Last Call For NatSecWonk

If you're going to go on Twitter and relentlessly criticize the White House on national security issues, make sure you're not working for the White House's national security team when you do it.

A White House national security official was fired last week after being caught as the mystery Tweeter who has been tormenting the foreign policy community with insulting comments and revealing internal Obama administration information for over two years.

Jofi Joseph, a director in the non-proliferation section of the National Security Staff at the White House, has been surreptitiously tweeting under the moniker @natsecwonk, a Twitter feed famous inside Washington policy circles since it began in February, 2011 until it was shut down last week. Two administration officials confirmed that the mystery tweeter was Joseph, who has also worked at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and Joe Biden. Until recently, he was part of the administration's team working on negotiations with Iran.

During his time tweeting under the @natsecwonk name, Joseph openly criticized the policies of his White House bosses and often insulted their intellect and appearance. At different times, he insulted or criticized several top White House and State Department officials, including former National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and many many others.

Now as @natsecwonk, Joseph was brutal towards the GOP as well, but as any real national security wonk would know,  there's no such thing as completely covering your tracks if you continue to use the same modus operandi for two years.  If you're going to go after the people who employ you, eventually, they're going to notice.

Check out Daily Beast's record of some of @natsecwonk's most...interesting...tweets, too.  There's a lesson to be learned here.

Apparently Denial Is A River In New Jersey

Because failed US Senate candidate and GOP nutjob Steve Lonegan is now blaming the GOP shutdown he wanted for his loss to Cory Booker last week.

"There is no doubt in my mind or in the minds of any of my campaign staff that the shutdown cost me the election," Lonegan said in an interview with the New Jersey Star-Ledger on Monday. "If I had known it was going to happen and that it was going to be handled so badly in Washington, I wouldn't have run for Senate."

Lonegan supported the shutdown while he was running for Senate.

Booker was long expected to clinch the nomination and win the Senate seat. Lonegan trailed in most polling of the race, even before the shutdown.

It's one thing to lie to the universe and blame a position you supported for your loss.  It's another thing entirely to do it on something as asinine as a government shutdown in a state like New Jersey.  This guy isn't competent enough to run a leaf blower.  He's going to find out the hard way that he won't get any Chris Christie style passes from the NJ GOP or the press on this one.

Making A Moose Of A Website

President Obama vowed on Monday to see the problems with the healthcare.gov website fixed as soon as possible.

Obama’s new pitch is the health care law itself is “working just fine.” It just has a balky website that needs to be fixed — and will be fixed, he said. 

“Nobody is madder than me about the fact that the website isn’t working as well as it should, which means it’s going to get fixed,” Obama said. 

Much of Obama’s pitch centered on the guts of the law, rather than its online front door. He said there was no “sugarcoating” the tech problems, but he predicted that people will be patient in order to access health care they wouldn’t otherwise get. 

“The essence of the law, the health insurance that’s available to people is working just fine,” Obama said. “The problem has been that the website that’s supposed to make it easy to apply for insurance hasn’t been working. The website has been too slow, people have been getting stuck during the application process.” 

Obama said he has called for a “tech surge” to get HealthCare.gov running up to speed. He again advertised the government’s toll-free phone number as a way people can sign up while HealthCare.gov does not function as promised.

This is a measured, responsible solution to what have been legitimate problems with the website.

This however is not.

Sarah Palin says the glitches in the online rollout of the Affordable Care Act are a feature, not a bug. 

The former half-term Alaska governor and failed vice presidential candidate suggested Sunday in a Breitbart.com column that design flaws were intentionally implemented to make the system more difficult to use and drive Americans to accept a government fix. 

President Barack Obama admitted Monday that the site needed to be overhauled and announced a “tech surge” to make those repairs, but Palin said the eventual fix would be a Canadian-style socialized health care system.

“These unusable Obamacare websites make a reasonable person wonder how this administration could have made such a colossal bungle of the rollout when they are, after all, the same savvy experts who had the most sophisticated and precise campaign websites ever built,” Palin writes. “They could pinpoint voters down to a city block, but they messed up a website that cost the government over $200 million more than it cost Apple to develop the first iPhone. Purposeful?”

This is why Sarah Palin is not Vice-President, and Barack Obama is President.  As somebody who actually works in IT for a living, I can safely say Sarah Palin knows even less about high-end web solutions that are designed to handle hundreds of thousands of people than she does politics.

StupidiNews!

• Human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say the Obama administration's use of armed drones in Pakistan and Yemen could constitute war crimes. 
• A county judge in Texas has switched political parties from Republican to Democrat and blasted Tea Party Republicans for shutting down the federal government in a video announcement. 
• Tuesday elections in Israel will see the selection of Jerusalem's mayor as incumbent moderate Nir Barkat is challenged by hardliner Moshe Leon while Palestinians boycott the elections as usual.
• Netflix most likely passed HBO last month in paid US subscribers, reaching some 30 million Americans compared to the pay cable giant's 28.7 million in September.
• Researchers investigating disappearing bees and "colony collapse disorder" are pointing towards evidence that a common insecticide weakens the immune system of bees, leaving them vulnerable to infection.