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Footnotes: The IRS Loses; GFY Robert Rubin; The “Fake” God of War | 01.21.14

Former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell and his wife have been charged for taking "gifts" they maybe shouldn't have [Washington Post]

Accounting maneuvers muddy bank earnings this quarter [CBS]

Robert Rubin has something to say about accounting standards. Might I be the first to tell him to go fuck himself? [Bloomberg]

The IRS was the big loser in the 2014 budget agreement [Christian Science Monitor]

I hate to admit I read the Daily Mail but I do, and it's a real weakness. Sadly, I missed this particular story on DM. Apparently China wasn't faking sunrises on TV screens in Beijing after all. COME ON, Daily Mail, we totally almost would have bought that story! Keep up the great investigative work. How do stories like this happen? One reason is shabby journalism, something for which the Daily Mail is renowned. As TIA points out, the originator, a writer named James Nye, is based in New York (as is this writer, for the record). Nye surveys a wide range of click-bait topics that fall between morbid and Kardashian. The discovery of that post-apocalyptic photo may have had something to do with the photo search for an article Nye had written earlier that day about severe turbulence in a flight bound for Beijing. The leap to making up news based on a photo isn’t hard, particularly when you crib a quote from an unrelated Associated Press story to round it out. [Daily Mail and Quartz]

Two guys who may or may not have something to do with the Target fraud caught at the Mexican border (I feel safer already!) [USA Today]

On that note, we could upgrade our payment cards here in the US to combat fraud, or something [The Switch via WaPo]