The Daily Caller currently has a “2016 Bombshell” splashed across its front page -- the conservative website claims that while the “chattering class” is certain that Hillary Clinton is planning to run for president in 2016, “whispers persist” that she will decline a run for office. Caller political reporter Alex Pappas amasses an array of slipshod claims from even less credible sources to string together his case.

The Caller often runs poorly-sourced hit-jobs aimed at damaging progressives and garnering traffic.  Here's the evidence on which the Caller is basing its story, which puts a Clinton spokesman's statement that she is “100%” up against four uses of the word “rumors” and three uses of “skeptics” or “skeptical.”

In the story's third graph, Pappas unveils what is apparently his most compelling evidence that Clinton's health is in jeopardy -- two supermarket tabloids have reported it:

These ubiquitous rumors of her health have been fueled in part by the supermarket tabloids. The National Enquirer wrote in 2012 that Clinton had brain cancer, something a spokesman dismissed then as “absolute nonsense.” In January of this year, the Globe claimed that Clinton secretly had a brain tumor.

That Globe story cites a “close source” saying that Bill Clinton has been telling Hillary that “they need to think long and hard about” her doctors' supposed warnings that she would not survive a presidential campaign. Which is weird, because back in September The Globe was reporting that Hillary was going to divorce Bill -- who, according to the story, is “dying” -- after he recently tried to “hook up” with Gennifer Flowers. And because in August, The Globe was reporting that Hillary's presidential plans were doomed after video emerged of her “steamy romps -- with another woman!”

In any case, the supermarket tabloids are old news -- they came out one month and fourteen months ago. So why is the Caller running the story now? The closest thing Pappas has to a news hook -- the only data point in the story from within the last month -- is a February 24 tweet from Roger Stone, identified as a “GOP consultant,” claiming that Clinton is “not running for health reasons.” Stone, who has been called a “professional dirty trickster and high priest of political hijinks” by the conservative Weekly Standard, is not someone to be taken seriously where Clinton is concerned -- in 2008 he founded the anti-Hillary Clinton 527 group Citizens United Not Timid, which emphasized its acronym on its website and on T-shirts.

The balance of the story goes back over Clinton's health scare in December 2012, when she suffered a concussion and doctors subsequently found a blood clot in her head, from which they said she made a “full recovery.” At the time, conservatives claimed that she had fabricated her “immaculate concussion” as a means of avoiding scheduled congressional hearings on Benghazi. Since then, Clinton has stepped down as Secretary of State, begun a campaign to accelerate global progress for women and girls at the foundation her husband founded, and embarked on a vigorous series of speeches around the world.

The phony concussion “rumor” has faded away, so the Caller has made up a new one. And Pappas apparently did the job his employer is looking for - his story got a Drudge Report link, and Caller reporters are paid in part based on traffic. This brand of conservative rumormongering is shoddy, but apparently it pays.

This post has been updated for clarity.