This is all classified information," Slotkin wrote. "Even the fact that they were considering this strike is classified. And for good reason: the time and method of an attack, if intercepted by our enemies, could have gotten American troops killed."
Please call your members of Congress today. The U.S. Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Tell the operator where you’re from and the operator will connect you to your representatives and senators. I tested this out today. It is very simple. They will ask for the congress member you want to contact. They will then switch you to that office
Orchid of the Day: Jon Zajac, Kristy Zajac, Alli Zajac and Addie Zajac of Tecumseh High School, for winning the Girls MHSAA Division 2 Championship. Jon is the AD, Kristy is the Head Coach, and Alli and Addie are members of the winning team. Alli was a finalist for Miss Basketball in Michigan. Kristy was the MHSAA Division 2 Coach of the Year in 2024. Jon and Kristy were star basketball players at Eastern Michigan University.
I have known Jon since he graduated from Eastern and was a teacher and golf coach at Ypsilanti High School. As a basketball official and baseball umpire, I had to work with Jon in his roles as the AD at Belleville and Tecumseh high schools. I couldn’t be happier for Jon and his family.
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Quote of the Day: See above by John Pavlovitz
Orchid of the Day: See above for the Zajac family.
Onion of the Day: Pete Hegseth. What he did should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his career.
Lyrics of the Day: Working double time on the seduction line
She's one of a kind, she's just mine, all mine
Wanted no applause, it's just another course
Made a meal outta me, and come back for more.
If you think you know the answer, send me your answer in the comments section of the blog.
Answer to Lyrics of the Day for March 24, 2025: More than a Feeling, Boston
Question of the Day: Who are you going to believe, Jeffrey Goldberg, or Pete Hegseth?
Video of the Day: Billy Joel & Brian Johnson: You Shook Me All Night Long (Live at Madison Square Garden 21/03/2014)
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The comsec compromise on Houthi attack by the national security team and while using the commercial encrytped communications app, Signal, is serious. A damage assessment of the comsec "spillage" will be conducted. Knowing what may have been compromised in the content, the real time effects, any enduring damages or further openings, as well as those involved is vital and standard. In making a comparison to Hillary's compromise of 40+ months and over 30,000 communication threads while at Secretary of State to this one spillage event provides a good comparison on intelligence damage assessment and hypocrisy that further damages our nation. Hillary had a regular computer server installed in her home closet and operated like any.persons home server without any protections. She directed improper (technically an illegal tap) connection into the State Department secure information network and frequently transferred information from an approved network to her home brew everyday server. She certainly was proven to have bridged the "air gap" between our most secure systems and her home brewed closet server. In DOD such a compromise results in loss of clearance and loss of employment with exposure to prosecution, I've seen it happen.
Hillary illegal email system was crossed with Defense, CIA, NSA, systems. It was an espionage agents dream. When such a immeasurable compromise occurs for years, there's enough there to defeat operations and planning in all our military, all our intelligence with added economic damages, it destroys our nations ability to be secure.
Knowing what's on the encrypted side and how it appears when deecrypted side is the ultimate win. So when this massive compromise was discovered the need for a damage assessment is vital. No damage assessment was performed, Hillary was set to run for office, even the words "damage assessment" were not made public and knowledgeable media ignored it. Her home brewed email were the most damaging comsec incident bar none and is on par to US code breaking of German Enigma and Japan JN25 Naval codes - nation killing war winning comsec compromise. You'll never see anything on the compromise that Hillary's email caused, there was no real damage assessment - Obama/Comey gift to the presidential contender. Don't expect the Communist Chinese to reveal what they gained. There were reports that Romanian intelligence transferred some of Hillary's home brew email. Hillary didn't erase all her email, she missed a few and the FBI found them, they included Top Secret/SCI/Keyhole items, our highest comsec level. Mishandling TS/SCI/Keyhole is a crime and the law does not require intent, only that comsec practices were ignored by anyone who was so entrusted.
Unrelated? but sometime later the entire US operation using local human intelligence (humint) sources was rolled up in Lebanon and the Middle East, many were caught and killed; also it's reported that our entire CCP humint sources were ID'd, monitored, some turned and finally all our local sources were captured and disappeared, so our entire operation in China was neutralized. Unrelated, during the Obama Hillary regime the CCP successfully went after the employment records of all Defense Department, Executive Branch and others. They knew where to look. The CCP knows the entire history, background investigations, travel orders, training, personal ID information of millions (myself included - got the compromise notification). Please continue to bring up Hillary so we may continue to contrast these events, it beats comparing egg prices.
Also, I love John Pavlovitz’s writing. My ‘second favorite’ Substack writer 😉