The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 03.26.25 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | March 26, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.26.25 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Horribly sick Monday and Tuesday. Still not 100%, but I’ll see what I can do.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Volokh Conspiracy Asked the Question I’ve Had for Decades, also,  University Professors Are Now Worried About Free Speech
Director Blue: Top 20 Mary McCord Fun Facts, also, Top 20 Democrat Judges Gone Wild
EBL: “Honorable” Judge Boasberg thinks he is president, Fire Country, Wicked, Democrats Keep Digging, and Former Utah Rep. Mia Love, RIP
Twitchy: NPR CEO’s Tweet Making The Rounds As She Futilely Denies Bias Allegations, Death Threats Surge Against Gal Gadot, and Energy Department Rolls Back Biden-Era Appliance Regs
Louder With Crowder: Ayanna Pressley Claims The “Trump Cabinet Is On Track To Be The Whitest Cabinet In History”, Smokeshow goes viral showing proper technique in how to wreck shoplifters , According to MSNBC having to register to vote is raaaaacist now, Jasmine Crockett Calls For Ted Cruz To Be “Knocked Over The Head,” Then Claims She Never Called For Violence, and 2028 Democrat frontrunner Occasional Cortex tells a Bernie rally she is pro-free speech, but we have receipts
Vox Popoli: Stay Off the Internet When You’re Mad, Seven Librarians, India Will Not Fight Russia, I Apologize, I Did Not Know Your Game, and Last Chance to Keep Odessa
Bacon Time: All Credibility Lost
Bugscuffle Gazette: A Break, The Cookie Tin…Of Doom, and Where Do I Start?
Stoic Observations: Kermadec Journal
Toni Airaksinen: Why Israel Is So Important To Islamists
Upstream Reviews: Sherlock Holmes & The Shadwell Shadows, The Lord of the Rings – A Catholic Worldview, and The Icarus Changeling
Defending The Wood Perilous: Vanity Vanity All is Vanity
Cedar Sanderson: The Green Race
Gab: The Case For A Segregated Internet, also, Modern “Christian” Art Is A Joke – Here’s How To Fix It

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: March Midrats Free For All, also, Constellation – Frigate Antigone, 
Dana Loesch: When You Add A Progressive Journalist To The War Chat, also, Democrat Princess Jasmine Crockett Mocks Gov. Abbott’s Disability
Don Surber: What Snow White Could Have Been, also, An actual insurrection
STUMP: DOGE – The Shot Across The Bow, also, The Week In Meep, 

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Sherlock Holmes & The Shadwell Shadows
The Lord of the Rings – A Catholic Worldview
The Icarus Changeling
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Category: Linkagery

‘Signal-Gate’: CIA Sabotage? Or Another ‘Anonymous’ in the Trump White House?

Posted on | March 25, 2025 | Comments Off on ‘Signal-Gate’: CIA Sabotage? Or Another ‘Anonymous’ in the Trump White House?

Tuesday evening, I watched Laura Ingraham interview National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who promised to “get to the bottom” of how a supposedly secure text-message conversation between top officials of the Trump administration “accidentally” included notorious anti-Trump Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. Democrats and their media allies are trying to turn “Signal-gate” into a scandal, while Trump’s defenders are circling the wagons and denouncing Goldberg. But what we’re not getting is a plausible explanation of how this happened.

My friend Matt Margolis has kept digging away at this story, without getting any definitive answer to the big question, and what is being said by Waltz and other administration officials doesn’t help explain this. They’re defending, not explaining, and if I were Donald Trump I’d give Waltz about 72 hours to figure out who screwed the pooch, or else he would become the former National Security Adviser.

Was it a CIA setup? Matt Margolis writes:

[A]ccording to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Joe Biden first authorized the use of Signal for government communications.
This jibes with what CNN’s Scott Jennings revealed Monday night. His sources told him that Signal was preloaded on various devices when the Trump administration took over for the Biden administration.
“I did learn a few things in some of my conversations, if you’re interested,” he said. “One is that the Signal program was preloaded on a number of devices and agency computers in this circuit when they got there. So, in their view, it was already in use.”
On Tuesday, [CIA Director John] Ratcliffe confirmed that the Biden administration installed the Signal messaging app on CIA computers and approved it for work use.
“So that we’re clear, one of the first things that happened when I was confirmed as CIA director was Signal was loaded onto my computer at, uh, the CIA, as it is for most CIA officers,” Ratcliffe said in sworn testimony Tuesday. “Um, one of the things that I was briefed on very early, Senator, was by the CIA records management folks about—about the use of Signal as a permissible work use. It is. That is a practice that preceded the current administration to the Biden administration.”

OK, so if the CIA installed the app, we could imagine a scenario in which someone on the agency’s staff had a “backdoor” on the administration communications devices, and used that access to insert Jeffrey Goldberg into the Signal chat group. If that’s what happened, the CIA operative responsible needs to be identified, indicted, arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But that’s just one scenario, and it’s not even the worst-case scenario. No, far worse is the possibility that this mysterious “accident” was done by a backstabber inside Team Trump.

You remember Miles Taylor, don’t you? He was the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who, under the byline “Anonymous,” published a 2018 New York Times article with the headline, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.” A year later, “Anonymous” published a book and, shortly before the 2020 election — by which time he was actively campaigning for Joe Biden — Taylor admitted that he was “Anonymous.” So what may have been exposed by “Signal-gate” is that someone else is now going the “Anonymous” route.

This is where I find myself troubled by what Waltz said in that interview with Laura Ingraham. She raised the idea — obviously, it’s occurred to others besides me — that a staffer was responsible:

“Is someone in your intel team trying to cause trouble here? Because that’s the scuttlebutt out there.”
Waltz answered, “No. Look, this is a great group. The president has a great team. This is not first term.” . . .
Ingraham then asked, “So, you don’t know what staffer is responsible for this right now?”
Waltz answered, “Well, look, a staffer wasn’t responsible. And, look, I take full responsibility. I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated.” . . .
Ingraham followed up, “So, a staffer did not put his contact information?”
Waltz answered, “Of course not.”

Hmmm. This doesn’t add up. Waltz appears to be saying that he himself entered Jeffrey Goldberg’s number onto the message chain, even as he denies having any contact with Goldberg.

The point here is, nobody inside the White House should be communicating with Jeffrey Goldberg, ever, for any reason. So where did this number come from? Who put it into the group chat? Waltz seemed to be telling Ingraham that somehow he had gotten “spoofed,” that Goldberg had engaged in some kind of impersonation — so that Goldberg’s number showed up on Waltz’s phone under somebody else’s name, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how this could have happened. Like, you get a phony text message that says it’s from Amazon, and your package didn’t get delivered so “click here,” etc., but is the NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER going to fall for that kind of stupid hacker trick on his GOVERNMENT-ISSUED SECURE PHONE?

Anyway, the story so far doesn’t make sense. Waltz has promised to “get to the bottom of it,” and he better be pretty damned quick about it, or he’s going to be spending more time with his family, as they say.



 

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Category: Donald Trump, Scandal

Chuck Schumer Tells the Truth?

Posted on | March 24, 2025 | Comments Off on Chuck Schumer Tells the Truth?

Ed Morrissey is having a gloat about Chuck Schumer’s appearance Sunday on Meet the Press, where Kristen Welker challenged him: “Leader Schumer, are you feeling pressure to step down?” To which Schumer replied. “Look, I’m not stepping down.” And this is gloat-worthy, because Schumer has become toxic with the Democratic Party’s “progressive” grassroots since he punted on his previous threat of a government shutdown. However — wow, how did this ever happen? — I feel a need to say a few words in defense of Schumer.

In explaining his vote in favor of the continuing resolution (CR) that will keep the government funded for another six months, Schumer said, “The CR was certainly bad, you know, the continuing resolution. But a shutdown would be 15 or 20 times worse,” before going on to explain that such a shutdown would have empowered Trump to pick and choose which agencies and programs got closed until Congress could reach a spending agreement. And this is certainly true, even if Schumer’s suggestions about what Trump might have done are paranoid fantasies invented to stoke the fears of liberals. Far more important to Schumer, however, is that Democrats would have been blamed for the shutdown.

Republicans already had their “Schumer Shutdown” talking points ready to roll if Schumer had filibustered the CR. That’s one thing that the lunatic fringe of the Democratic Party doesn’t wish to acknowledge — there was a Senate majority in favor of passing the CR, and in order to prevent that, Schumer would have had to order Democrats to vote “no” on cloture, thus filibustering the bill. Democrats are on record denouncing the filibuster as an outdated vestige of Jim Crow, just like Democrats are on record declaring that government shutdowns are horrible, and yet the Left was demanding that Schumer invoke a filibuster to cause a shutdown? The optics of such a maneuver would be awful, and Schumer could see that train coming down the tracks at full steam. All those video clips of what Democrats said about filibusters and shutdowns in the past would have been playing on endless loop, and if you think the favorability of the Democratic Party is bad now, it would have been far worse with a “Schumer shutdown.” This is just a fact.

As Ed Morrissey says, Schumer had calculated on House Republicans coming up short of a majority on the CR, and needing Democrat voters to pass it, which would have led to negotiations favorable to Democrats. Unfortunately for Chuck, Trump helped House Speaker Mike Johnson twist enough Republican arms to get the votes he needed, which put the ball in Schumer’s court, and there was then no good option for Senate Democrats — either pass the CR, or take the blame.

Look, I know there are people on our side who hate the CR as much as any left-wing Democrat hates it — for completely opposite reasons — but when Republicans have control of the White House and both houses of Congress, it would look very bad if we couldn’t avoid a shutdown. “Amateur hour,” is what that would look like to a lot of voters, and the GOP needs to avoid lending credibility to the Democrats’ accusation that Trump is causing “chaos” in Washington. No shutdown, no chaos.

That’s the smart play, and if some MAGA true believers want to call me a sellout for advocating the smart play, well, I can’t help it. The way Washington operates, we seldom get a chance to throw a 50-yard TD pass, and instead must content ourselves to push the ball down the field one play at a time. Don’t turn the ball over, don’t commit any stupid penalties, and execute the fundamentals — that’s winning football.

If we want to convince voters that the Democratic Party is a dangerous collection of fringe kooks — which, of course, they are — then it behooves us to avoid acting like fringe kooks ourselves. And you can already see how this pays off: Chuck Schumer actually did the right thing for once in his life, and it’s driving the AOC wing of the Democratic Party berserk.



 

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Category: Budget, Chuck Schumer

Rule 5 Sunday: Babe in Boots

Posted on | March 24, 2025 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Babe in Boots

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five California Burning Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, “Enchanted”, MAGA Team Trump – The Executive Strikes Back, Ukraine 1944, Black Death [Featuring Gwen Stefani], Lily Stewart Mugs For The Camera, Standing Up, Galway Girl, Irish Dance, Firefly, and Dolan’s Pub

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Ari Dugarte, DNA Reveals Genetic Bottleneck in Chesapeake Sturgeon, Fish Pic Friday – Lakyne Nicole, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, Nothing Else Matters, St. Patrick’s Day Flotsam and Jetsam, The Monday Morning Stimulus and Palm Sunday 

BACON TIME: Rule 5 Redheads

Thanks for all the luscious links!

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: A Week of Beatings

Posted on | March 23, 2025 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: A Week of Beatings

— compiled by Wombat-socho

baseball

It was one of those weeks, and then some.

Once again, it was a bad week to be a Senators fan. Not only did we get swept by the (formerly) cellar-dwelling A’s, we got swept by the Dodgers as well, and just for good measure lost two out of three to the Red Sox when we came home for what would have been next Tuesday’s games. We traded our second-round draft pick to the Braves for 3b Steve Braun before the series against Boston, but his left-handed bat didn’t help much since the Sox started three lefties against us. Welp.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

‘Supports Digestive Health’
EBL
357 Magnum

Making Sense of Democrat Disarray and the Future of the MAGA Revolution
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

The Worst Pundits EVER!
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

FMJRA 2.0: Breakthrough!
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

Rule 5 Sunday: Waitress on the Ramparts
Animal Magnetism
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In The Mailbox: 03.18.25 (Afternoon Edition)
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

In the Mailbox: 03.18.25 (Evening Edition)
EBL
A View From The Beach
357 Magnum

As Ace Says, ‘Woman’
EBL
The Daley Gator
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 03.20.25
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

Double Standards for Jew-Haters?
Small Dead Animals
EBL
357 Magnum
A View From The Beach

In The Mailbox: 03.21.25 (Afternoon Edition)
EBL
357 Magnum

Top linkers for the week ending March 21:

  1.  EBL (11)
  2.  357 Magnum (10)
  3.  A View From The Beach (8)

Thanks to everyone for all the links!

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Category: FMJRA Award

The Intersection of Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Posted on | March 22, 2025 | Comments Off on The Intersection of Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Emma Vigeland and Sam Seder on Election Night

If you were in need of expert guidance, wouldn’t you seek out someone smarter and more knowledgeable than you? Wouldn’t you try to research their background to determine if they were qualified to advise you? Or at least ask around for recommendations from friends? If you were looking for insight on the current political situation, who would you trust?

The headline refers to two well-known cognitive biases: “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities” — sometimes oversimplified to “why dumb people think they’re smart.” And the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect refers to the fact that, when the media reports on a subject we know well, we easily spot their errors, and yet continue to trust them to report accurately on everything else — we forget how wrong they were, thus suffering a sort of amnesia about media inaccuracy.

Why are people still watching The Majority Report? Some recent episodes (e.g., “Chuck Schumer Is a Disaster,” March 19) have gotten more than 100,000 views, which is a rather substantial audience for a YouTube channel. Where is the evidence that Sam Seder actually knows anything about politics or public policy? Is he any more knowledgeable or insightful on this subject than the typical member of his audience? And what about his youthful protégé Emma Vigeland? What sort of credentials does she bring to the table as a political commentator?

Yes, on the eve of the 2024 election, Emma Vigeland predicted that Kamala Harris would win all seven “battleground” states — Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada — as well as Iowa, for a total of 325 Electoral College votes.

As Maxwell Smart would say, “Missed it by that much.”

Emma Vigeland was not just slightly wrong, but completely wrong.

Emma suffered a credibility-destroying humiliation and yet, she’s still blabbering away on YouTube every day, and tens of thousands of people are still watching. The question is, why? What would cause someone to spend their leisure hours watching a political pundit with a track record of catastrophic error? If you are sincerely interested in politics, wouldn’t you prefer to become better informed by watching someone who actually knew what they were talking about? What kind of people would choose instead to become misinformed, by relying on a source like Emma Vigeland who is demonstrably ignorant of basic electoral politics?

Emma said Kamala Harris would “eke out a victory in Iowa” — Trump won Iowa by a 13-point margin. How can you possibly be that wrong, and still be taken seriously as a commentator on American politics?

Emma Vigeland has proven herself to be of “limited competence” in politics, a field in which she preposterously claims to possess expertise — a classic example of Dunning-Kruger Effect, and the fact that she still has an audience is proof of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. No matter how wrong a liberal pundit may be, liberals don’t care — they’re like a junkie craving another fix of the drug that’s killing them.

Watch the “highlights” (if such is the proper term) of Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland’s Election Night live podcast:

 



 

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Category: Media Bias

What Democrats Will Never Explain

Posted on | March 22, 2025 | Comments Off on What Democrats Will Never Explain

Glenn Reynolds calls attention to this graphic depiction of the Biden administration’s policy of flying in hundreds of thousands of “inadmissable aliens” from three countries — Venezuela, Nicaragua and Haiti — during the span of just two years. This policy was an abrupt departure from previous administrations, and there has never been any explanation of why it happened. It’s relevant and newsworthy today because Trump has just ordered all these aliens deported.

If you look at the timeline on the graphic, you realize that the Biden administration’s unprecedented policy of mass importation of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Haitians seems to have been implemented right around the time Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats lost their House majority in the 2022 midterm elections. Was that timing coincidental, or was there a political calculus involved in this decision?

Now that the Trump administration is in office, and have access to all the communications of the agencies involved — DHS, State Department, etc. — is it possible there could be an investigation to reveal the decision-making process behind this policy? Because I can pretty much guarantee that there’s not a single Democrat in public office who wants to discuss this. If most voters had been aware of the numbers involved, Trump would have won by an even larger margin, and unless Democrats emphatically repudiate this Biden-era policy, they might never win another election. Start asking questions, and demanding answers.



 

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Category: Immigration

In The Mailbox: 03.21.25 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | March 21, 2025 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.21.25 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: You Can’t Just Shoot Someone – Take Two
EBL: Black Death [featuring Gwen Stefani], Spring : Antonio Vivaldi, and Wearisome Activist Judges
Twitchy: Politico’s Spin On What Cuts To The Bureaucracy Could Create Contains Quite The Admission, Damning Thread Exposes Main Organizer Of Tesla Takedown Terrorism, and Trump Vows to Open His Own Wallet To Give Stranded Astronauts OT Pay
Louder With Crowder: Jasmine Crockett caught on video cheering on leftists organizing vandalism and attacks against Tesla owners, Farmer uses his chickens to illustrate progressives’ terrifying plans for how we are “allowed” to live our lives, Someone gave Dylan Mulvaney a podcast and as cringe as you would think the trailer would be… it’s worse, Why Domestic Terrorism is a Leftist Phenomenon, and Woke Superintendent rants that keeping boys out of girls’ sports is just like… women’s suffrage
Vox Popoli: Sgt. Boreings Daily Wire Club Band, The Prophet of the 21st Century, Dual-Citizens Don’t Exist, and UATV is Under Attack
Jim McCoy: Laws & Prophecies
Stoic Observations: The Problem With Empowerment
Postcards From Barsoom: Ukrainada
Upstream Reviews: Shards of Honor

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: So, COCOM Reform?
Dana Loesch: The Justice System’s Activist Problem
Don Surber: The court is out of order

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Laws & Prophecies
Shards of Honor
Best Sellers – Patio, Lawn, & Garden
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Category: Linkagery
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