RSN: Genetically Modified Potato Is Approved by USDA, Low Bridge: The Lingering Death of Health Care Reform

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Andy Borowitz | Obama Urged to Work Closely With People Suing Him

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "President Obama is under increasing pressure to work closely and coöperatively with a group of people who are suing him in federal court, the people suing him confirmed today."
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How Voter Suppression Helped Produce the Lowest Turnout in Decades
Juan Thompson, The Intercept

 

(photo: Eric Gay/AP)

Thompson writes: "Yes, President Barack Obama's poor performance and approval rating undoubtedly played a role in the lower turnout. But the evidence is piling up that systematic voter suppression, including voter ID laws and dubious vote-fraud prevention software, played a significant part in keeping people from casting ballots, as well."
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Mexican AG: Burned Remains Probably Are 43 Missing
Christopher Sherman, Associated Press
Sherman writes: "Suspects in the disappearance of 43 college students have confessed to loading the youths onto dump trucks, murdering them at a landfill, then burning the bodies and dumping the ashen remains into a river, Mexican authorities said Friday."
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Charles Pierce | Low Bridge: The Lingering Death of Health Care Reform
Charles Pierce, Esquire

 

(photo: Getty Images)

Pierce writes: "On Tuesday, there was something of an ideological shift in our politics. You may have noticed. Then, yesterday, a federal circuit court of appeals pretty much shoved the question of marriage equality in the direction of the Supreme Court."
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Buy Your Daughter All the Butch Dolls You Want, She Still Won't Be Able to Get an Abortion in Texas

 

Goldie Blox calls itself, 'A company out to inspire the next generation of female engineers.' (photo: Goldieblox.com)

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, The Intercept
Vargas-Cooper writes: "And what is freedom? Freedom is buying a butchy-girl action figure. Not interested? Well, your progressive-leaning parents who mistake 'buying stuff' for collective action might be!"
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Supreme Court to Hear New Obamacare Challenge
Adam Liptak, The New York Times
Liptak writes: "The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear a new challenge to the Affordable Care Act, potentially imperiling President Obama's signature legislative achievement two years after it survived a different Supreme Court challenge by a single vote."
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Genetically Modified Potato Is Approved by USDA
Andrew Pollack, The New York Times
Pollack writes: "A potato genetically engineered to reduce the amounts of a potentially harmful ingredient in French fries and potato chips has been approved for commercial planting, the Department of Agriculture announced on Friday."
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Right Wingers Sabotage Obamacare!

Chairman McCaul Questions Witnesses at Hearing on Cybersecurity....

Published on Nov 13, 2013

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, questions witnesses at a hearing entitled "Cyber Side-Effects: How Secure is the Personal Information Entered into the Flawed Healthcare.gov?" 11-11-13

Steve Marmel

Hey, here's another tidbit of information you probably haven't heard about.

It's exactly how they try to rig elections in their favor except that it's exactly like that, but about this.

 

 

 

Right wing cyber attacks on Healthcare.gov website confirmed

November 14, 2013

Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Committee published a video on their Youtube page highlighting a portion of the committee questioning Roberta Stempfley, acting assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cyber-security and Communications, who confirmed at least 16 attacks on the Affordable Care Act’s portal Healthcare.gov website in 2013.

Roberta Stempfley highlighted one successful attack that is designed to deny access to the website called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is designed to make a network unavailable to intended users, generally through a concerted effort to disrupt service such as repeatedly accessing the servers, saturating them with more traffic than the website is designed to handle.

Right wingers have been distributing the link to the necessary tools to perform the attacks on the Healthcare.gov website through social networking, as pointed out by Information Week, and other websites .

The name of the attack tool is called, "Destroy Obama Care!"

"Destroy Obama Care!", that's the advertised name given to the attack tool by "right wing patriots" who are distributing the DDoS tool through downloads on social networks, which promises to overwhelm the Healthcare.gov website.

"This program continually displays alternate page of the ObamaCare website. It has no virus, Trojans, worms, or cookies. The purpose is to overload the ObamaCare website, to deny service to users and perhaps overload and crash the system," reads the program's grammar- and spelling-challenged "about" screen. "You can open as many copies of this program as you want. Each copy opens multiple links to the site."
"ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people," it adds. "We have the right to civil disobedience!"

Marc Eisenbarth, research manager at the DDoS defense firm Arbor Networks says that the DDoS attack tool has been used in the past to attack perceived political wrongs.

"This application continues a trend Arbor is seeing with denial-of-service attacks being used as a means of retaliation against a policy, legal rulings or government actions," said Eisenbarth.

Some online news sites have talked about this attack tool being distributed by right wingers, and Congress held hearings this week and talked about the attacks, but there is not one mainstream news organization that seems to be interested. But they all continue to talk about the Healthcare.gov website not working as it should, and if it will be ready by the White House's self imposed deadline of December 1, 2013.

And if you watch the attached video of the questioning of Roberta Stempfley, by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), they both are aware of the attacks, but neither mentions the website attack tool, “Destroy Obama Care!”. The Republican asking the questions obviously has the agenda of attacking the Affordable Care Act as all Republicans do, and it would not be in his best interests to mention that people on his side of the aisle are attacking it. And the DHS did not bring it up for obvious reasons of not wanting to advertise the attack tool.

A link to the attack tool “Destroy Obama Care!” was specifically omitted from this report for the same obvious reasons.

http://www.examiner.com/article/right-wing-cyber-attacks-on-healthcare-gov-website-confirmed