MOTHER JONES DAILY: The summer of embarrassing men, Amazon Got a Perfect Score on Disability Inclusion—From a Group It Helps Fund, Far-right influencers don't know what to do about Threads, EV charger hacking could imperil the security of the power grid, Choose your fighter: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg, Of course a thunderous fart wrecked an RFK Jr. dinner, The disastrous Oppenheimer movie you've never heard of 14JUL23

 

July 14, 2023 After somewhat of a quiet news week, it pains me to report that I'm still stuck on the thunderous fart that wrecked a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. event in New York. But who could blame me? The story has it all: gossip, irresistible quotes, and a real-life Kennedy, who, according to the New York Post, remained stoic amid the fracas. That's quite impressive for a man who otherwise does a fine job embarrassing himself all on his own. But Kennedy is far from alone in the apparent quest to humiliate themselves lately. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want a literal cage match. Chris Christie is managing to keep himself relevant in the Republican presidential field with quotes like, "I'd kick his ass." Meanwhile, the top candidate in that cursed field, Donald Trump, is reportedly planning to appear on more outlets that center around "combat sporting events" in order to appeal to the Barstool crowd. And perhaps the most anger-inducing for your newsletter writer, the father of Keke Palmer's kid—hopefully now an ex—had the nerve to publicly shame her over an outfit while dancing with Usher. The common denominator here is not hard to detect; the emphasis on traditional masculinity is in fact glaring. But even as my eyes roll, I can't help but also wonder if these antics appeal to the average dude. Your boyfriend, colleague, brother. If they do, then is the natural next step something that mirrors the hate on the far-right? I can't say. But the summer of men embarrassing themselves appears intent to rage on. In the meantime, here's to hoping we at least get a few downright absurd, genuinely LOL-inducing dispatches to keep us from crying. —Inae Oh Amazon Got a Perfect Score on Disability Inclusion—From a Group It Helps Fund So did a tobacco giant, an infamous HMO, and a target of child-labor lawsuits. BY JULIA MÉTRAUX SPONSORED CONTENT BY HEIFER INTERNATIONAL Free Goat Tote with Your Monthly Gift Heifer International is a global nonprofit dedicated to ending hunger and poverty. As a monthly donor, you’ll give families the resources, education and opportunity to thrive. If you join now, we’ll send you your very own goat tote to say thanks. Join today — and make a difference for a lifetime. Far-right influencers don't know what to do about Threads BY ALI BRELAND EV charger hacking could imperil the security of the power grid BY TIK ROOT Choose your fighter: Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg BY EAMON WHALEN Of course a thunderous fart wrecked an RFK Jr. dinner BY INAE OH Advertisement The disastrous Oppenheimer movie you've never heard of "Oppie" signed off with assurances, but MGM's big-budget picture didn't go as he'd hoped. BY GREG MITCHELL Support from readers allows Mother Jones to do journalism that doesn't just follow the pack. Donate Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by forwarding it to a friend or sharing it on Facebook and Twitter. For advertising opportunities see our online media kit. Were you forwarded this email? Sign up for Mother Jones' newsletters today. www.MotherJones.com PO Box 8539, Big Sandy, TX 75755

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Obamacare enrollments surging, HealthCare.gov working better & The Massive Republican Campaign to Sabotage the Affordable Care Act 20NOV13

THE repiglicans and tea-baggers and their corporate masters, the voluntarily ignorant, the haters, the liars, the greedy are all ramping up their attacks on Obamacare. At times the most rabid of those who oppose Obamacare are almost hysterical, lending credence to the need to increase mental health coverage. Their goal is to destroy Obamacare, to take us back to being the nation with the "best health care in the world, if you can afford it". WE MUST NOT, WE WILL NOT GO BACK to the days of people being denied health care because they can't afford it, to people being denied health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, to children being denied health care because they are uninsured, to families being destroyed financially because of catastrophic illness. There are problems with the launch of Obamacare, but the tens of thousands who have signed up since 1 OKT 13 and the tens of thousands "window shopping" on the government exchange and health care websites and even the numbers of people who tried to sign up but were not able to because of the website problems testify to the need and desire for affordable health insurance. This system will be fixed, and it will work in spite of the obstructionism of repiglicans, tea-baggers and jellyfish democrats. This from Daily Kos and HuffPost......

This should be the day's leading Obamacare news: enrollements across the country are surging, coming in ahead of projections in states across the country.

"What we are seeing is incredible momentum," said Peter Lee, director of Covered California, the nation's largest state insurance marketplace, which accounted for a third of all enrollments nationally in October. California—which enrolled about 31,000 people in health plans last month—nearly doubled that in the first two weeks of this month. Several other states, including Connecticut and Kentucky, are outpacing their enrollment estimates, even as states that depend on the federal website lag far behind. In Minnesota, enrollment in the second half of October ran at triple the rate of the first half, officials said. Washington state is also on track to easily exceed its October enrollment figure, officials said.

Enrollments are moving at a faster clip than during October in these, despite the fact that some people are confused by the problems the federal site has had, not sure if the sites in their own states are working. Covered California's director said that the state has had to change its marketing to remind people that the state site wasn't the same as the federal site, and was working just fine. Unfortunately, so far enrollments on the federal site are still lagging. For example, just  2,991 people in Texas were able to complete enrollment in October, fewer than Kentucky, which has a sixth of Texas' population. But there's better news on the federal site front today, as well. HealthCare.gov is now working for 90 percent of users who have tried again to sign up. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services updated reporters Monday with the news that the site was functioning better, and that it had sent out 275,000 emails to people who had started to create accounts, but couldn't get through the process. CMS says that 90 percent of those people who tried again got all the way through the process. So far in November, 50,000 people have selected a plan in the federal site, up from 27,000 for the entire month of October.
Many people are likely still in window-shopping mode, and enrollments should pick up even more—both on the state sites and the federal site—in the last week or two before the December 15 deadline for insurance to be in place on January 1, and then again in February and March before the final deadline. The Massachusetts experience provides the best model for enrollment patterns, and in the first four months of enrollment just about one-fifth of the uninsured population enrolled.
The people will come. They're not freaked out over what most people perceive as inevitable: a problematic new government program. They're not abandoning support for the program in droves. They're not calling for an end to the program. They're patient enough to give it time to work, even if Republicans and the traditional media are not.

Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Tue Nov 19, 2013 at 09:32 AM PST.

Also republished by Daily Kos. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/19/1256749/-Obamacare-enrollments-surging-HealthCare-gov-working-better?detail=email 

We're entering a bizarre end-of-the-year edition of Silly Season in which the news media is laser-focused on the wrong things. As stories about the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act begin to dissipate, it looks like we've segued into an especially nonsensical "MSNBC Anchor Wants to Poop in Palin's Mouth" meets "Wacky Toronto Mayor Does Wacky Stuff" news cycle.
Lost in the mix, of course, is the ongoing far-right effort to sabotage the Affordable Care Act.
I'm not talking about the myths and propaganda -- the "death panel" nonsense and the like. This is serious business: the well-financed, broadly implemented sabotage campaign designed to rig the law for failure, while also making it more difficult for Americans to receive insurance.
Sabotaging the Website
We've known for quite some time that most Republican governors refused to open health insurance exchanges in their states. 27 states don't have exchanges and therefore uninsured residents are shuffled over to the Healthcare.gov website to buy a policy.
However, earlier this month, we learned that Republican Party leadership directly urged those governors not to do it -- chiefly to burden the federal exchange with a heavier load.
Worse yet, the ACA contained zero funding for the development and implementation of the site, and there's no way the congressional Republicans would ever authorize more money for it. It's unclear why the federal exchange was unfunded in the law, but one thing's for sure, a House of Representatives that voted 46 times to totally repeal the law wouldn't have coughed up a dime to rectify the oversight.
So, what happened? A cash-starved Healthcare.gov development process, which precipitated serious glitches when October 1 rolled around -- problems that should never have occurred.
And those glitches might've been exacerbated when right-wing hacktivists reportedly conducted "denial of service" attacks against Healthcare.gov -- deliberate attempts to overwhelm the website's servers. CNN reported on Monday:

Hackers have attempted more than a dozen cyber attacks against the Obamacare website, according to a top Homeland Security Department official. The attacks, which are under investigation, failed, said the official. Authorities also are investigating a separate report of a tool designed to put heavy strain on HealthCare.gov through a so-called distributed denial of service. It does not appear to have been activated.

What else?
Sabotaging the Medicaid Expansion
Americans for Prosperity, funded by Charles and David Koch, launched advertising campaigns to strong-arm state lawmakers to block the expansion Medicaid in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Ohio, Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Once again, in the 26 states that blocked the Medicaid expansion, we're left with five to eight million people who are consequently unable to afford exchange policies but who also make too much money to qualify for Medicaid.
In Alaska yesterday, Governor Sean Parnell, a Republican, obviously, rejected the Medicaid expansion thus denying health insurance to 40,000 Alaskans. Parnell said, "I believe a costly Medicaid expansion especially on top of the broken Obamacare system is a hot mess."
That's a lie. Fact: the federal government pays the entire cost of the Medicaid expansion for 2014 through 2016. The states pay nothing. So it's not costly at all. In fact, it's free for the first three years.
What happens when the expansion is blocked throughout more than half the nation? Potentially millions of pissed-off working class Americans due to what's perceived as punitively expensive Obamacare premiums -- premiums that are only too expensive because Republican governors blocked the Medicaid expansion.
There's more.
Sabotaging ACA Marketplace Enrollment
Speaking of the Koch brothers and Alaska, a group called Foundation for Government Accountability launched a campaign to convince Alaskans to deliberately not buy insurance policies in order to undermine ACA enrollment goals, and, naturally, to express their self-defeating hatred of President Obama. Smart.
A pair of websites, along with accompanying Facebook pages, were launched back in September: dontenrollalaska.org and knowthefactsalaska.org. And go figure:

Based in Naples, Fla., the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) is a 501(c)3 non-profit that "promotes public policies that achieve limited, constitutional government and a robust economy that will be an engine for job creation across the states." One of the foundation's directors is Robert Levy, the chairman of the board of the Cato Institute, the Washington, D.C. think tank with a long and complicated relationship with the Koch brothers.

Yep. All roads lead back to the Kochs.
There's something especially visceral and sinister about well-protected billionaires telling middle class Americans to go without health insurance in order to, you know, kick Obama in nuts.
At the end of the day, if not enough people enroll in the exchanges, the law entirely falls apart. Combined with everything else, that's sabotage, plain and simple, while the Koch brothers can rest assured knowing they'll never be without quality healthcare, so screw it. Let fly. After all, the traditional press won't really cover it with the same hard-nippled vigor with which they've covered the buggy website, or with which they've almost universally blamed the low enrollment numbers on the president.
For that, much of the press is an active, though not entirely knowing conspirator in the sabotage plot. And there's no indication any of it will change any time soon.
Cross-posted at The Daily Banter.
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BobCesca.com Blog with special thanks to Karin Riley Porter.

 

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FBI: Hundreds Of Thousands May Lose Internet In July 20APR12

JUST to be safe everyone should check their computers. This from HuffPost......

WASHINGTON (AP) — For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this summer.
Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.
The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org, that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.
Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.
Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.
"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get 'page not found' and think the Internet is broken."
On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn't enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.
Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.
This is what happened:
Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.
The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address — such as www.ap.org — into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.
The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.
When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.
The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.
Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.
FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.
"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division. "Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."
Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before.
___
Online:
To check and clean computers: http://www.dcwg.org

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/20/fbi-internet-july_n_1441260.html?ref=mostpopular#s893504&title=9__Raleigh