RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/iron-dome-funding-bill-passes-house-despite-vehement-progressive-opposition/

“Eight Democrats and one Republican rejected the Iron Dome supplemental measure, including Representatives Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, Ilhan Omar, Marie Newman, Ayanna Pressley, Jesús García, Raúl Grijalva, Cori Bush, and Thomas Massie, respectively. Massie, the lone Republican to vote against the measure, opposes all foreign aid. The bill now advances to the evenly-divided Senate for a vote.”

Independent legislation that would allocate $1 billion to Israel’s Iron Dome defense system, introduced after House progressives stripped the support from a previous government spending bill, overwhelmingly passed the House on Thursday.

Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro proposed the stand-alone legislation on Wednesday, eliciting outrage from squad member Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was one of just nine House members to vote “no.”

The progressive congresswoman announced her opposition Thursday, saying she refuses to financially support a “violent apartheid system.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/3-5-trillion-is-a-phony-number-democrats-spending-bill-entitlements-joe-biden-11632425260?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Democrats are grasping for ways to finance their cradle-to-grave welfare state, with the left demanding what they claim is $3.5 trillion over 10 years. The truth is that even that gargantuan number hides the real cost of their plans.

The bills moving through committees are full of delayed starts, phony phase-outs, and cost shifting to states designed to fit $3.5 trillion into a 10-year budget window that can pass with a mere 51 Senate votes. Even if the bill shrinks to $2 trillion or less, the real costs will be far greater. Behold one of the greatest fiscal cons in history.

• Start with the child allowance, which is among the bill’s most expensive provisions. Extending the $3,000 to $3,600 per-child payments for a decade would cost roughly $1.1 trillion. That’s as much as all of the income tax increases on individuals passed by the House Ways and Means Committee.

Democrats have hidden the real cost by extending the allowance only through 2025. Even if Republicans gain control of Congress and the White House in 2024, Democrats and their media allies will bludgeon them to extend the payments, which will cost another $110 billion each year. The GOP will be accused of raising taxes on middle-class families.

• Democrats are using a different time shift to disguise the cost of their Medicare expansion. New vision and hearing benefits would kick in over the next two years and cost about $20 billion a year. But Democrats are delaying the phase-in of the much more expensive dental benefit to 2028. This “saves” $420 billion over 10 years, but the costs explode after that.

https://nypost.com/2021/09/23/hunter-biden-emails-boast-ties-to-white-house-and-china/

Hunter Biden’s business contacts touted his access to his father, “State, Treasury,” his relationship with then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s stepson, as well as his ties to the “highest level” in China, as they weighed whether to work with him on a potential Libya deal in 2015, newly uncovered emails show. 

The two emails — published by Insider on Thursday — date back to 2015, when Joe Biden was vice president, and reference getting Hunter’s help on a deal regarding billions in Libyan assets frozen by the Obama administration.

The emails are unrelated to Hunter’s infamous laptop.

In the first email, dated Jan. 28, 2015, Democratic donor Sam Jauhari repeatedly referred to Hunter as “#2 son” — an apparent reference to Joe Biden’s VP role at the time — and noted that Hunter had requested a $2 million retainer.  The business contact listed a string of positives to working with Hunter, including his business relationship with Kerry’s stepson Chris Heinz and Hunter’s apparent self-proclaimed high-level access in China.

According to new emails, Hunter Biden’s business contacts touted the political access Biden had to the president and several other offices within the White House.Teresa Kroeger/Getty Images for World Food Program USA

“Per phone conversation I met with #2 son. He wants $2 per year retainer +++ success fees. He wants to hire his own people – it can be close circle of people for confidentiality. His dad is deciding to run or not,” the email said.

Biden’s access to Chris Heinz, stepson of ex-secretary of state John Kerry, was a major plus to his business partners.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/23/biden_security_adviser_sullivan_tied_to_16_

White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan figures prominently in a grand jury investigation run by Special Counsel John Durham into an alleged 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign scheme to use both the FBI and CIA to tar Donald Trump as a colluder with Russia, according to people familiar with the criminal probe, which they say has broadened into a conspiracy case.

Sullivan is facing scrutiny, sources say, over potentially false statements he made about his involvement in the effort, which continued after the election and into 2017. As a senior foreign policy adviser to Clinton, Sullivan spearheaded what was known inside her campaign as a “confidential project” to link Trump to the Kremlin through dubious email-server records provided to the agencies, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Last week, Michael A. Sussmann, a partner in Perkins Coie, a law firm representing the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of making false statements to the FBI about his clients and their motives behind planting the rumor, at the highest levels of the FBI, of a secret Trump-Russia server. After a months-long investigation, the FBI found no merit to the rumor.

The grand jury indicated in its lengthy indictment that several people were involved in the alleged conspiracy to mislead the FBI and trigger an investigation of the Republican presidential candidate — including Sullivan, who was described by his campaign position but not identified by name.

The Clinton campaign project, these sources say, also involved compiling a “digital dossier” on several Trump campaign officials – including Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page. This effort exploited highly sensitive, nonpublic Internet data related to their personal email communications and web-browsing, known as Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses.

To mine the data, the Clinton campaign enlisted a team of Beltway computer contractors as well as university researchers with security clearance who often collaborate with the FBI and the intelligence community. They worked from a five-page campaign document called the “Trump Associates List.”

The tech group also pulled logs purportedly from servers for a Russian bank and Trump Tower, and the campaign provided the data to the FBI on two thumb drives, along with three “white papers” that claimed the data indicated the Trump campaign was secretly communicating with Moscow through a server in Trump Tower and the Alfa Bank in Russia. Based on the material, the FBI opened at least one investigation, adding to several others it had already initiated targeting the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016.

https://www.nysun.com/national/democrats-are-back-on-the-heels-as-bidens-polling/91669/

With President Biden’s polls once again plunging and wide gaps in the Democratic Party over spending and taxing along with some serious grassroots opposition from groups like the save America coalition, I really do believe the Democrats are on the run. They’re back on their heels. They can’t get their story straight.

Again this evening I express my support for Senator Joe Manchin’s “strategic pause” to carry over big budget deals until the spring of 2022. Our motives might be a bit different, but our goals right now are similar. If the Democratic budget resolution doesn’t get through reconciliation until then — which admittingly is an improbable longshot — then the whole thing will die.

I do believe public Democratic weakness after the Biden meetings and the nonsensical press conference with Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi have a lot to do with the huge stock market rally today.

While insiders tell me that President Biden told democratic leaders to come up with their own topline on spending and, I presume taxes, at this point that project looks impossible with Mr. Manchin at between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, the Bernie Sanders budget scored at $3.5 trillion, and the actual gimmick-free budget scored at about $5.5 trillion.

That’s some spread.