(The Epoch Times) Several dozen House Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) bid to stall final passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package.
The procedural tactic failed by a 235–149 vote as 40 GOP lawmakers joined the Democrats to vote against her motion to adjourn. Greene had decried the stimulus legislation on March 9 as a “woke progressive Blue State Bailout.”
Greene also sent a warning to House Republicans that should they vote with Democrats, they would be seen as joining them.
(The Epoch Times) The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the updated versionof President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package.
The vote was 220-211, with all Democrats voting for the bill except for Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine) and all Republicans voting against it.
The House passed a version of the bill late last month, followed by the Senate on March 4. The upper chamber removed the $15 federal minimum wage hike and changed other provisions, such as decreasing weekly supplemental unemployment aid by $100 to $300 a week. No Republicans supported the package in either vote.
Biden plans on signing the bill on Friday and “hitting the road” in the near future to try to convince Americans the package was a good idea, according to the White House. Press secretary Jen Psaki during a press conference in Washington called it “the most progressive bill in American history.”
Democrats utilized a budget process to ram the package through Congress with no bipartisan support, drawing criticism from the GOP.
“I rise in opposition to the partisan $1.9 trillion spending bill before us today. It’s shameful Democrats have disregarded their obligation to provide real COVID relief to the American people and are instead attempting to use this process to jam through partisan agenda items. This bill is not targeted, timely, or tied to COVID. We need to focus on solving the critical issues at hand: getting vaccines to Americans, providing relief to our local businesses, restaurants, and entertainment venues, and supporting those who have been seriously impacted by this pandemic. Only 9 percent of this massive $1.9 trillion package goes to fighting COVID-19. And outside of stimulus payments, nearly half won’t even be spent this year,” Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) told colleagues on the House floor on Wednesday.
Five people are being accused of various election fraud-related cases during the Nov. 3 election, according to the DuPage County State’s Attorney’s Office in Illinois.
The state’s attorney’s office said the charges stem from investigations into 32 cases of alleged election fraud, adding that most of those cases have been closed without investigation. However, the office stressed that several remain under investigation, according to a news release on Tuesday.
Those who were charged include Colleen A. Kirchoff, 60, of Naperville; Thomas E. Wojciechowski, 73, or Carol Stream; and Adam P. Butler, 51, officials said in the release.
Kirchoff was charged with forgery and perjury after she allegedly attempted to cast a ballot for someone else, officials said in a news release. Butler was charged with a count of forgery and one count of perjury in election code, while Wojciechowski was charged with one count of perjury in election code, officials said.
Two others—Darrick Kent, 43, and Amy Kent, 41—of Austin, Texas, were charged with one count of perjury in the election code.
“I would like to thank County Clerk Jean Kaczmarek and her office for their fine work in uncovering these alleged violations and bringing them to our attention,” DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin said in the release. “The charges filed today are the direct result of the cooperation and professionalism displayed by the Clerk’s Office throughout the entire investigation.”
His office did not provide any more details about the charges or the investigation.
“The very foundation of our country is built upon fair and free elections,” Berlin added. “Elections are a sacred duty and while the five defendants charged today represent an infinitesimal percentage of the 491,067 votes cast in the 2020 general election, it is important that anyone suspected of attempting to interfere in any way in the election process be investigated and charged where appropriate.”
A judge on Tuesday signed arrest warrants for the five suspects, and each person’s bail was set for $1,000, reported WBBM.
Last week, the mayor pro tem of a Northern California city resigned from office after pleading guilty to election fraud charges. Crescent City Mayor Pro Tem Alex Campbell entered the plea to making a false declaration of candidacy in Del Norte County Superior Court, local news outlet Wild Rivers Outpost reported, citing the city’s clerk’s office.
Separately, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, a judge ordered a new runoff election for a city alderman seat after more than three-quarters of absentee ballots cast in the June 2020 Democratic runoff election were found to be invalid, while a notary involved in the election was arrested.
“[We] must make breakthroughs in combat methods and ability, and lay a sound foundation for military modernization,” he says.
China must prepare for an “inevitable” war with a “dominant power,” says the country’s top general.
General Xu Qiliang, second in command of China’s armed forces after Xi Jinping, believes a major war is “inevitable” because China is rising as a military power.
“In the face of the Thucydides Trap and border problems, the military must speed up increasing its capacity,” said Xu, who is also a member of the Politburo, the Communist Party’s inner circle.
“[We] must make breakthroughs in combat methods and ability, and lay a sound foundation for military modernization.”
A “Thucydides Trap” was a term coined by a U.S. political scientist who believed war was “inevitable” between China, an emerging military power, and the United States.
The term is a reference to the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta which was ignited by Athens’ rise in power.
The “border problems” Xu refers to include its ongoing dispute with India over its shared 2100-mile-long border; however, China also has ambitions to defeat the United States if war erupts.
“Defense ministry spokesman Wu Qian said that part of the 6.8% defense budget increase this year would be spent on key projects in the next five-year plan to help the military reach its long-standing goal of catching up with the US in being able to ‘fight and win’ on the modern battlefield,” reported the South China Morning Post. “The rest would go on training, weapons procurement and salaries for the country’s two million soldiers, he said.”
The Chinese newspaper also reported that Xi Jinping said “there is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap” during a 2015 speech in Seattle, which is noteworthy because if Xi actually believes that, it’s unlikely his second-in-command would openly contradict him.
A shock to the job market as massive and as sustained as the coronavirus will leave lasting change — and damage — in its wake.
The big picture: We jumped from the best labor market in 60 years, before the coronavirus, to the worst, in April. As the country comes back, millions of jobs lost during the pandemic will never come back, and there will be massive reallocations of jobs from some parts of the economy to others.
“This is the biggest thing since the Great Depression. It’s absolutely enormous and incredibly fast,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford.
What’s happening: Even as states start opening up, new job postings in the U.S. are still down nearly 30% compared with February, according to an analysis by research firm Gartner.
But a closerlook at which sectors of the economy are hiring tells us more about how the pandemic might alter the job market.
There’s been a surge in postings for grocery and delivery workers. Amazon, Walmart and Instacart alone have hired around 700,000 people since the pandemic began.
Look for similar surges in cleaning, sanitation and construction in the coming weeks and months, Bloom says. Public spaces will need to hire cleaning crews and construction companies to keep spaces sanitized and add barriers or other distance-enforcing features.
We could also see increased hiring in high tech because jobs in that sector can often be done remotely, he says.
There is also data on the sectors that have suffered most and that will have the toughest recoveries.
Jobs like Uber driver, flight attendant, server and chef are among those that have seen the steepest hiring slumps.
Gartner notes that hiring in some of the hardest-hit areas of the economy — like hospitality and retail — is starting to climb back up. But millions of jobs will be gone for good as many stores and restaurants permanently shutter and people remain nervous about traveling.
And there’s another longer-term — and seldom discussed — potential impact of the pandemic: So far, much of the pain has hit low-skill and low-wage jobs, but white-collar jobs will also be in jeopardy as the crisis grinds on, Bloom says.
Consider this: The bulk of job creation during the pandemic has been in low-wage jobs, like grocery and delivery, while other sectors freeze hiring altogether. If a graphic designer or a middle manager at a software company loses their job now, it’ll be very difficult to find a comparable job out there.
The deteriorating labor market could also push discouraged, laid-off older workers — who are also at greater risk of becoming seriously ill if they contract the coronavirus — into early retirement.
“There will be a number of people for whom this will be the last job they have,” says Bloom. “And waves of early retirement are really bad for the U.S. labor market.”
The wife of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio wants citizens to personally “physically intervene” to stop violent crimes, nine months after she convinced her husband to get aboard the “defund the police” movement by redirecting money from police to “youth initiatives and social services.”
Shootings in New York City doubled in 2020 and were up 75 percent last month compared to a year prior. Burglaries have also increased, and violent, unprovoked crimes against Asians have become endemic.
“As attacks on Asian American communities continue, we’re asking New Yorkers to show up for their neighbors and intervene when witnessing hateful violence or harassment. I know that can be frightening when you aren’t sure what to do or say, but you can learn,” New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray wrote on Twitter March 6. “Fear is a normal feeling when stepping into a confrontation, but being prepared can help.”
She suggested that witnesses step into the middle of a “hate crime or incident” and engage directly with the person who is being targeted by asking a question like, “What time is it?”
She also advised that witnesses “respond directly to the aggressor or physically intervene and only after assessing the situation. Be confident, assertive, calm. This is risky, but sometimes all we can do is speak up.”
They could also “support a person in crisis by recording on your phone” and “check in with the survivor after the incident. This shows them that they are valued.”
Her remarks came about a week after Yong Zheng was killed in Brooklyn intervening in just such a situation, attempting to help a stranger, who was also Asian, whom he saw being robbed.
McCray, a major figure in city government in her own right, has frequently decried anti-black racism and has a fractured relationship with the city’s police. In April de Blasio named his wife, who is black, as co-chair of the city’s Task Force on Racial Inclusion and Equity.
In June, de Blasio put her in charge of a “Commission on Racial Justice and Reconciliation” that will examine whether monuments and buildings honoring founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should be removed or renamed because of their association with slavery, the New York Post reported.
That came after she overrode residents’ vote to erect a statue honoring Mother Frances Cabrini, an Italian-American nun. The statue would have been just one of seven, three of whom were black. McCray said that though the nun “set an example of compassion and leadership that resonates powerfully today… it will take many more years to correct centuries of neglect and the glaring gender and ethnic imbalance in our public spaces.”
NYPD statistics list 20 arrests for alleged anti-Asian hate crimes in 2020. Most of the suspects were black.
On February 25, 2021, 23-year old Salman Mufihi allegedly stabbed a 36-year old Asian man and said, “If he dies, he dies. I don’t give a f***,” CNN reported. De Blasio called it a “horrible act of violence against an Asian American man out of nowhere, just pure hatred” and said “we have to stop hate.” Mufihi was not charged with a hate crime.
In 2015, NYPD officers turned their backs to de Blasio outside the funeral of officer Wenjian Liu, who was killed by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, who was angry about perceived injustice against blacks and abuses by police. “The man who killed my husband believed the lie told by the politicians and the radicals that police are evil,” his widow said.
Activists who have frequently protested police abuse and black oppression have appropriated assaults on Asians to promote their causes, with one group blaming “white supremacy” for an alleged black-on-Asian crime. As Intercept reporter Lee Fang noted, New York activists on February 20 held a rally titled, “End the violence towards Asians: Let’s united against white nationalism” in Washington Square Park to attain “Justice for Vicha Ratanapakdee.”
Ratanapakdee, an 84-year old man from Thailand, was killed January 28 as he walked in his San Francisco neighborhood at 8:30am. Antoine Watson, a 19-year old black man, was charged with murder.
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Over a dozen leaders and scholars affiliated with the Pro-life Evangelicals for Biden initiative have expressed disappointment with the Biden administration’s support of a measure to remove a legal statute limiting taxpayer funding of abortion.
The Biden administration recently declared support for a COVID-19 relief bill that would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding of abortion in most instances.
In a statement posted on the Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden website, the evangelical leaders and scholars argued that they “feel used and betrayed.” But, they “have no intention of simply watching these kinds of efforts happen from the sidelines.”
“Many evangelicals and Catholics took risks to support Biden publicly. President Biden and Democrats need to honor their courage,” the statement reads.
“We call on President Biden to honor his commitment to us and immediately demand that the House of Representatives apply the Hyde language to the American Relief Package.”
Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden went on to declare that this “is no time for radical change to longstanding abortion policy” and called on certain Democrats in Congress by name to “demand the Hyde Amendment be included.” They warned that if “this is not done, it will raise the question of whether or not we are still welcome in the Democratic Party.”
“As pro-life leaders in the evangelical community, we publicly supported President Biden’s candidacy with the understanding that there would be engagement [with] us on the issue of abortion and particularly the Hyde Amendment,” the statement explains. “The Biden team wanted to talk to us during the campaign to gain our support, and we gave it on the condition there would be active dialogue and common ground solutions on the issue of abortion. There has been no dialogue since the campaign.”
Signatories to the letter include Fuller Seminary President Emeritus Richard Mouw, Evangelicals for Social Action President Emeritus Ronald Sider, and Billy Graham’s granddaughter Jerushah Duford.
Others include John Perkins, the founder of the Christian Community Development Association; Eastern University President Emeritus David Black; Florida megachurch pastor and community organizer Joel C. Hunter; Bishop Claude Alexander of The Park Church in North Carolina; and Dennis P. Hollinger, president emeritus of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.
In October of last year, the group released a statement urging pro-life evangelicals to vote for Biden despite the Democratic Party’s views on abortion.
Sider, a longtime evangelical figure and an advocate for biblical solutions to social and economic injustices, also edited a book released last year called The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump in which 30 evangelical Christians talked about why they opposed the former president.
Tony Perkins, president of the Christian conservative advocacy organization Family Research Council and Trump supporter, responded to the Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden statement by contending that the group “can’t say they weren’t warned.”
“Everyone in America knew where Joe Biden stood on abortion — because he told them. In 13 debates, multiple campaign ads, and a Planned Parenthood townhall,” Perkins wrote in a statement on Monday.
“If Evangelicals for Biden want to say they never saw this COVID bill and its abortion funding coming, then they were the only ones.”
Perkins quoted Biden, who had said on the campaign trail that while he had supported the Hyde Amendment for years while in Congress, he could no longer do so.
“Once they ate of the fruit the Biden campaign was offering the damage was done. The Biden team got what they wanted in 2020: cover for their unbiblical, anti-faith position on abortion,” continued Perkins.
“… the people who argued that evangelicals needed to either back away from Donald Trump, sit out the election, or vote for Joe Biden own this — and all of the other ungodly, evil policies flowing from Capitol Hill.”
Weeks before the presidential election, Sider and Mouw wrote an opinion column published by The Christian Post touting the pro-life evangelical coalition’s statement of support for Biden.
A key point of their argument was that while Biden was pro-choice, his positions on other issues such as racial reconciliation, healthcare reform and immigration made his platform more consistent with biblical values.
“… we believe that on balance, Joe Biden’s policies are more consistent with the biblically shaped ethic of life than those of Donald Trump,” declared the statement in part.
“Therefore, even as we continue to urge different policies on abortion, we urge evangelicals to elect Joe Biden as president.”
(The Epoch Times) The Biden administration is planning to drastically expand the nation’s welfare statethrough increased child allowance grants quietly added into the latest stimulus, which some experts say is a move toward universal basic income.
As part of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, the annual child tax credit was increased to $3,000 per child from ages 6 to 17, and $3,600 for children under 6. It will be made fully refundable, and payable in monthly installments of $300.
Before this, the maximum annual credit was $2,000 for every child under 17.
Notably, the program removed existing work requirements that would increase credit earned based on a person’s income from work. Now, all taxpayers earning under $200,000 with children aged 17 or under living with them at least half the year can claim the full credit. Tax experts have called the increase a “vast undertaking.”
Some experts describe the plan, if enacted permanently, as “the second-largest expansion of means-tested welfare entitlements in U.S. history,” one Feb. 10 Heritage report noted. The same report states that “in constant dollars, its annual cost would dwarf the initial costs of the Medicaid, food stamps, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children programs.”
Advocates of the credit increase say the expanded child tax credits will help reduce poverty for many Americans. One report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, claims it would lift9.9 million children out of poverty. But experts say this is based on faulty data, and on a false notion that the U.S. welfare system isn’t properly funded.
Robert Rector, senior research fellow of domestic policy studies at the Heritage Foundation and a leading authority on poverty and welfare programs, said the child credit program would cost the country about $80 billion a year in cash outlays and about another $40 billion in tax reduction.
The problem is that “it’s unnecessary, and it’s counterproductive,” he said.
“It’s $80 billion on top of a half a trillion dollars that the United States currently spends on cash, food, housing, and medical care for low-income Americans,” he told The Epoch Times. “And that half a trillion dollars is roughly six or seven times the amount needed to completely abolish child poverty in the United States.”
Most estimates say the cost of these expanded child tax credits will cost the country more than $100 billion, with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget identifying the cost at $143 billion annually. Although the current stimulus package notes this credit is only temporary and lasts for a year, experts say it paves the way to enacting a full-fledged, permanent policy.
‘Permanent Expansion’
During the 1990s, the U.S. welfare system was overhauled, shifting the focus away from giving cash unconditionally to one that focused on a work-oriented system. Rector noted that change slashed the poverty rate among children roughly in half while reducing dependence and increasing employment.
He says that what Biden is doing now is returning to a policy of unconditional aid that is “extremely expensive but also very harmful to the poor themselves, because when you do that you’re pushing them toward the social margin.”
Rector notes how experiments in these types of programs indicated that for roughly every $1,000 given, there is a loss of $660 in earnings. He said the child tax credit is “clearly intended” to move in the direction of enacting a universal basic income.
“They’re presenting this as if it’s a one-year change in response to the COVID crisis,” he told The Epoch Times. “But it’s clearly intended to be a permanent expansion.”
There is no possible sustainability in the child tax program, especially “when you factor in all the other social programs Democrats want to enact or are already enacted,” according to Nicholas Giordano, a professor of political science at Suffolk Community College in New York.
“Assuming that we don’t levy an increased tax burden, this program would cost nearly $1 trillion, and that’s if the program is only offered to those in poverty,” Giordano told The Epoch Times, referring to a universal basic income program. “Second, sooner or later, we are going to have to confront our enormous national debt that is growing exponentially.”
“With interest rates likely to increase due to inflation, servicing the debt will become a lot more expensive. This growing debt is unsustainable over the long term,” he added. “Thirdly, there is no fathomable way of implementing a program like this along with universal health care and education programs.”
In Finland and Canada, attempted pilot programs for universal basic income were terminated early due to the massive costs and the little benefit they provided, Giordano said.
Measuring Poverty
One issue related to the debate over welfare is how the United States measures poverty levels. The government, when it counts income, doesn’t count money taken from the half-trillion dollars in welfare as income, according to Rector.
“Our poverty statistics are kind of meaningless,” he said. “When these organizations run a calculation and say, ‘Look at how much this credit reduces poverty,’ the credit calculations are based on these ridiculous databases that exclude all of the current spending, or nearly all of it.”
“Now, they’re saying if we’re spending new money, we’re going to say that it’s income, but if it was money created in the previous welfare programs and so forth, that doesn’t exist.”
It’s important for a variety of reasons to have a working adult in a household, according to Rector, who notes that it initiates social contacts, creates role models for the children, and improves the psychological well-being of the individuals.
“It’s a huge cultural trap that you’re creating, by creating this artificial environment where the poorest people are kind of set aside and told, ‘You’re not expected to work or do anything,’” he said. “And in here, we’re going to give you a lot of money and they’re there. It’s not just this program, there are still a lot of old programs that already do this.”
(The Daily Wire) In an interview with Inside Edition, Samantha Markle, 56, half-sister to Meghan Markle by way of their father, blasted some of the claims Meghan made in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, asserting, “The truth was totally ignored and omitted.”
In the interview, Oprah asked, “Samantha Markle, your half-sister on your father’s side, has written a supposedly ‘tell-all’ book about you. What is your relationship with her?”
“I think it would be very hard to ‘tell all’ when you don’t know me,” Markle replied. “I grew up as an only child.”
“I don’t know how she can say I don’t know her and she was an only child,” Samantha responded. “We’ve got photographs over a lifespan of us together. So how can she not know me?”
In the Winfrey interview, Meghan claimed, “The last time I saw her must have been at least 18, 19 years ago, and before that, ten years before that.”
But Inside Edition showed a picture of the two women at Samantha’s college graduation, saying, “But here they are at Samantha’s college graduation in 2008, 13 years ago.”
Meghan claimed her half-sister only changed her name back to Markle after Meghan’s relationship with Harry became public, saying, “She changed her last name back to Markle — I think she was in her early 50s at that time — only when I started dating Harry. So I think that says enough.”
But Samantha countered, “I was a Markle before she was. I thought that was kind of weird that she would say I only changed my name back when she met Harry. Markle has always been my name.”
“Samantha then showed Inside Edition her petition to change her name that was dated back to December 1997 and her college diploma, which says Samantha M. Markle,” The Daily Mail noted.
Town and Country Magazine reported in 2018, “Samantha, who is also known by the name Samantha Grant, is 17 years Meghan’s senior,” then quoted Samantha Markle saying, “Life is about cashing in. You take opportunities as they arise and hopefully you enjoy the ride and make it as positive as you can. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Commenting on Meghan’s claim that she had contemplated suicide, Samantha, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008 and uses a wheelchair, stated, “Depression is not an excuse for treating people like dishrags and disposing of them.”
The Daily Mail offered some examples of some questionable claims Meghan Markle made: Meghan claimed that she never researched Harry or the Royal Family before the relationship started, yet the couple’s biography, “Finding Freedom,” stated that prior to Meghan’s first date with Harry in 2016, “Naturally both participants in this blind date did their homework with a thorough Google search. Harry, who scoped out Meghan on social media, was interested.”
‘Every single influencer person on the planet can come there’
(New York Post) MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell said that he’s been developing a social media application that would restore free speech to those who were banned by the mainstream tech platforms.
My Pillow founder Mike Lindell has made the grand claim that he is launching his own social media site — after he was booted from Twitter for spreading baseless claims about election fraud.
The pillow pusher said on conservative radio host Charlie Kirk’s podcast Friday that his Big Tech rival could even be live within a month, Business Insider reported.
“Every single influencer person on the planet can come there. You’re going to have a platform to speak out,” Lindell announced, adding that he has been working on the site for four years.
“It’s not just like a little Twitter platform,” said the businessman, who has claimed that he lost $65 million in revenue this year because of mass boycotts over his ongoing claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.
“They’re suppressing our voices,” Lindell railed on the show Friday.
“We’re launching this big platform so all the voices of our country can come back and start telling it like it is again,” he declared.
“You will not need YouTube. You won’t need these places … it will be where everything can be told, because we’ve got to get our voices back. People will be able to talk and not walk on eggshells.”
Lindell then discussed “cancel culture” and claimed his Wikipedia page had been “changed into something I’m not,” without elaborating.
“Google canceled me on some things, I can tell you,” he said in the podcast, explaining that he bought ads on the search engine giant so more people would see “evidence” of the alleged election fraud.
But he said Google took “tens of thousands of dollars” in ad revenue from him before shutting him down.
Lindell also complained that “even the bad stations” wouldn’t have him on their shows to talk about election fraud, the COVID-19 vaccine and Dominion Voting Systems, which recently filed a lawsuit accusing him of defamation.
The voting machine company is seeking more than $1.3 billion in damages on allegations that Lindell falsely accused it of “stealing millions of votes” in the federal election.
The My Pillow CEO said the site would launch in “four or five weeks,” but also that it could launch in “10 days,” adding that he couldn’t announce the platform’s name yet. No further details about the platform, including what it would look like or how it would function, were offered.
