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Anatomy of a Smear Gone Very, Very Wrong

by donnajansen Posted on January 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This note from the Daily Caller is perhaps the most awesome “correction” of the year the month the week:

An earlier version of this article reported claims made in a Princeton student newspaper article that appears to have been fabricated. Kirkpatrick denies the reporting from the Daily Princetonian and The Daily Caller has not been able to confirm it independently.

Reading this, you might think that a Princeton reporter turned out to have made up some facts, and after extensive investigation the Caller has ferreted this out and is letting its readers know. These disputed facts still might be true, mind you, but they can’t confirm them and the Kirkpatrick guy denies them.

Except for a few things:

The source is a spoof issue of the Princeton Daily News from 1990, which contains stories about Elvis, aliens, and the student government embezzling all the student fees and flying off to Rio.
The Caller has “not been able to confirm” its main charge because it didn’t happen.
And the best part: The Kirkpatrick in question is New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick, who wrote a piece about Benghazi a few days ago that conservatives didn’t like. The Caller’s mistake was made in an attempt to smear Kirkpatrick by claiming that he posed nude for Playgirl 23 years ago.

This is the kind of thing that I’d normally ignore, but it’s just too breathtakingly half-witted to pass by. Does the Caller seriously think that even the part of the story that’s true—that Kirkpatrick streaked through campus as an undergrad—could possibly call his Benghazi reporting into question? This has to be the lamest smear ever, and you, my loyal readers, deserve to know about it. Dave Weigel has all the details if you want to bask in the entire glorious idiocy of the thing.

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Anatomy of a Smear Gone Very, Very Wrong

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Planet Likely to Warm by 4C by 2100

by Leon51tt8 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk initiative.

Temperature rises resulting from unchecked climate change will be at the severe end of those projected, according to a new scientific study.

The scientist leading the research said that unless emissions of greenhouse gases were cut, the planet would heat up by a minimum of 4°C by 2100, twice the level the world’s governments deem dangerous.

The research indicates that fewer clouds form as the planet warms, meaning less sunlight is reflected back into space, driving temperatures up further still. The way clouds affect global warming has been the biggest mystery surrounding future climate change.

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Planet Likely to Warm by 4C by 2100

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Chart of the Day: American Cars Are Getting Older

by Anatoleia3 Posted on January 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Americans are keeping their cars longer than ever before. In 2007, the average age of cars on the road was a little over 10 years. Today it’s a little over 11 years.

The proximate cause of this is the Great Recession. If you don’t have enough money to buy a new car, you’re going to keep your car longer. But I wonder how much is the result of cars being more reliable than in the past? My car is nearly 13 years old, and it basically still runs fine. A couple of decades ago, even a Toyota would have been getting a little long in the tooth at that age.

This mainly matters because it has an impact on what happens over the next few years as the recovery (hopefully) picks up steam. New car sales are a prime driver of economic recoveries, and if the aging of the US fleet is producing pent-up demand for new cars, this will help the economy. But if consumers are keeping their cars a little longer because they still run fine, then there might not be as much pent-up demand as we think.

We’ll have to wait and see, because current data is inconclusive. Automakers had a pretty good year in 2013, but they finished up with a tepid December. And the existing fleet continued to age in 2013 despite those strong sales. Considering the higher reliability of modern cars and the weakness of the recovery, I wouldn’t be surprised if car sales in 2014 are OK but not great, and the fleet continues to age a bit.

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Chart of the Day: American Cars Are Getting Older

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NSA Paid Security Company to Adopt Weakened Encryption Standards

by BrennaKGTB Posted on December 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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A few months ago, we learned via the Snowden leaks that the NSA had been busily at work trying to undermine public cryptography standards. One in particular was a random number generator used for creating encryption keys in RSA’s BSafe software. But Reuters reports there’s more to the story:

Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.

….Most of the dozen current and former RSA employees interviewed said that the company erred in agreeing to such a contract, and many cited RSA’s corporate evolution away from pure cryptography products as one of the reasons it occurred.

But several said that RSA also was misled by government officials, who portrayed the formula as a secure technological advance. “They did not show their true hand,” one person briefed on the deal said of the NSA, asserting that government officials did not let on that they knew how to break the encryption.

Well, look. There are a very limited number of reasons that the NSA would be so eager for you to use their encryption software that they’d be willing to pay you $10 million to do it. Surely someone at RSA must have had some inkling of what was going on.

Probably more than an inkling, if I had to guess. But this certainly goes to show just how serious and relentless the NSA has been about crippling the public use of cryptography. The president’s surveillance commission recommended on Friday that this stop, and since trustworthy encryption is critical to trust in the internet as a whole, it would sure be nice of President Obama put a stop to this.

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NSA Paid Security Company to Adopt Weakened Encryption Standards

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Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

by JeffreyCole Posted on December 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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Well, my switch to Chrome didn’t go well after all. It turned out that the MoJo tech team had an excellent reason for not supporting it: For some reason, when you paste text into our blog software, Chrome copies over every last bit of HTML formatting from the source document. Why? Beats me. But it doesn’t really matter, because Chrome lacked so many handy features that I’ve gotten used to in Opera that I would have given up on it anyway. So I tried Firefox again, and so far it’s been great. It had most of the features Chrome didn’t, and the few it lacked could be easily added via extensions. Performance is fine, and it mostly works well with the MoJo web software.

It doesn’t have a built-in email client, which is one of the Opera features I like best, but that was eliminated in the most recent Opera update anyway. Given all this, there’s really not much reason to stick with a browser that’s supported by nobody and that merely produces shrugs (or worse) when you complain about their site not rendering properly.

But before I make the switch permanently, I have a question for the hive mind. I don’t really recall why I gave up on Firefox a couple of years ago, but my recollection is that it had gotten slow and crash-prone. Anyone have any comments on that? Has it gotten better? Or does it still tend to crash at inopportune moments?

Also: Are there any add-ons that are so fabulous I should check them out immediately?

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Halftime Report: Chrome Out, Firefox In

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Red States Remain Adamantly Opposed to Medicaid Expansion

by shaz066ow7 Posted on December 20, 2013

Mother Jones

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A lot of people, myself included, have hoped that pressure from health care groups will eventually persuade even deep red states to enact the Medicaid expansion that’s part of Obamacare. After all, the expansion is almost entirely paid for by the federal government, and the loss of Medicaid money hurts doctors and hospitals in the affected states.

Today, Dylan Scott reports that the key word here is “eventually.” For now, anyway, red-state politicians are adamant about never, ever expanding Medicaid by even a dime:

Top officials for powerful trade organizations in three of the largest states not expanding Medicaid under Obamacare told TPM that they have effectively given up that fight until political conditions change, setting their sights on 2015 at the earliest.

“What I’m really struggling with is — I don’t even know how to talk about expanding Medicaid without just pissing Republicans the hell off and making them think I’m part of the problem,” said a top official for one of the industry groups, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about the political reality in their state and avoid upsetting the chances of expansion in the long term.

….These organizations approached Medicaid expansion as a typical legislative issue last year — the kind where the promise of billions in federal dollars and opportunity to insure thousands of your constituents would trump ideological purity….”We found that this issue is much bigger than that. The influences are much stronger than a state-derived influence in terms of keeping states in the ‘No’ column,” a trade group official in a third state said. “We can’t even call it Medicaid expansion here. That’s a politically incorrect way of saying it.”

Ideological purity continues to trump the prospect of helping the poor, even when that help is all but free. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your modern Republican Party.

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Red States Remain Adamantly Opposed to Medicaid Expansion

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Most Americans Have No Clue How Health Insurance Works in America

by IndiaDeloach Posted on December 19, 2013

Mother Jones

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EBRI has released its annual workplace benefits survey, and for the most part it’s a triumph of status quo bias. Most people are fairly satisfied with their benefits and not especially eager for change. But there’s one particular question that produced a different response. Here it is:

I’m scratching my head a bit over this. The thing is, employer health insurance is the gold standard of American health insurance. Sure, every year employee cost sharing rises and copays go up, but it’s still great compared to nearly all individual plans. Deductibles are small and out-of-pocket maxes are low. Plus it’s nontaxable. If you have a choice between employer insurance and individual health insurance, about 99 percent of the time you’d be crazy not to take the employer plan.

And yet, 66 percent (!) of respondents wanted to go out and choose a plan on the open market and then get reimbursed in one way or another. The only thing I can figure is that this demonstrates just how little most people know about health insurance. They have no idea that the full value of employer health insurance is free of income tax, which makes it a great deal compared to spending your own money. Nor, as so many people are suddenly discovering about Obamacare, do they realize that individual plans usually have large deductibles and stratospheric out-of-pocket maxes. For those reasons, buying an individual plan on the open market and then getting reimbursed for it is almost certainly a losing proposition.

Maybe I’m missing something here, and people understood the question differently than me. But on the surface, this sure seems to indicate that most Americans simply have no clue about how health insurance works in this country.

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Most Americans Have No Clue How Health Insurance Works in America

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Fed Announces Beginning of the End of QE3

by StefanWillison Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s official: we are tapering. The Fed announced today that it would reduce its QE3 bond-buying program from $85 billion per month to $75 billion per month.

So what does this mean? In a nutshell, markets will probably freak out temporarily. Econ pundits will write about a hundred thousand words today exploring every possible nuance of the decision. Ben Bernanke will tell everyone to calm down. In a day or two, there will be some news about the holiday buying season and the whole thing will be forgotten. Five years from now, there will be several doctoral dissertations about what it all really meant.

Substantively, though, this just isn’t that big a deal. You may now return to your regularly scheduled Obamacare bashing and/or defending.

UPDATE AT 11:12 AM: Apparently the Dow is up 100 points on the taper news. So markets don’t seem to be freaking out after all. If this holds, it will be the most quickly disproven prediction I’ve ever made, and yet another lesson that you should never make predictions. Will I ever learn?

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Fed Announces Beginning of the End of QE3

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This Might Be the Most Jaw-Dropping Tale of Fraud You Read This Year

by Lila3153jc Posted on December 17, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, a friend emailed to complain about this headline at NBC News:

Climate change expert’s fraud was ‘crime of massive proportion,’ say feds

Technically, this headline is correct. It’s about a guy who’s a climate change expert. And he did perpetrate a fraud. The thing is, his fraud had nothing to do with the fact that he’s a climate change expert. So why make it sound that way in the headline? Is it just clickbait for the fever swamp denier crowd?

And yet! You really, really ought to click the link and read the story anyway. Just ignore the ridiculous headline and dig in. This really is one of the more remarkable fraud stories of the year. I guarantee your mouth will be hanging open by the time you finish it.

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This Might Be the Most Jaw-Dropping Tale of Fraud You Read This Year

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Judge Rules NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional

by Hyatt Monien Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

A federal judge ruled today that the NSA’s mass collection of telephone records is unconstitutional. Via Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden released this statement:

“I acted on my belief that the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts,” Mr. Snowden said. “Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.”

Well, I hope so. But keep in mind that Snowden didn’t expose this program to the light of day. We’ve known about it in fuzzy terms since late 2005, and in very specific terms since 2006, when Leslie Cauley reported it in USA Today. The agency’s goal, she wrote then, was to create a database of “every call ever made” within the nation’s borders. In the intervening seven years, this revelation has basically produced nothing except a collective yawn.

I’m delighted that Snowden helped this get more attention, and delighted that a judge wants it to stop. But district court judges make lots of rulings that never go anywhere, and this is most likely one of them. Unfortunately, recent history suggests that neither the American public nor Congress—and apparently not the president either—is inclined to seriously rein in the NSA’s phone record surveillance.

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Judge Rules NSA Surveillance Unconstitutional

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