DearCongress
IsTheGovernmentShutdown.com? It’s registered to one Zach Seward, senior editor of Quartz. Which is conveniently the source of the two articles displayed on the bottom of its home page. Damn you, Seward!
Trending: The #DearCongress hashtag. It’s more than 3 years old (a comedia going by the handle @lilduval appears to have started using it in response to a State of the Union address, but it’s suddenly back with a vengeance, being promoted by NBC’s Today show. It’s an unscientific, pungent look at how the government shutdown is starting to play out across the country. The Tampa Bay Times has also curated a bunch.
Assignment for a data-analytics reporter: map these #DearCongress tweets by Congressional district.
Slate reports on the government shutdown as if the US was a banana republic far away. A sample: “The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity.”
Wondering what happens to .gov, aka, the federal web, during a government shutdown? All FOIA processing will be stopped; the FEC site will go static; but Regulations.gov and THOMAS will stay online. Our friends at the Sunlight Foundation are finding out more details and updating this post as they do. Government employees are also being told to stay away from official email and stop using their government-issued Blackberries during the shutdown. And NASA’s @AsteroidWatch account won’t be warning us about approaching hazardous interplanetary objects either.
This is what Twitter is for: “Reporters tweeted Monday night that they could smell booze on the lawmakers working to strike a last-minute spending deal on Capitol Hill.”
Over on HealthCare.gov, the Health Insurance Marketplace is open.
Just in time for the start of Obamacare’s health exchanges, the folks at Consumer Reports have launched HealthLawHelper.org, a website that takes visitors through a series of simple questions to help them navigate the new law and figure out what steps they should take, if any, to benefit from it.
In other news around the web
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