Behind the scenes, patience has run out.
The Obama administration has decided that the apparent Chinese-backed hacking attack of the Office of Personnel Management, resulting in the compromise of personal information on over 20 million Americans, was so brazen that it will demand American retaliation. The form that retaliation will take
is not yet decided.
The decision to retaliate is a sudden reversal for the White House, which had previously indicated it might not even publicly blame China for the cyberattacks. Administration officials have only privately accused Beijing of ordering the digital strike.
“One of the conclusions we’ve reached is that we need to be a bit more public about our responses, and one reason is deterrence,” one senior administration official involved in the debate told The Times. “We need to disrupt and deter what our adversaries are doing in cyberspace, and that means you need a full range of tools to tailor a response.”
The potential effectiveness of economic or legal sanctions is seen as dubious; other, more direct retaliation options include
counter-hacking.
One of the most innovative actions discussed inside the intelligence agencies, according to two officials familiar with the debate, involves finding a way to breach the so-called great firewall, the complex network of censorship and control that the Chinese government keeps in place to suppress dissent inside the country. The idea would be to demonstrate to the Chinese leadership that the one thing they value most — keeping absolute control over the country’s political dialogue — could be at risk if they do not moderate attacks on the United States.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—Obama's "working class whites" and "Hispanic" problem:
The media blowhards tell me Obama can't win poor whites. How do they explain this?
Democratic Sen. Barack Obama holds a 2 to 1 edge over Republican Sen. John McCain among the nation's low-wage workers [...]
Obama's advantage is attributable largely to overwhelming support from two traditional Democratic constituencies: African Americans and Hispanics. But even among white workers—a group of voters that has been targeted by both parties as a key to victory in November—Obama leads McCain by 10 percentage points, 47 percent to 37 percent, and has the advantage as the more empathetic candidate.
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Got that? Despite the always-wrong bloviators who prattled on and on about Obama's "working class" problem, fact is he does exceedingly well with that target demographic. Not that we didn't know any better. From the beginning we argued that Obama's problem was an Appalachian one, hurting him in states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and corners of Ohio and Pennsylvania. On the other hand, Obama won working class whites handily in other states like Oregon, pretty much the entire West, and elsewhere.
The issue was more of regional appeal than it was about a broad racial construct. Of course, that was too much "nuance" for the political blowhards. Just about anything usually is. There's a reason they're always so wrong.
Tweet of the Day
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show: Where else will you find someone with the courage to tackle the issues of vocal fry, resting face, penisgate and politics? In two days the debate will be behind us, but today
David Waldman offers expert pre-debate analysis with
Greg Dworkin &
Joan McCarter. The A-Team has been picked. Those other little guys played their heart out, let’s give them a hand. Jeb Bush loses the election. But what if Donald Trump wins? No, really. The President speaks on the Iran deal. Black Lives Matter matters. Joan discusses the actual policy stands of the debaters & today’s scheduled cybersecurity vote. David delves further into Joan’s article on CISA, Ron Wyden & the OLC.
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