60 Minutes Left In Your Credibility

Looks like last Sunday's 60 Minutes hatchet job on Benghazi is falling apart faster than CBS reporter Lara Logan's reputation.

CBS correspondent Lara Logan apologized to viewers Friday for a disputed "60 Minutes" report on the Benghazi attack and said the program would issue a correction. 

"Today the truth is that we made a mistake," Logan said on "CBS This Morning." 

At the center of the dispute is Dylan Davies, a British security contractor who under a pseudonym gave "60 Minutes" a heroic account of his involvement in the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. After the program aired, the Washington Postand the New York Times discovered contradictions between the account Davies gave "60 Minutes" and the descriptions of the attack the contractor gave to his employer and to the FBI. 

Those reports raised questions about whether Davies was actually present at the Benghazi compound on the night of the attack, casting doubt onto the contractor's credibility as a source. 

CBS issued a statement Thursday that said the network had learned of "new information" undercutting Davies' account and was looking into the matter. 

Logan told viewers that the program took Davies' vetting "very seriously," but that the contractor "misled" them. 

"We were wrong to put him on air," Logan said.

Of course, the real issue is that this now discredited Benghazi bombshell was cited by several Republicans as the reason they were going to filibuster judicial nominations this week, and did so, blocking nominations for one DC Circuit Court judge and threatening more.

But no big deal, right?  Media's in the tank for Obama, right?  Oh, but it gets worse for CBS.  The book that Davies wrote?  CBS owns publisher Simon and Schuster, who printed the book.

Simon & Schuster has pulled The Embassy House after author "Morgan Jones" (real name Dylan Davies) was exposed as giving contradictory statements about his whereabouts on the night of the 2012 Benghazi attacks. Earlier today, 60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan apologized for airing Davies' account in an October 27 report. 

Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, said in a statement from spokesperson Jennifer Robinson: "In light of information that has been brought to our attention since the initial publication of THE EMBASSY HOUSE, we have withdrawn from publication and sale all formats of this book, and are recommending that booksellers do the same. We also are notifying accounts that they may return the book to us."

Threshold Editions released The Embassy House on October 29, two days after 60 Minutes ran a segment featuring Davies and his claims about his activities on September 11, 2012. The 60 Minutes report rehashed old myths about Benghazi, including the debunked claim that there's a "lingering question" about why no U.S. military forces from outside the Libya were able to help the diplomatic facilities.

60 Minutes' report on Davies and Benghazi failed to disclose that Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS. Lara Logan later conceded to The New York Times that the program should have disclosed the financial connection.

So yes, the "exclusive interview" with the author of the book that was Logan's "Benghazi bombshell" was really CBS just hyping the book it owned the publisher for, with an imprint dedicated to putting out right-wing propaganda, and CBS then knowingly ran with a false story to attack Democrats.

The network cooked this Benghazi falsehood up from conception, published the book, then hyped the book and its garbage on 60 Minutes in order to appeal to wingers.

A former "60 Minutes" producer who was fired over a 2004 story about then-President George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard said Friday that CBS' now retracted story about the attack in Benghazi, Libya was done to appeal to conservatives.

"My concern is that the story was done very pointedly to appeal to a more conservative audience's beliefs about what happened at Benghazi," Mary Mapes told Media Matters. "They appear to have done that story to appeal specifically to a politically conservative audience that is obsessed with Benghazi and believes that Benghazi was much more than a tragedy."

But "liberal media" and everything.

Healthcare Dot Hack

When anything and everything the government does becomes "an affront on individual freedom" to some, then the enemy becomes government itself.  That of course justifies any and every measure in response, morality be damned.

Researchers have uncovered software available on the Internet designed to overload the struggling Healthcare.gov website with more traffic than it can handle.

"ObamaCare is an affront to the Constitutional rights of the people," a screenshot from the tool, which was acquired by researchers at Arbor Networks, declares. "We HAVE the right to CIVIL disobedience!"

In a blog post published Thursday, Arbor researcher Marc Eisenbarth said there's no evidence Healthcare.gov has withstood any significant denial-of-service attacks since going live last month. He also said the limited request rate, the lack of significant distribution, and other features of the tool's underlying code made it unlikely that it could play a significant role in taking down the site. The tool is designed to put a strain on the site by repeatedly alternating requests to the https://www.healthcare.gov and https:www.healthcare.gov/contact-us addresses. If enough requests are made over a short period of time, it can overload some of the "layer 7" applications that the site relies on to make timely responses.

A relatively simple tool designed to specifically break the federal health care exchange web site.




People trying to sign up for health insurance? Who cares when you can watch the world burn and "Destroy Obama Care"?

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• The Philippines are still trying to assess the massive damage from Super Typhoon Haiyan's landfall early Friday, hundreds may be dead in hardest-hit Tacloban City.
• A deadly virus has killed more than 700 bottlenosed dolphins in the Atlantic since July, and researchers are scrambling to deal with beach strandings of dead dolphins.
• October's government shutdown period job numbers were much better than expected, pushing major stock indices to new all-time highs.
• The reality of NYC Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio's new job?  Big budget holes and labor contracts with over 300,000 city employees.
• A new study from Carnegie Mellon University finds computer science students pick the safest plaintext passwords, business school students' passwords are the easiest to crack.