Were anti-Obamacare hackers trying to pull a DDOS attack on the New York state health exchange website?
At the height of the Snowden revelations, I got to thinking whether the US government and particularly the Intelligence Community didn’t have a structural problem on its hands. Having worked indirectly in, with, albeit basically on the margins of the tech world for a decade (through various aspects of running TPM), I know that Snowden is no one-off. His mix of mindset and ideology are in fact pervasive within the tech and hacker worlds – a deep belief in transparency, an equally deep skepticism toward power and authority and a sense of right and wrong (perhaps rooted in the binary nature of code) that is deeply-held but not always smoothly applied to the ‘real’ world outside. Whatever you think of Snowden or what the NSA was doing, it seemed to me that the Intelligence world had a basic problem on its hands. They absolutely need these people to create and run their systems and yet many of these folks come in with a mindset and worldview that is in deep conflict with much of what the intel community – especially the signals intelligence world – is trying to do. That became the basis of our first TPMPrime longform piece (formerly ‘minis’). If you’re a Prime member, here it is. Let us know what you think.
We’ll be publishing two of these longforms a month going forward.
Behold Fox News’ epic coverage of Day #1 of Obamacare. All the Fox tricks, tics, and tendencies in one daylong effusion:
FoxNews.com prefers to refer to it as a government “slimdown.”
So Boehner secretly fought to hold on to hold on to health care subsidies for congressional staff. As it happens, it makes sense that he would since what’s being proposed puts burdens on congressional staff that no one else in the country is forced to face. But telling since he’s now making doing the opposite a condition of reopening the government.
We just did the math: The House has now voted 46 times to kill off Obamacare.
46 times!
And yet … Rand Paul said on CNN this morning, “We haven’t had a big debate about Obamacare really since it passed in Congress.”
Jon Stewart on government shutdown false equivalency: “This is when someone is driving to work and there’s a car coming directly at them in their lane. That’s not a game of chicken. That’s an a**hole causing a head-on collision.”
Democrats’ margin over Republicans on the generic congressional ballot is the largest Quinnipiac has measured so far in this cycle.