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.
FoxNews.com prefers to refer to it as a government “slimdown.”
Behold Fox News’ epic coverage of Day #1 of Obamacare. All the Fox tricks, tics, and tendencies in one daylong effusion:
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.
Were anti-Obamacare hackers trying to pull a DDOS attack on the New York state health exchange website?
John Boehner’s latest strategy — to push through a series of partial government funding bills — is falling apart. The first bill, to restore veterans benefits, just failed to muster a two-thirds majority needed to pass.
Whelp, all three partial spending bills failed.
Back to the drawing board for Boehner and Co. Also for Cruz, Lee and company — who were quick to encourage this strategy and claimed credit for it.
More on tonight’s failed partial funding votes: (1) Eric Cantor said after the vote they knew the bills would fail; (2) some Dems think today’s move was a stall tactic; (3) House majority whip says they’ll bring the bills up for a vote again Wednesday, but under different rules where only simply majority required for passage. More here.
Martin Bashir taught me today that you can say “a-hole” on TV.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re going to be publishing two longform pieces a month going forward. A few we’ll do in-house. But mainly we’ll commission them from freelancers or outside writers. We’ve got a couple more in the pipeline. But we’re also very open to pitches. Just shoot us a line at our main email address up top with the subject line “Longform Pitch.”
Rick Perry says his wife misspoke when she pretty clearly said she opposes abortion personally but believes it is a “women’s right.”