How A Walk In The Park Became Putin’s War. Talk about mis-overestimating (H/T to Dubya) your capabilities…:
They never had a chance.
Fumbling blindly through cratered farms, the troops from Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade had no maps, medical kits or working walkie-talkies, they said. Just a few weeks earlier, they had been factory workers and truck drivers, watching an endless showcase of supposed Russian military victories at home on state television before being drafted in September. One medic was a former barista who had never had any medical training.
Now, they were piled onto the tops of overcrowded armored vehicles, lumbering through fallow autumn fields with Kalashnikov rifles from half a century ago and virtually nothing to eat, they said. Russia had been at war most of the year, yet its army seemed less prepared than ever. In interviews, members of the brigade said some of them had barely fired a gun before and described having almost no bullets anyway, let alone air cover or artillery. But it didn’t frighten them too much, they said. They would never see combat, their commanders had promised.
Only when the shells began crashing around them, ripping their comrades to pieces, did they realize how badly they had been duped.
That’s merely a carnage-flavored appetizer of what happened. It looks to me like Putin may have given up hopes of winning, but just wants to wreak devastating destruction on Ukraine. He will go down in history as one of its most notorious butchers.
Garland Orders End To Sentencing Disparities On Crack, Powder Cocaine:
Critics of the longtime policy have said it is a relic of Washington’s misguided War on Drugs era that targeted Black and Brown communities, resulted in overpopulated prisons and strained federal and local resources at the expense of more-effective strategies.
Leave it to a Rethug senator to immediately complain:
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), however, assailed Garland’s move. Grassley, who supports significantly reducing the disparity but not eliminating it, said the attorney general risked upsetting legislative negotiations on Capitol Hill.
“A bipartisan group of lawmakers, including myself, just recently came to an agreement on statutory changes that could possibly be included in the year-end funding bill,” Grassley said. “That hard-won compromise has been jeopardized because the attorney general inappropriately took lawmaking into his own hands.”
Right. They were just getting around to doing something after decades of funding and perpetuating these disparities. I call bullshit.
It Hertz To Rent A Car From…: Lose track of your rental cars, file false reports that they have been stolen by customers, settle for $168 mill:
The company recently announced that it will pay $168m to settle 364 claims that were brought against it. According to Hertz, the settlement will bring resolution to “more than 95% of it pending theft reporting claims.”
Numerous lawsuits filed against Hertz in recent years accuse the company of knowingly and falsely reporting its customers to authorities. They accuse Hertz of not investigating alleged thefts before filing theft reports, as well as reporting cars stolen without any verification that they are stolen.
In addition, the lawsuits allege that the company rents “stolen” cars to unsuspecting customers and supplies false information in theft reports by secretly deleting customer rental extensions and backdating rental due dates.