Yes. Look at it politically from his point of view. What was the alternative? Admit failure? Delay for a year -- after just winning the sequester against the hated Republicans who ran on exactly that proposition?

Whatever gave you the idea I said this was a conspiracy? The question about what the President knew does comes from the Watergate era, but that is incidental. It's just a very pertinent question.

According to the Washington Post:

"A final 'pre-flight checklist' before the Web site’s Oct. 1 opening, compiled a week before by CMS, shows that 41 of 91 separate functions that CGI was responsible for finishing by the launch were still not working. And a spreadsheet produced by CGI, dated the day of the launch, shows that the company acknowledged about 30 defects on features scheduled to have been working already, including five that it classified as 'critical'".

The question is, what did the President know, and when did he know it? We know the responsible White House staff knew the system would not work because it simply wasn't finished. And that's only for the parts that were to go live on October 1st. As we heard last week from the existing CTO on the project, there is still 30-40% of the backend system that hasn't even been written yet.

I don't think it is reasonable that no one told the President about this. I think the President knew, but decided to push it through anyway. Why? Personally, I think it's because he believed that the glitches would be forgiven, and because the press was behind him, he could always blame the other side, and they would go along as the usually do.

Point well taken

If you read the specifics, you'll find that there is plenty of leeway between what the auditors asked for (things like scanning for empty/default admin passwords, filing security audit reports in a central location, documenting that managers approved admin accounts, etc.) and what the IRS believed it had done to implement them.

If you ask me to implement something, I think I did so, and so I check that off as "completed", that is not lying.

This is more like a failed test case. The auditors are complaining that the IRS' implementation of their recommendations are insufficient.

" OTOH the problem with cutting government spending is that it involves firing people, which reduces salaries for everyone by increasing the supply of available labor while reducing the demand for said labor."

This has got to be the thousandth time I've read an analysis of debt from a Progressive that fails to account for the fact that government is only a redistributor of income. Any decrease in spending is an increase in the amount that taxpayers can keep for themselves.

The question really comes down to market efficiency. Collecting taxes to direct an economy is obviously less efficient than letting the economy spend its own earnings. The overhead of administration alone makes government spending generally a raw deal, efficiency-wise.

This post assumes that the actions of the federal government are in response to people's fears. That's your problem right there, you've got it backwards. It's the government who is acting in bad faith to begin with, and is then just looking for some cover to excuse it.

You didn't really think it takes $4 Trillion to catch a bunch of terrorists, did you?

Capitalism rewards profitable work. Whether that work is easy or hard is immaterial.

Well said. The analysis of the rationale for allowing veterans to vote was especially interesting, thanks.

Actually, I liked both the book and the movie, but for obviously very different reasons. Suffice it to say that the book was mined for characters, names, and context, and then an entirely different story was told. That sometimes happens in movies. An example of that happening in a good way is in Children of Men, which is really a terrific riff on the ideas and characters in the novel of the same name by PD James, but isn't the same story at all.

Why I liked Starship Troopers, the movie, is because the acting is superb. The plot is childish, the Nazism stupid, the splatterfest is stomach-turning, and the gratuitous nudity is sophmoric, but those actors are terrific, across the board. If you want to see the difference between having an A-team ensemble cast vs. a partial A-team, just watch any of the two sequels.

Akin to "Ender's Game depicts a society using children to commit xenocide" and "Orson Scott Card believes in a very traditional definition of marriage"?

Hey, asking citizens to just get out their cameras and document how a king tide affects their properties is fine with me. That's cheap, easy, and makes sense. Sure beats questionable schemes like carbon "taxes".

I love the idea of modular, transportable structures, but do they have to look like a pile of garbage bins with pins sticking out of the top? That's not industrial-cool, or retro-cool, that's just plain ugly. Makeover!

Whatever Snowden did to bottle up his stolen cache of documents, it has apparently kept the entire US security apparatus at bay.

Now, THAT'S a project that would look good on an IT resume, anywhere.

"I'm really the one who's 'work makes the company work' and it is really my work that the company is selling and turning into profit."

You couldn't be more wrong. Try doing your work without someone selling it for you. Try doing your work without someone in the back office making sure that the customers pay for the software sold by sales, so you can get a paycheck on time, like clockwork. Try doing your work without someone orchestrating, adjusting, and aligning your work with everyone else's, so the company actually delivers something the customer is willing to buy. Try doing your work without someone else looking over your work, checking and cross-checking for errors, so customers get delivered a good product that we know will work. Try doing all that without someone making sure you have a table to type on, a chair to sit in, and a functioning bathroom when you need it.

What you need, my friend, is to get out and start a startup company. There you will learn the value of teamwork, I guarantee it.