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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:27:00 GMT -8
The man who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.
Want to Replace Your Garden Gnome With an Inflatable Tank?
Losing a tank or valued US-made high mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) can hurt an army less if the weapon is a cheap inflatable decoy placed on the front lines to deceive the enemy.
With the war in Ukraine boosting the need for heavy military vehicles, guns and planes, it has also been a boon to Inflatech Decoys, a Czech maker of fake army equipment.
The company has added HIMARS to its fleet of more than 30 types of inflatable real-size decoys it sells to customers worldwide, Chief Executive Vojtech Fresser said.
The decoys are made out of synthetic silk and, apart from misleading the adversary visually, have a thermal footprint and appear on radars to fool enemy reconnaissance.
They pack into sacks that two to four soldiers can carry, and can be inflated within 10 minutes.
The HIMARS inflatable top, without the heat generator and compressor equipment, weighs 43kg, Fresser told reporters at the company’s factory in the northern Czech city of Decin.
The decoys cost from $10,000 to $100,000.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:31:40 GMT -8
TucKGBer Does What You Would Expect
Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Monday released security video from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, using footage provided exclusively to him by Speaker Kevin McCarthy to portray the riot as a peaceful gathering.
Tucker Carlson, with video provided by Speaker McCarthy, falsely depicts Jan. 6 riot as a peaceful gathering
Tucker Carlson, with video provided by Speaker McCarthy, falsely depicts Jan. 6 riot as a peaceful gathering
© Provided by NBC News
Carlson acquired the tapes as part of a deal for McCarthy, R-Calif., to win the speaker’s gavel. When McCarthy was struggling to gather the votes to lead the House, Carlson used his program to list two “concessions” he could make to win over far-right Republicans.
“First, release the January 6 files. Not some of the January 6 files and video — all of it,” Carlson, the most-watched host on cable news, said after McCarthy faced three failed votes. “So that the rest of us can finally know what actually happened on January 6, 2021.”
In the two months since McCarthy won the gavel, he has granted both. Carlson announced in late February that McCarthy had given him exclusive access to 44,000 hours of security video from the deadly riot before he unveiled some clips of the video on his show Monday night.
Carlson focused Monday’s segment on promoting former President Donald Trump’s narrative by showing video of his supporters walking calmly around the U.S. Capitol. He asserted that other media accounts lied about the attack, proclaiming that while there were some bad apples, most of the rioters were peaceful and calling them "sightseers," not "insurrectionists."
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson told his audience Monday. “Instead it shows police escorting people through the building, including the now-infamous ‘QAnon Shaman.’”
He continued: "More than 44,000 hours of surveillance footage from in and around the Capitol have been withheld from the public, and once you see the video, you’ll understand why. Taken as a whole, the video does not support the claim that Jan. 6 was an insurrection. In fact, it demolishes that claim."
Video that Carlson didn’t air shows police and rioters engaged in hours of violent combat that resulted in injuries to hundreds of police officers. Two pipe bombs were also planted nearby but were not detonated
It's Also Probably What Kevin Expected
A handful of Senate Republicans on Tuesday pushed back on conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson after he characterized the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as “mostly peaceful chaos,” with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis blasting those remarks as “bullshit.”
Carlson, the popular but controversial figure on Fox, made those comments to his millions of viewers Tuesday night as he aired select clips of never-before-seen surveillance footage of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and downplayed the violent insurrection that injured 140 police officers during an hours-long assault.
“I think it’s bullshit,” Tillis told reporters in the Capitol.
“I was here. I was down there and I saw maybe a few tourists, a few people who got caught up in things,” he added. “But when you see police barricades breached, when you see police officers assaulted, all of that ... if you were just a tourist you should’ve probably lined up at the visitors’ center and came in on an orderly basis.”
Tillis said Carlson's depiction was as “inexcusable” and compared it to those who downplayed the fires and "devastation" during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 following the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota conservative, said he was in the Capitol on Jan. 6 and firmly rejected Carlson's portrayal of that day as “some rowdy peaceful protest of Boy Scouts.”
“I think that breaking through glass windows and doors to get into the United States Capitol against the borders of police is a crime. I think particularly when you come into the chambers, when you start opening the members' desks, when you stand up in their balcony — to somehow put that in the same category as you know, permitted peaceful protest is just a lie,” Cramer said.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:35:01 GMT -8
Cowardice Comes With a Price
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:36:40 GMT -8
When Will They Ever Learn?
Apparently, neither the media nor supposedly sober Republicans have learned anything from the past. Trump gave a bonkers speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, musing about Russia blowing up NATO headquarters, claiming President Biden had taken the border wall and “put it in a hiding area,” and telling the crowd, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
We do not get headlines acknowledging this is unhinged. Instead, we get from the New York Times: “Trump Says He Would Stay in 2024 Race if Indicted.” And a similar angle from CNN. ABC started its website report this way: “Former President Donald Trump continues to reign supreme over the conservative wing of the Republican Party.” From The Washington Post: “Trump takes victory lap at conservative conference.”
From the coverage, you would never understand how incoherent he sounds, how far divorced his statements are from reality, and how entirely abnormal this all is. Talk about burying the lead.
This spectacle is equal parts infuriating and pathetic. Here are Republicans, some of whom are considering runs for the presidency, who somehow expect to get through a campaign without mentioning the single most disqualifying thing about the leader in the race (other than his mental unfitness): He betrayed the country. Such timidity is itself disqualifying for someone seeking the presidency. If these candidates cannot stand up to an ex-president who is currently devoid of power, how can we expect to them to defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic?
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:45:04 GMT -8
I Can Imagine How Fox Noise Will Report This: "Biden Proposes Raising Your Taxes!"
Biden unveils plan averting Medicare funding crisis, challenging GOP
The White House on Tuesday proposed raising taxes on Americans earning more than $400,000 and reducing what Medicare pays for prescription drugs in an attempt to ensure that the health-care program for seniors is funded for the next two decades, challenging Republicans over an imminent funding crisis.
As forecasters warn that a key Medicare trust fund will run into major financial problems within five years, the administration proposed three key changes — including the tax hike and new rules to reduce prescription drug costs — to bolster the program for at least 25 years.
Roughly 60 million seniors depend on Medicare for their health insurance. Because the program is spending money at a much faster clip than it brings in funding, it faces automatic federal cuts starting in 2028, raising the nightmare scenario of medical providers refusing care to senior citizens if Congress and the White House don’t address the looming shortfall first.
Social Security, Medicare brawl awaits Washington, even if not this year
The administration is introducing the measures as part of the White House’s broader 2024 budget proposal, but it faces an unlikely path to passage through a Republican-controlled House of Representatives. The budget is set to be released Thursday.
President Biden’s introduction of a Medicare financing plan aims for a direct contrast with the GOP, which has weighed cuts to the program while also criticizing the administration for approving legislation last year aimed at reining in spending on prescription drugs. The White House’s plan amplifies the high political stakes of Medicare and Social Security — by far the two biggest federal programs — ahead of the 2024 presidential election. Details of the plan were first reported Tuesday morning by The Washington Post.
The White House’s proposal would raise the net investment income tax, created by the Affordable Care Act, from 3.8 percent to 5 percent for all Americans earning more than $400,000 per year, in line with Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes for anyone under that threshold. The tax applies to capital gains and investment income. The plan also would expand this tax by applying it to more kinds of income from pass-through firms — businesses in which the owners pay taxes on their personal income taxes. Currently, these kinds of business owners do not pay this tax.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:46:29 GMT -8
The Latest Salvo in the War on Women
Five women who said they were denied abortions despite grave risk to their lives or fetuses sued Texas on Monday, in the first apparent case of pregnant women suing over curbs imposed after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
The lawsuit asks a state court in Austin, the state's capital, for a ruling clarifying that a doctor cannot be prosecuted for providing an abortion if, in the doctor's good faith judgment, the abortion is necessary to treat an emergency that threatens a pregnant patient's life or health.
Texas, like most of the 13 states with abortion bans, allows exceptions when a physician finds that there is a medical emergency. But the lawsuit, backed by the abortion rights group Center for Reproductive Rights, says that the law is unclear, leading doctors to refuse to perform abortions even when the exception should apply for fear of losing their licenses and facing up to 99 years in prison.
A spokesman for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had no immediate comment.
Texas banned abortion shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.
Four of the women in Monday's lawsuit had to travel out of state to obtain abortions in order to avoid serious medical complications. A fifth was hospitalized in Texas with a premature rupture of membranes, which meant that her fetus could not be saved, but was not given an abortion until she developed a severe infection that required her to stay in an intensive care unit, according to the complaint.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 9:48:41 GMT -8
Keep on Running
Runners often hear the warning “Keep pounding the pavement and you’ll destroy your knees.” A new study found that runners were not more likely to develop hip or knee osteoarthritis the longer, faster and more frequently they ran.
Osteoarthritis, a condition marked by deteriorating cartilage where the bones meet, affects more than 32.5 million adults in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As the cartilage cushioning the bones wears down, osteoarthritis can cause pain, stiffness and even disability. It’s the most common form of arthritis, especially among older adults, and there’s no known cure.
“Once it’s there, it’s there,” said Dr. Matthew Hartwell, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, and a lead author on the new study, which is scheduled to be presented Thursday during the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons' annual meeting. “You can’t re-form the cartilage.”
The new research surveyed 3,804 recreational runners who participated in the Chicago Marathon in 2019 or 2021 with questions from how many years they’d been running and their average running paces to whether they had family histories of arthritis.
It's widely believed, even among doctors, that using the joints more often, through a repetitive activity like running, makes the knee and hip cartilage deteriorate more quickly, upping osteoarthritis risk.
The Northwestern University researchers — including Hartwell, who was at Northwestern for the duration of the study, and a co-author, Dr. Vehniah Tjong, an orthopedic sports surgeon — found that wasn’t the case.
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Post by mhbruin on Mar 7, 2023 10:04:05 GMT -8
Florida Politician For Sale
Utility companies flooded Ron DeSantis’s campaign coffers with donations. Now, the Florida governor is allowing them to withhold information about widespread power shutoffs to their struggling customers.
Of the $9.5 million that has flowed into the Republican Party of Florida from electric utilities and their affiliated PACs since 2019, $2 million has come in in the past nine weeks, as DeSantis preps a widely anticipated run for the presidency as the main GOP primary opponent to former president Donald Trump.
In particular, NextEra and Duke are the two biggest electric-company donors to DeSantis and the Florida GOP since 2019. Duke has donated $4 million to the Florida GOP since 2019, while NextEra has given more than $2.2 million to DeSantis and the Florida GOP, according to our analysis of state campaign finance reports.
Guess what Floridians, we are contributing to these republicans every time we pay our light bills.
In November 2021, Florida’s Public Service Commission (PSC) issued a memorandum allowing electric utilities to stop disclosing their shutoff data. The memorandum, which reversed the commission’s September 2020 decision to collect the data to track the pandemic’s effects on utility customers, came after DeSantis stacked the board with his appointees. The move came less than a month after commission members approved the largest electric rate hike in Florida’s history, resulting in a 20 percent increase in costs to residential ratepayers.
Now it’s impossible to know how many customers have been disconnected from their electric utilities for being unable to pay their increasing power bills. NextEra — the parent company of Florida’s largest utility, Florida Power & Light — disconnected 738,000 Floridians in 2021 and 1.1 million Americans nationwide since 2020, according to a report from Bailout Watch last month. If that disconnection rate continued, noted the report, NextEra would have shut off 1.2 million customers in 2022. But we do not know the total, because the DeSantis-appointed Florida PSC allowed the company to hide the data.
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