RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nysun.com/national/the-sum-of-all-fears/91647/

So what did they hide, and when did they hide it? Key Democratic committees — Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate — are marking up unheard of spending and taxing plans. Right now. Yet they are not telling the public what they’re really up to.

The answer to “what did they hide?” and “when did they hide it?” is that they’re hiding it now, and information is starting to leak out on specifics. There’s no question that the Democrats want this $3.5 trillion reconciliation, which is really going to be more than $5 trillion, to avoid public scrutiny and to roll rapidly through both houses just to get it done.

Some say that it’s going to be a 10,000 page bill and that literally no one is going to know what’s in it. I remember when, a month or so back, I asked Senator Shelley Moore Capito, who is a friend, whether she’d read the 2,000 page infrastructure bill. She smiled and said she got through half of it. She was one of my great hopes that actually might know what’s going on in the second half of the bill.

This one — 10,000 pages worth — no one will know. Trust me. Not before, during, or after. It will take many years to figure this out. That’s just the specifics. In terms of the negative consequences, we won’t know for many years after that.

This is why Joe Manchin’s idea to “pause” the process is a good one — if he sticks to it. The senator’s track record is not fabulous, but hope springs eternal in the Mountain State. Meantime, there’s such a thing in Congress as regular order. Got it? It’s one of the most important concepts in democracy.

Regular order. It means that even in highly partisan bills, normal process is an open markup to thoroughly examine and debate key proposals. Policy experts on both sides of the aisle testify in open session to discuss these massive new programs. This is a time-honored tradition.

After the public testimonies, members then go back and discuss. Then they vote inside the committee to bring it to the floor of the Senate. This is not happening. Instead, Democrats are hiding the policies, foregoing any discussions, and avoiding score cards from the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Tax Committee.

That scoring will eventually come. The reconciliation instructions call — explicitly — for deficit reduction by not less than $1 trillion over the 10 year period ending in 2031. Trust me, there will be nowhere near a trillion spondulix in deficit reduction. Instead there will be significant deficit increases even with the largest tax hike in more than half a century.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2021/09/07/inexcusable-bureaucratic-red-tape-left-wing-senator-excoriates-biden-for-delay-in-rescuing-americans-behind-in-afghanistan-n1476575

Richard Blumenthal, one of the more partisan politicians in America, slammed the Biden administration Monday afternoon. The Connecticut senator is “furious” about the ignoble efforts toward assisting Americans trying to escape Afghanistan.

Blumenthal issued a press release condemning Team Biden for delaying flights out of Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport following reports that the administration did not give evacuation flights the green light.

Blumenthal and his staff are reportedly working around the clock to “secure the safe passage of two planes” carrying “American citizens, at-risk Afghan allies, and their families.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee member is frustrated at the government’s “delay and inaction” in rescuing people left behind in Afghanistan after Biden’s botched troop withdrawal.

“There will be plenty of time to seek accountability for the inexcusable bureaucratic red tape that stranded so many of our Afghan allies,” Blumenthal explained. “For now, my singular focus remains getting these planes in the air and safely to our airbase in Doha, where they have already been cleared to land.”

The senator also said he expects the Biden administration “to do everything in their power to make this happen” because “these are American citizens and Afghans who risked everything for our country. We cannot leave them behind.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/07/bidens_withdrawal_from_reality_146362.html#comments-container

Cory Mills and a private team of military veterans led the effort to rescue Mariam and her three children from Afghanistan

The organizer of a private mission to rescue an American mom, Mariam, and her three children from Afghanistan says the U.S. State Department is now trying to insert itself into the story of her evacuation, despite playing little to no role for much of the rescue effort.

Senior State Department officials on Monday announced that the “U.S. has facilitated the safe departure of four US citizens by overland route from Afghanistan. Embassy staff was present upon their arrival.” 

But those actually involved in the dangerous rescue operation say the State Department deserves little to no credit for Mariam’s escape from Afghanistan. 

Cory Mills and a private team of military veterans, drawing on funding by private donors including the Sentinel Foundation, led the effort to rescue Mariam and her three children from Afghanistan, where they had been left behind by the Biden administration, multiple sources with knowledge of Mariam’s evacuation confirmed to Fox News. 

Mills and his team worked for weeks to get Mariam’s family out of Afghanistan after Republican Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson alerted him to the family’s plight.

Mills’ team first sought to get the family aboard one of the last government flights out of Kabul, but she was unable to gain admission into the airport. The State Department repeatedly urged the four Americans to go to the airport gate, braving Taliban checkpoints along the way, only for them to be refused admission each time, Mills said. 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/07/bidens_withdrawal_from_reality_146362.html

The Democratic Party and its apparatchiks in the media keep asking the American people variations on a single question: What are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

From the Trump/Russia collusion fantasy and concocted claims that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” to ongoing efforts to cast an America that has never been freer or fairer as a nation riddled with “systemic” racial oppression, they keep insisting that we reject clear and convincing evidence and embrace politically driven falsehoods.

The latest example is President Biden’s refusal to even acknowledge the catastrophic failure of his withdrawal from Afghanistan. The nation heard him say on July 8 that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would overrun the country. The Washington Post reports that his senior leadership team was caught so unaware by the Taliban’s August advance that many were on vacation when Kabul fell. Then came the images of chaotic panic at the airport, a grim scene turned violently grisly when a suicide bomber murdered scores of people, including 13 Americans.

Biden subsequently described the withdrawal as an “extraordinary success” even as he left behind lethal state-of-the-art military equipment worth billions of dollars as well as many Americans and Afghans who had aided us during the 20-year struggle – including the interpreter who helped rescue Biden himself in 2008.

Slowly but surely the mainstream press, which initially covered the debacle forthrightly,  is beginning to embrace Biden’s narrative. Ezra Klein offered his New York Times readers a fatuous counterfactual defense: “A better withdrawal was possible — and our stingy, chaotic visa process was unforgivable — but so was a worse one.” Jonathan Karl of ABC News played the Trump card: “The truth is that Biden accomplished exactly what Trump had tried to do in his final year in office. The only real difference is that Trump wanted to withdraw more quickly and with less regard for the Afghan citizens who worked with the United States.”

Expect to hear more of the same in the coming weeks. Don’t be surprised if Biden is nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. The brazenness is stunning. This is not your typical political spin, it is propaganda. It is the willful effort to corrupt our perception of reality. Say it loud and long enough and people will believe it. If they don’t, get Twitter mobs and cancel culture to silence and punish them. That is increasingly becoming the Democrats’ playbook.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/complete_the_wall__around_biden_.html

Let’s hope Joe Biden has finally gone a fib too far: taking to the airways with false indignation to harangue us for daring to question his execution of the lethally inept Afghanistan “retrograde” action he engineered along with his Team of Trivials. Biden’s purpose of course was to obscure the fact that he’d blithely and needlessly thrust fine, dedicated troops into a tactical straightjacket that could logically have had no other result than multiple casualties; perhaps though in the process causing some heretofore tightly shut eyes to be pried open concerning the character and abilities of our overmatched chief executive.

If there is any degree of justice in the world, across this nation, many self-anointed sophisticates are staring at the yellowing diplomas hanging on their walls, contemplating how someone so demonstrably smart and accomplished could have been so utterly misguided in his/her 2020 assessment of presidential fitness.

It’s unfortunate that we don’t have the voter equivalent of a remedial safe-driving course.

Somehow, someway, over his many years of feeding at the public trough (and multi-national deals) Mr. Biden has succeeded in cultivating the image of an amiable, even-tempered spinner of yarns, whose repertoire of self-aggrandizing tales served — at least in his mind — as parables illustrating deeper truths. And if, in pursuit of his overarching message, the factual bases of these stories were suspect, then what of it? Underneath it all, Joe’s a good egg, don’t you know, so why don’t we just let it slide?

That protective aura: of a good-natured, basically decent guy despite his obvious intellectual shortcomings and weird personal peccadillos, made — along with Covid-19 and its concomitant voting irregularities — Biden, the un-Trump, and his presidency possible. But it’s also catapulted one of the biggest liars in American public life into a position he can’t successfully navigate through the copious shoveling of BS.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/06/new-january-6-stories-that-complicate-the-media-narrative/

The Associated Press reported in August that Robert Reeder, a Maryland man, pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating or picketing in a Capitol building.” He argued for leniency because, “he is a registered Democrat who wasn’t a supporter of former President Donald Trump.” So why did he join the incursion into the Capitol building? Because, he says, he was an “accidental tourist” with nothing better to do.

But an online group that calls itself Sedition Hunters recently tweeted a picture it says shows that same “accidental tourist” attacking a police officer. Curiously, the “accidental tourist,” who didn’t support Donald Trump, happened to be wearing a red “MAGA”-style hat. His attorney argued in court, “Mr. Reeder is not politically active, is not and has never been a member of any right-wing or anti-government or extremist group and has, unfortunately, been publicly grouped with many others (whose) views he abhors.”

The story reminds one of John Sullivan, a Black Lives Matter activist who infiltrated the January 6 incursion to encourage violence, bully police officers, and generally stoke mayhem. While many of the trespassers remain locked up without bail, Sullivan mysteriously received pre-trial release.

But there’s more. As I’ve written before, the January 6 event has a statistically anomalous count of suicide victims among police officers. Additionally, one officer’s widow has now sued two men she says inflicted a grievous head injury on her husband, possibly leading to his suicide. Her complaint claims, 

Open-source intelligence materials found at https://seditionhunters.org/insider-1107/ appear to depict Defendant [Taylor F.] Taranto throughout the Capitol Insurrection engaged in other unlawful acts. In addition, and upon information and belief, said website appears to show Defendant Taranto with the weapon used to assault Officer Smith. Upon information and belief, the weapon appears to be the Ka-Bar TDI ‘self-defense’ cane.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/06/what-did-the-capitol-celebrity-cops-do-to-roseanne-boyland/

The most violent clashes between police and protesters on January 6 occurred inside and outside the west terrace tunnel. The tunnel leads to doors that open into the Capitol building; according to federal documents, “the Lower West Terrace Door was heavily guarded by U.S. Capitol Police and [D.C. Metro Police] personnel, who had formed a defensive line to prevent unauthorized access into the U.S. Capitol via the tunnel.”

Dozens of people have been arrested and charged with various offenses, including assaulting police, for their conduct at the tunnel that afternoon.

It also is the location where Roseanne Boyland lost her life. The Georgia woman was one of four Trump supporters who died on January 6. While her death was ruled an accidental drug overdose by the highly political D.C. Medical Examiner’s Office—the chief officer refers to January 6 as “an unprecedented incident of civil insurrection”—new court filings and video footage raise plenty of questions about what actually happened to Boyland.

And congressional testimony by Officers Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, the two U.S. Capitol Police officers who have become media celebrities for their near-death accounts of January 6, should raise eyebrows about their potential involvement in the death of Roseanne Boyland.

A sworn statement in a motion filed last month in the case of Jacob Lang provides jaw-dropping details on police behavior in the moments before and after Boyland, 34, died.

Phillip Anderson, a protester who was near Boyland when she passed out, accuses law enforcement of using “excessive force” and spraying a highly noxious gas on protesters in the west terrace tunnel. Anderson told the court that Lang, who’s been behind bars since January awaiting trial, saved his life on January 6.

“I do not know what type of gas the officers used, but I know for sure that it was not tear gas,” Anderson said in an affidavit signed August 22. “After the officers sprayed this gas at me, I could not breathe for longer than a few seconds. This gas caused me to collapse, where the police then proceeded to push others on top of me. There were many others who collapsed because of these toxins, as I did. The police continued . . . hitting me and others. One of the people that fell in the crowd was a woman by the name Roseanne Boyland.”

Police pushed the mob, most of whom had been doused with the toxic gas, out of the tunnel as bodies tumbled on top of one another. Boyland was crushed and lost consciousness. Anderson said Boyland grabbed his hand but her firm grip quickly “loosened.” Several people attempted to administer CPR “while the police officers hit them over the head repeatedly.”

NO LINK

 There has been plenty written about our Afghanistan withdrawal. The “great achievement” pointed to by our President reading a script someone wrote for him, was that we brought 124,000 people out during our airlift. It would seem worth pointing out that 6,000 of these were Americans, 7,000 were Afghans with special visas (meaning well fewer than half the 18,000 translators identified several months ago), and a few thousand (number not provided) who were nationals of our Nato allies.

What this means is that over 100,000 , or more than 80% , are people who did not fit any of the categories for whom the airlift was intended. How these people were the ones selected for admission to the airport and outbound flights is entirely unclear. Supposedly vetting of these people is now underway, and already  several hundred have been identified who had problematic backgrounds (potential threats).  

The large majority are likely people with no or minimal background records we can access .You  can do the math on how many potential threats to America might be admitted if 1 per cent of 100,000, or 0.1% of 100,000 turned out to be bad guys. 19 people did a lot of damage 20 years ago in the space of a few hours. We took a lot of Afghans out, but left a few hundred Americans, and a  lot of Afghans we were committed to getting out, in the hands of a ruthless band of  very well armed America loathing  tribesmen straight out of the middle ages.

  Of course, we are now told the Taliban are different- more inclusive, more respectful of women, anxious to govern pragmatically, and join the community of nations, and of course responsive to American pressure (with sufficient cash bribes). And we can count on them to do the job preventing the county from being overrun by jihadists anxious to make it a primary base again for attacks against the West. Of course we can simply come in over the top to bomb them into the stone ages (what’s new) if they fail to do a good job on the terror front. This is the wisdom of our diplomatic and homeland security luminaries. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/05/biden-and-the-left-wing-standard-of-attacking-presidents/

As Joe Biden entered office in January 2021, there still roared a left-wing revolution, a woke madness spreading through popular culture and Congress, much of which he indirectly has aided and abetted. It has redefined not just politics but the rules of the presidency. And the eventual casualty of these radical shifts in protocols and customs will be—Joe Biden.

Take impeachment, which heretofore had been rare and has still never led to a Senate conviction. Prior to Trump, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton were the only presidents to have been impeached (Richard Nixon resigned to avoid it), and both were acquitted in the Senate. 

Yet leftist congressional representatives introduced articles of impeachment the very first week Trump was in office, on the absurd allegation of profiting from his office (the presidency cost the Trump corporations hundreds of millions). The House later went on to impeach him twice, without writs of “treason” and “bribery” or even “high crimes and misdemeanors” as set out by the Constitution. Instead, Trump was, first, successfully impeached for supposedly abusing his power and obstructing Congress. I don’t think the average American has ever been pulled over by the police for the high crime “of obstructing Congress” (historically a presidential pastime) or has been charged with “abuse of power” (said of every president from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama). 

Trump’s second impeachment was even flimsier. He was accused of “incitement of insurrection” concerning disturbances on January 6 that supposedly led to the violent death of Officer Brian Sicknick, the fatal shooting of an unarmed Ashli Babbitt, and the entire fable of an “armed insurrection.” Post-impeachment, we would learn that Sicknick died of natural causes. Strangely, for months no information about the shooter of Ashli Babbitt or the inquiry into that fatal act was ever fully released to the public. No one was charged with armed insurrection, largely because none of the buffoonish rioters were found either to have carried or used a firearm that day or were exposed as master plotters with plans to destroy the U.S. government. They may well have been guilty of felonies, but armed insurrectionary conspiracy was not one of them.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/who-responsible-darkness-has-descended-us-david-horowitz/

The late author Susan Sontag once famously said, “Communism is fascism with a human face.” A more perfect description of what the Democrat Party has become would be hard to come by. For five years the Democrats have focused their energies on laying the foundations of a communist economy and a one-party state. In pursuit of the latter, they have tried to abolish the electoral college, change the election laws to undermine the integrity of the voting system, give non-citizens the right to vote, eliminate voter I.D.’s which connect legitimate voters to their ballots, pack the Supreme Court, end the filibuster, pass legislation that would put control of presidential elections in the hands of the Democrat-favoring Washington bureaucracy and remove that control from the fifty states, as the Constitution now requires.

These efforts led to massive irregularities in the presidential election results that put the brain-damaged, pathological liar in the White House and led directly to the crises on the southern border, in America’s streets, and in Afghanistan. They were accompanied by a campaign to demonize former President Trump and the 74 million Americans who voted for him as “white supremacists” and “cultists.” This was itself a dagger aimed directly at the heart of the democratic process which depends on respect for the political opposition and compromise on legislation. If an opposing political party is placed beyond the pale, the inevitable result is a one-party state.

Character assassination has become the Democrats’ first weapon of choice, with Trump’s multiple bogus impeachments providing examples of how far Democrats are prepared to go to tear up the Constitution and two-hundred and forty years of American political tradition. Trump is no longer president but as a private citizen he is still the target of a Pelosi “commission” or “committee,” stacked completely with members who voted to impeach him, whose sole purpose is to convict Trump of inciting a fake “insurrection” in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States. This is one more despicable effort to demonize Trump and his 74 million voters as “domestic terrorists” and therefore enemies of America to be dealt with as such.