America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Friday, March 10, 2023
WAR PROFITEER SEN DIANNE FEINSTEIN - I WAS FIRST TO ENDORSE 'CREDIT CARD' JOE. I KNEW HE'D KEEP OUR WAR MACHINE GREASED, BE MUM ON OUR CORRUPTION, SERVE BANKSTERS AND LIE ABOUT IT EVERY DAY
IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.
“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” ---- Karen McQuillan AMERICAN THINKER.com
Biden Administration Wants to Boost Defense Spending to Nearly $900B
The Biden administration released its nearly $7 trillion 2024 budget request to Congress on Thursday, which included $886 billion for defense — a 3.2 percent boost from the prior year’s defense budget.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Jack Reed (D-RI) acknowledged that the request is “among the largest in history,” but said it reflected the “reality of the national security challenges we face.”
“With this strong budget, President Biden is prioritizing the safety and well-being of the American people. Some will inevitably say the topline is too much, while others will claim it is not enough. I say America’s defense budget should be guided by our values, needs, and national security strategy,” he said.
However, Republican defense hawks say the defense budget needs to be higher due to inflation under the Biden administration.
The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee Roger Wicker (R-MS) called the defense budget request “woefully inadequate and disappointing.”
“The President’s defense budget is woefully inadequate and disappointing. It does not even resource his own National Defense Strategy to protect our country from growing threats around the world. This defense budget is a serious indication of President Biden’s failure to prioritize national security,” he said in a statement.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL) also slammed the defense budget.
“A budget that proposes to increase non-defense spending at more than twice the rate of defense is absurd. The president’s incredibly misplaced priorities send all the wrong messages to our adversaries,” he said in a statement.
Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-NY) called the defense portion an effective “cut,” due to inflation.
“The defense portion of the budget proposed by Biden is effectively a cut as the 3.2% increase doesn’t keep pace with inflation and the cost to refill depleted supplies around the world. Our greatest adversaries, China and Russia, continue to ramp up military expenditures, which pose a grave threat to U.S. security at home and abroad,” she said in a statement.
The administration did not include a full breakdown of what that money would be used for. A detailed breakdown will be released on March 13.
However, the Biden administration did highlight funding for key priorities.
The request would include a pay increase for the military and Department of Defense civilian employees of 5.2 percent, the largest increase since 2002 amid record inflation.
It would also provide $9.1 billion for its Pacific Deterrence Initiative to enhance the U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific in the face of an increasingly aggressive China, as well as $6 billion to support NATO and Ukraine.
The final defense budget will likely be higher as it does not yet factor in additional emergency war funding for Ukraine, which will likely be requested by the administration and welcomed by Republicans and Democrats alike.
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the non-interventionist think-tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in a piece Thursday:
Adding in likely emergency military aid packages for Ukraine later this year plus the potential tens of billions of dollars in Congressional add-ons could push total spending for national defense to as much as $950 billion or more for FY 2024.
“The result could be the highest military budget since World War II, far higher than at the peaks of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or the height of the Cold War,” he said.
Some of the billions of dollars of weapons the United States sent to Ukraine has fallen into Iranian hands, a report Friday details.
As Republican lawmakers have stepped up their oversight on U.S. aid to Ukraine, four anonymous sources revealed to CNN some of the weapons provided to Ukraine have been captured by Russian forces and sent to Iran for reverse-engineering.
Those weapons include the Javelin anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that Ukraine has begged the U.S. to send more of. The weapons were likely picked up on the battlefield, the sources told CNN.
According to the report:
In many of those cases, Russia has then flown the equipment to Iran to dismantle and analyze, likely so the Iranian military can attempt to make their own version of the weapons, sources said. Russia believes that continuing to provide captured Western weapons to Iran will incentivize Tehran to maintain its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, the sources said.
Earlier this month, Republican lawmakers had pressed Department of Defense officials on whether any U.S. weapons have fallen into the wrong hands.
The Pentagon’s top policy official, Colin Kahl, repeatedly insisted that the DOD was not seeing “any evidence of significant diversion” of weapons sent to Ukraine, as previously reported by Breitbart News.
However, he admitted, “I think our assessment is if some of these systems have been diverted, it’s by Russians who have captured things on the battlefield which always happens. But there’s no evidence that the Ukrainians are diverting it to the black market or some other things.”
He also argued that the Ukrainians were asking for more weapons because “they are using everything that we have provided them.”
Officials claimed to CNN that the Ukrainian military “has made it a habit since the beginning of the war to report to the Pentagon any losses of US-provided equipment to Russian forces.”
The U.S. has committed more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine in less than a year, with more than $32 billion of it in weapons, much of it taken from the U.S. military’s own stocks.
Grilled at the same hearing with Kahl, the Department of Defense Inspector General Robert Storch would not answer whether the U.S. has complied with a 1976 law to make sure it is tracking weapons sent to Ukraine.
He acknowledged some complaints had been made to a hotline set up for missing U.S. weapons in Ukraine, but said those complaints were still under investigation.
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