Brainless celebrities, Obamacare, and Drudge: Today's news for January 9th

The big news today is brainless celebrities attacking president-elect Donald Trump. Here is a brief sampling:

Fox News:

Meryl Streep, Jimmy Fallon and more use Golden Globes stage to slam Trump

CNN:

Meryl Streep attacks Trump in Golden Globes acceptance speech

There are plenty of intelligent people out there attacking Trump for good reasons. Jimmy Fallon and Meryl Streep, even if they get it right, are not it. They are more like blind pigs finding an acorn if they happen to stumble across the truth. What would you expect from a second-rate comedian and a woman who spends her life portraying other people, with little introspection to who she actually is?

Moving right along...

U.S. News & World Report:

The GOP’s Obamacare Conundrum

Obamacare is "hurting people right now," House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters Thursday. That's why he wants to have a "transition period" away from it so that "people do not have the rug pulled out from underneath them while we get to a better place."

If that seems like a self-contradictory set of notions ... well, it is. In just a few breaths, Ryan neatly encapsulated the intellectual contradiction and political problem at the heart of the GOP's ongoing passion for repealing the Affordable Care Act. After all, if the law is hurting people "right now," why do we need a "transition period"? If people are "hurting right now," wouldn't repealing the law right now be a welcome respite rather than people having "the rug pulled out from underneath them"?

Nice rhetorical catch. Sadly, the real news is what this article doesn't say: The problem with repealing and replacing Obamacare is that we are likely to get a different Rube Goldberg machine from the Republicans. Nobody recognizes that government involvement will, in the long term, kill more people by adding expenses to health care that weren't there before. The expenses may come in financial costs or in time costs or even with insufficient doctors and nurses to handle all the "free" health care being provided by government.

All of this is being done to defend a non-existent "right to life", which flies in the face of the inevitability of death. If the Republicans want to create a truly great health care system, they would remove government from the health insurance business entirely. No amount of red tape and regulations is going to "give" anyone anything.

In other news...

Business Insider:

Someone is trying to take down the Drudge Report — and it's a mystery who's behind it

The Drudge Report, the highly trafficked conservative news website, has been knocked offline for extended periods of time over the course of the last two weeks, succumbing to large distributed denial of service attacks, according to its founder, Matt Drudge.

And it's a mystery who's behind it all.

Drudge wrote on Twitter that a December 30 attack was the "biggest DDoS since [the] site's inception."

A DDoS attack is executed by using hijacked computers or electronic devices to flood a website with redundant requests, aiming to overload the website's hosting server and render it unavailable.

But, according to cybersecurity experts who spoke to Business Insider, using such a method to take down the Drudge Report would not be easy.

The website is already equipped to handle a high volume of visitors and scale out to accommodate spikes in traffic. Moreover, a website that generates so many page views would likely employ strong defense measures, the cybersecurity experts said.

Whodunit?

For his part, Drudge has pointed the finger at the US government, tweeting that the traffic which downed his website had "VERY suspicious routing [and timing]."

"Attacking coming from 'thousands' of sources," he wrote on the social media platform. "Of course none of them traceable to Fort Meade…"

Drudge seemed to imply that his site was taken down in connection with punishment leveled against Russia for election-related hacking. The first attack on his website came hours after President Barack Obama announced the US would impose sanctions against Moscow, and the Drudge Report had previously been identified in a Washington Post story as responsible for spreading Russian propaganda.

"Maybe they think this is a proportional counterattack to Russia," tweeted Sheryl Attkisson, a former CBS News investigative journalist. "After all they have decided @Drudge is Russian fake news, right?"

Neither the White House nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to requests for comment. But cybersecurity experts who spoke to Business Insider discounted Drudge's claim on grounds that the government attacking a US journalist's website would be a blatant violation of the Constitution — as well as generally improbable.

"If [Vladimir] Putin wanted to take down a website, I'm sure he could order it," said Jared DeMott, chief technology officer of Binary Defense Systems and former security engineer for the National Security Agency. "If Obama wanted to do something like that, he'd have to go to different people. It would be a hard conversation to have."

"Maybe if there was a military reason to have it," DeMott added. "But domestically, there is no way."

DeMott...posited that another nation-state could be the potential culprit.

"It definitely could be a nation-state," he said. "They do stuff like that on an ongoing basis, whether they are looking for intel or trying to destabilize a political region."

[Ajay Arora, CEO and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Vera,] agreed, saying that only a "small number of groups" in the world have the sophistication necessary to execute an attack to take out the Drudge Report for extended periods of time.

"I would say it would be a group or nation-state that has pretty sophisticated methods and means," he said. "Given the fact it's happened a number of times and is persistent for well over a few minutes, and it's coming from multiple sources, against a site that would have a lot of protection, it would indicate it's someone pretty sophisticated."

Chris Weber, co-founder of the firm Casaba Security, explained that because the Drudge Report is "getting so much traffic already," a DDoS attack would need to be on a far "greater magnitude" to be effective against it.

"It does seem unlikely that the Drudge Report would be easily taken down or slowed significantly by a standard DDoS attack," he said. 

While Matt Drudge's theory may not be right, the article's experts dismiss his conclusion too easily.

It is a safe assumption that whoever is involved in the DDoS is a Leftist source. While it could be a private hacktivist organization:

But hacktivist organizations almost always take credit after a successful attack has been executed, experts said. So far, no one has claimed credit for the attacks on the Drudge Report.

That narrows our list of suspects down to a government-sized operation. What foreign government would care enough about the Drudge Report to risk being outed as the source of the DDoS?

No, the most likely culprit with the most motive IS the United States government. As we learned from the IRS targeting controversy scandal, even mindless bureaucrats are capable of using the full force of the government against any perceived threats. As we learned from Edward Snowden, the government is perfectly capable of a massive hack attack.

With the Obama administration pushing saber-rattling rhetoric about "fake news" and "Russian hacking", clandestine government-sponsored hacking operations could have been brought to bear against some of these alleged fake news sources, including Drudge. Unfortunately for them, Drudge is too high profile, and shining his light on the government undoubtedly had the Obama administration cockroaches scurrying for cover. DDoS attack over...for now.