TPM’s Benjy Sarlin was in high school, a few blocks from the World Trade Center, on Sept. 11, 2001. He writes about two of his classmates and the paths they took after 9/11, for The Atlantic.

For all the problems President Obama has now — and they’re getting hard to count — he still runs even or just ahead of his main potential opponents in virtually every poll. What continues to surprise me is that he does about the same in North Carolina. Whatever else is happening in our politics, North Carolina — once reliably Republican in presidential politics — seems to have clearly moved into the swing state category.

Yesterday NASA launched two lunar satellites on a mission to produce an extremely detailed gravitational map of the moon.

As I noted in my overnight post, TPM continued to publish news at its temporary home on Tumblr during the most extreme phase of last night’ DDOS attack. Still it disrupted some of our publication and reporting. We are now in the process of publishing stories that we were not able to publish yesterday afternoon and evening. The attack is on-going. But we have put in place countermeasures that are allowing the site to remain online and accessible, albeit in a diminished, less robust capacity.

As some of you may have noticed, TPM was offline and inaccessible for roughly 8 hours starting just before 5 PM on the East Coast this evening. The site was the victim of a massive denial of service (DDOS) attack. Here’s what we know about what happened. Read More