Texas sued to block the ban on Biden’s third day in office. Federal Judge Drew Tipton had already temporarily paused it twice prior to Tuesday night’s order.
A federal judge in Texas has put an indefinite halt to President Joe Biden’s 100-day ban on deportations after issuing a preliminary injunction late Tuesday.
The ruling by Judge Drew Tipton comes after he had already temporarily paused the moratorium twice. The ban is nationwide and is in place as the case continues to play out in courts.
The ruling is a victory for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who sued to block Biden’s order three days into the Biden administration. Paxton’s office argued the state would face financial harm if undocumented immigrants were released into the state because of costs associated with health care and education, and said the moratorium would also lure others to come to Texas.
BREAKING — U.S. Judge Drew Tipton temporarily halts the Biden administration’s 100-day moratorium on certain deportations in an early legal battle over the new president’s immigration policy.
Tipton, a Trump appointee to the federal bench, wrote in his order that Texas would also incur costs for detaining immigrants within its state. “Texas claimed injury from unanticipated detention costs is sufficiently concrete and imminent. The harm is concrete or de facto because Texas incurs real financial costs in detaining criminal aliens,” he wrote.
It’s unclear whether the Biden administration will appeal the ruling to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Texas’ federal benches.
Biden’s moratorium was announced as part a review of enforcement policies within Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agencies as the administration developed its final priorities, according to the Biden administration. Tipton’s order does not affect the rest of that review.
I applaud Judge Tipton’s ruling to ban the enforcement of President Biden’s 100-day deportation pause. https://t.co/eWNXR4okyW
The American Civil Liberties Union, which intervened in the case, said the ruling only means an extension of former President Trump’s hardline policies.
“Allowing these deportations to continue means that families will be torn apart and that people who have the opportunity to seek relief in the United States will be returned to danger,” Kate Huddleston, attorney with the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement. “At the same time that Texans face a long recovery from a deadly winter storm, Paxton is inflicting yet another trauma on our communities by creating fear and uncertainty.”
Days after Tipton issued the first order, a witness to the El Paso Walmart shooting was deported after being pulled over during a traffic stop. Her attorney said the woman, who was cooperating with prosecutors in El Paso, would not have been sent back to Mexico had Paxton not filed the lawsuit.
Dr. Rachel Levine’s commitment to imposing a radical gender ideology on our nation’s children should perhaps be of even greater concern to the Senate HELP Committee.
On Thursday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee will hold a nomination hearing for Dr. Rachel Levine, President Joe Biden’s pick for Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). There are plenty of reasons for the committee to be concerned about placing Dr. Levine in such an influential and powerful role.
COVID-Overkill.
During Levine’s time as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Levine and Pennsylvania’s Governor Tom Wolf drew headlines by engaging in a draconian campaign of threats against counties that questioned state COVID-19 guidelines and wished to reopen their local economies as local businesses fell further into despair.
Additionally, Levine infamously forced COVID-19 patients out of hospitals and into nursing homes and long-term care facilities, exacerbating the spread of the virus to the elderly and infirm, among whom it proved to be most lethal. Levine repeatedly downplayed this criticism, arguing it was a necessary part of the state’s coronavirus response, and that COVID-19 was already present in those facilities.
Watch:
While Levine was actively putting these elderly residents at grave risk, Levine chose to personally play by a different set of rules by quietly removing a parent from a nursing home facility early on in the pandemic.
But while the draconian treatment of local Pennsylvania governments and the COVID-19 nursing home scandal should be enough to call Dr. Levine’s nomination into question, Levine’s commitment to imposing a radical gender ideology on our nation’s children should perhaps be of even greater concern to the Senate HELP Committee.
A professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine, Levine has given lectures in various settings since at least 2012 on how to perform sex changes and gender conversion therapy on children.
According to Levine, children ought to be given the latitude to choose their own gender. Levine has advised adults to “try not to force them one way or other [sic]” and instead to follow the child’s lead.
“For prepubertal children,” Levine said in a 2017 speech at Franklin & Marshall College, “they might present in different ways. They might present at school in the gender they were identified at birth, or they might present as the other gender, or they might be more gender-fluid.” Levine has described children as young as five or six as “knowing” which gender they wanted to be.
Once, however, the child reaches the “young adolescent” stage, Dr. Levine recommends puberty blockers, a practice which Dr. Levine apparently followed at Penn State Hershey Medical Center as Chief of the Division of Adolescent Medicine and Eating Disorders. In speeches, Levine describes prescribing puberty blockers and cross-gender hormone injections to children who expressed anxiety about the natural process of puberty.
Biden's HHS Pick Dr. Rachel Levine has advocated for sex changes for childrenhttps://t.co/aYgLzyvaq3
Additionally, Levine has expressed doubts about the “controversial” requirement in some standards of medical ethics that patients receive psychological evaluations before undergoing such drastic medical regimens.
The current protocols for gender-dysphoric youth, Levine stated in a 2017 speech, outline a two-step process: the prescription of puberty-blockers during the first stages of puberty, and then, after continued counselling, the introduction of cross-gender hormones between the ages of 14 and 16. Then, around age 18, the patient may undergo surgery. But, as Levine noted, there are sometimes exceptions. In certain instances, Levine has said, surgical procedures may be performed on patients under the age of 18.
Levine, however, has noted that doctors may discard the protocol and significantly “accelerate” the process when dealing with “street kids,” who do not come into clinics with their parents, and who may be tempted to buy hormones off the street. In such cases, Levine said, doctors may skip the blockers altogether and go straight to cross-gender hormones, presumably at ages even younger than the 14-16 range described above. Though common in the past, the practice of foisting experimental medical treatments on vulnerable populations, especially minors, is condemned by most medical ethicists.
In addition to the Pennsylvania nursing home scandal, Levine has previously come under fire for other questionable judgments, including an order requiring that two-year-olds wear masks in public, a one-night suspension of alcohol sales in restaurants on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and a state recommendation that Pennsylvanians take up sexting or subscribe to a pornography service like OnlyFans in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
It is unclear whether any senators will question Levine on these judgments, or on Levine’s radical transgender ideology. Thus far, opposition to Levine’s nomination has been muted at best. Meanwhile, polls have shown large majorities of voters oppose subjecting minors to sex changes and gender conversion therapy. Senators on the HELP Committee may want to press Levine, and other Biden nominees to HHS, about their support for such radical proposals.
President Joe Biden’s choice for Assistant Secretary for Health has come under fire for supporting hormone treatment and gender reassignment surgery for pre-pubescent children with gender dysphoria.
The National Pulse reported this week that Dr. Rachel Levine, the Pennsylvania Secretary of Health, supports young gender-dysphoric adolescents receiving puberty blockers, cross-gender hormone injections, and eventually surgery as part of the transition process.
“For prepubertal children,” Levine said in 2017 during a speech at Franklin & Marshall College, “they might present in different ways. They might present at school in the gender they were identified at birth, or they might present as the other gender, or they might be more gender-fluid.”
She tweeted last month: “A new study has found that #Transgender youth with access to a puberty blocker have decline in chances of suicide + #mentalhealth problems now and in the future. This study is important because it’s the first to show this specific association.”
Levine is a transgender woman herself, and would be the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the Senate.
The National Pulse said that “Levine’s radical transgender ideology,” makes her “unfit” for the position.
“It is unclear whether any senators will question Levine on these judgments, or on Levine’s radical transgender ideology,” writes the National Pulse’s Jon Schweppe. “Thus far, opposition to Levine’s nomination has been muted at best. Meanwhile, polls have shown large majorities of voters oppose subjecting minors to sex changes and gender conversion therapy. Senators on the HELP Committee may want to press Levine, and other Biden nominees to HHS, about their support for such radical proposals.”
Senate Republicans are eager to get aid where it’s needed, reopen schools and encourage work.
Democrats are anxious for any excuse to blow up the Senate filibuster, the last procedural hurdle to one-party government. Their latest is that Republicans oppose the president’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Despite having passed five bipartisan Covid-19 relief bills to date—including one barely seven weeks ago—they claim our opposition demonstrates historic intransigence.
No, it demonstrates that the $1.9 trillion bill is a clunker. It would waste hundreds of billions of dollars, do nothing meaningful to get kids back to school, and enact policies that work against job creation. The Congressional Budget Office’s recent analysis of the plan found that more than a third of the proposed funding—$700 billion—wouldn’t be spent until 2022 or later, undermining the administration’s claim that the massive price tag is justified for urgent pandemic-related needs.
The Biden stimulus is unsound economic policy. High unemployment isn’t the result of too little money in American pockets; it’s because of the pandemic. Sending out checks won’t get consumers back into restaurants, bars, salons, malls, hotels or airplanes. Near-record levels of savings are evidence that consumers are able to spend. When Covid is finally in the rearview mirror, they will come roaring back. Congress should target assistance to those who need it and help speed the delivery of vaccines—not borrow hundreds of billions more to check items off a political wish list, deepening the nation’s debt and risking inflation.
The bill is also filled with bad policies and sloppy math. It calls for $350 billion for states and localities. If you live in New York, you might think that sounds about right because the pandemic severely exacerbated your state’s existing financial woes. But New York is the exception. Florida hasn’t even had to dip into its rainy-day fund. California has a multibillion-dollar surplus. Utah’s revenues rose by double digits.
JP Morgan found that 21 states had revenue increases in 2020. Other states drew on rainy-day funds—which is what they are there for. Only a few are in severe financial distress. The same is true of cities and counties: Some are hurting, but the great majority aren’t. Most local tax revenue comes from property taxes, which are far less volatile than sales or income taxes. Sending out hundreds of billions of dollars to states and localities regardless of need is both wasteful and harmful. It would create incentives for the mismanagement that got some states into fiscal trouble in the first place.
Over the weekend, the U.S. House posted a first draft version of the “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021” – a $1.9 trillion emergency aid package to help America recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
Previous legislation has already provided at least $4 trillion in funds for testing, paid family leave, small business relief, direct payments to individuals and families, the Kennedy Center, and a plethora of non-related Covid-19 “relief.”
Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team essentially wrote the bill, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found what House Democrats consider coronavirus-recovery “essential” spending:
$1.5 million earmarked for the Seaway International Bridge, which connects New York to Canada. Senate Leader Chuck Schumer hails from New York.
$50 million for “family planning” – going to non-profits, i.e. Planned Parenthood, or public entities, including for “services for adolescents[.]”
$852 million for AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps Vista, and the National Senior Service Corps – the Corporation for National and Community Service – civic volunteer agencies. This includes $9 million for the AmeriCorp inspector general to conduct oversight and audits of the largess. AmeriCorps received a $1.1 billion FY2020 appropriation.
People of goodwill can debate each of these goals, but is it truly emergency spending or funding related to Covid-19?
For example, what is the public purpose for a hike in the minimum wage to $15 per hour – which the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says will cost the economy 1.4 million jobs?
Certainly, the coronavirus stimulus bill does provide $473 billion in payments to individuals, $75 billion in cash for vaccines, $26 billion to restaurants, $15 billion to help fund airline payrolls, and another $7.2 billion in Paycheck Protection Program funding for small businesses.
However, The Wall Street Journal editorial board estimated that only $825 billion was directly related to Covid-19 relief and $1 trillion was “expansions of progressive programs, pork, and unrelated policy changes.”
For example, separately, our auditors found that $470 million in the bill doubles the budgets of The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities.
$200 million in the bill to The Institute of Museum and Library Services (FY2019 budget: $230 million). This agency is so small that it doesn’t even employ an inspector general.
$270 million funds the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities (FY2019 budget: $253 million) – In 2017, our study showed eighty-percent of all non-profit grant making flowed to well-heeled organizations with over $1 million in assets.
A quick spotlight on agencies and entities receiving “coronavirus recovery” money in the bill includes:
$350 billion to bailout the 50 States and the District of Columbia. The allocation formula uses the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2020. Therefore, states like New York and California –who had strict economic lockdown policies and high unemployment – will get bailout money. States like Florida and South Dakota – who were open for business – will get less.
$128.5 billion to fund K-12 education. The CBO determined that most of the money in education will be distributed in 2022 through 2028, when the pandemic is over.
$86 billion to save nearly 200 pension plans insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. There are no reforms mandated while these badly managed pensions are bailed-out. Many of these pension plans are co-managed by unions.
$50 billion goes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). A portion of these funds is earmarked to reimburse up to $7,000 for funeral and burial costs related to Covid-19 deaths.
$39.6 billion to higher education. This amount is three times the money – $12.5 billion – that higher ed received with the massive CARES Act funding from last March.
$1.5 billion for Amtrak – the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. In FY2020, Congress appropriated $3 billion for Amtrak ($2 billion in annual appropriations, plus an additional $1 billion in the CARES Act COVID relief bill). In the three years before the pandemic, AMTRAK lost $392 million – even after a $5 billion taxpayer subsidy (FY2017-FY2019).
We reached out to Speaker Pelosi for comment and will update the piece if there is a response.
During the past three years, Republicans and Democrats have helped drain the U.S. Treasury from the left and the right. Our national debt increased from $10 trillion (2008) to $19.6 trillion (2016) to $23.6 trillion (2020) and stands at $28 trillion today.
Continuing coronavirus responses and bloated legislation will drive the national debt much higher.
We see it everywhere. Thanks to Corporate America, mainstream media, so-called civil rights groups, academia and a relevance-worshipping Church, we are a nation increasingly judging one another and separating ourselves by the color of our skin. We’re surrounded by marketing that elevates one group while excoriating another. It’s okay, we’re told. It’s all in a day’s work toward “diversity” and “inclusion.”
Funny thing how so many get excluded in those pursuits.
Racism is evil. Exploiting it, marketing it, and expanding it is too.
The racial messaging is loud and clear: if you’re not the right hue, there’s obviously something wrong with you. And those reminders are relentless. From Hollywood babble to pandering politicians to Big Tech Tyrants to Institutions of Higher Mislearning to euphemistic bridges to nowhere in woke churches, we’re barraged by an unending stream of color conscious craziness that demands society sees hue before they see you.
As with all things rooted in human frailty, today’s celebrated form of segregation is immensely profitable, especially for those peddling the victimhood. There’s no scarcity of New York Times bestselling authors reminding us to define ourselves by our “whiteness” or “blackness,” and to assess every situation, every word, every interaction with others through the broken narratives of Critical Race Theory. It’s exhausting. That’s not living.
At every turn we’re being commanded to check our color, check our privilege, check our to-do-lists of guilt-oriented tasks. Corporate America has taken genuflection to a whole new low. Remember when Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy got on his knees and started shining hip-hop artist Lecrae’s shoes in a seriously cringey display of reconciliation-gone-wrong? He told other white people to do the same. If you ever try to shine my shoes, I will kick you. I repeat. I. Will. Kick. You. This doesn’t erase racism. This doesn’t change the past. This just makes someone feel really uncomfortable.
Guilt is a powerful thing. And when it’s coupled with racism, it’s a cash cow, especially for the groups that rely on victim evangelism. The Black Lives Matter movement raked in millions while cities and businesses burned last summer. The NAACP, in full denial of the massive violence and destruction wrought by many #BLM “peaceful protests,” was the recipient of millions more in pledges from Corporate America.
Apple has turned up the volume on its social justice rhetoric with its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative and its “Black Unity” branded watch. Why not a “Unity” collection that celebrates us all? Never mind these same corporations closed and boarded up their businesses to protect their assets during BLM protests. They sent out press releases that sounded like an abused spouse making excuses for the abuser.
Taxpayers get to be force-fed the Cult of Neo-Segregation even in our museums. Remember when the Smithsonian posted an infographic about “whiteness” and “white culture” claiming that having a “protestant work ethic” was a “white thing.” So, as someone with brown skin, I don’t believe in working hard? The Smithsonian got fierce pushback and removed the infographic, but (of course) kept the racist “whiteness” section on their website.
We’re siloing, and it’s toxic. I’m all about expressions of diversity and learning others’ cultures. We are a beautifully diverse nation, and that diversity exists even within the same shades of pigmentation. But we don’t make up for the suppression of some cultures by demonizing everyone else. We don’t bring people together by constantly obsessing over our hues, our past, and our assumed “privileges.”
I’m all about addressing inequality…real inequality. I’m all about taking steps to dismantle systemic racism where and when it actually occurs (let’s start with Planned Parenthood —the leading killer of black lives). I’m all about criminal justice reform and law enforcement accountability, but I won’t embrace a lie (BLM, CRT, DNC) to achieve it. I’m all about more healthy dialogue, more relationships and more unity around the fact that we’re one human race.
Church, can you help me out on this? Acts 17:26 if you’ve forgotten.
I’m not about living in the past. I’m not about mainstream media’s and academia’s revisions of the past. And I’m not about a mindset that certain people can never escape the past. Thank goodness this doesn’t apply to us in the spiritual sense. We’re forgiven by a God who loves us and redeems our past. But a broken worldview wants us to hold someone responsible for something they may or may not have done. Some want perpetual penance for wrongs someone’s ancestors have committed.
Are we responsible for the crimes of even our parents? Am I responsible for the crime of my biological father because I was conceived in rape?
Too many times the past is weaponized and used to justify present behavior. If African-Americans, who lived in the horrific oppression of slavery, could forgive and move forward, what’s holding our modern society back?
The Civil Rights Act of 1871 (aka the Ku Klux Klan Act) was a piece of legislation that addressed the horrific KKK violence that terrorized black Americans and their white allies. No surprise, but zero Democrats in the House and Senate voted for the bill. A group of African-American Congressman (they were all Republicans) had a profound take on the legislation which alarmingly allowed pardons for former Confederates. The trailblazer legislators were Senator Hiram Revels and Representatives Robert Elliott, Robert De Large, Benjamin Turner and Joseph Rainey — all born into slavery. They proclaimed: “We have open and frank hearts toward those who were our oppressors and taskmasters. We foster no enmity now, and we desire to foster none for their act in the past to us, nor to the Government we love so well.”
We have a lot to learn from our past. But the most powerful lesson that benefits all of us, regardless of our beautiful hues, is how (especially as Christians) we can choose to have a more loving, more forgiving and more unified future.
Most of the $1.9 trillion House bill has little to do with the virus and is being called “little more than a wishlist for the radical left masquerading as a COVID relief package.”
House Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill is a socialist “wish list” that will also subsidize blue states that have mismanaged their budgets for years, Sean Hannity told viewers Monday.
“No Democrat spending bill is complete without subsidies for illegal immigrants, federal money for abortions. If [ths bill is] passed … Planned Parenthood will now qualify for PPP small business loans, which then become grants and bridges to Canada and environmental justice equity commissions for farmers, health care in other countries,” the “Hannity” host said.
“[It’s] also a budget bailout … for New York, for Andrew Cuomo, and Gavin Newsom in California. This is not a serious, thoughtful COVID relief package. What this really is, is a massive federal payout to everyone and every state who donated to and supported Democrat candidates in 2020.”
“Even during a global crisis,” Hannity added, “the left is constantly playing political games.”
The host added that Democrats have shown that are not taking coronavirus relief as seriously as they should be, pointing to a bill from Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., that would ban former President Donald Trump from being buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
“In the middle of a pandemic, when over 100,000 Americans [have] died during Joe Biden’s time in the White House, raging against President Trump is still the Democratic Party and the media mob’s top priority,” he said.
“Clearly the same Democrats have been in no particular rush to pass a COVID relief package and get money into the hands of Americans who actually need it,” Hannity concluded. “The bulk of spending [in the COVID bill] is unrelated to getting immediate assistance to our fellow Americans in need through no fault of their own. In fact, nearly $700 billion won’t be spent until after 2022, including billions not spent until after 2024.”
“So we must ask ourselves tonight, how is that COVID relief?”
Over the weekend, the U.S. House posted a first draft version of the “American Rescue Plan Act of 2021” – a $1.9 trillion emergency aid package to help America recover from the coronavirus pandemic.
Previous legislation has already provided at least $4 trillion in funds for testing, paid family leave, small business relief, direct payments to individuals and families, the Kennedy Center, and a plethora of non-related COVID “relief.”
Since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership team essentially wrote the bill, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found what House Democrats consider coronavirus-recovery “essential” spending:
$1.5 million earmarked for the Seaway International Bridge, which connects New York to Canada. Senate Leader Chuck Schumer hails from New York.
$50 million for “family planning” – going to non-profits, i.e. Planned Parenthood, or public entities, including for “services for adolescents[.]”
$852 million for AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps Vista, and the National Senior Service Corps – the Corporation for National and Community Service – civic volunteer agencies. This includes $9 million for the AmeriCorp inspector general to conduct oversight and audits of the largess. AmeriCorps received a $1.1 billion FY2020 appropriation.
People of goodwill can debate each of these goals, but is it truly emergency spending or funding related to COVID?
For example, what is the public purpose for a hike in the minimum wage to $15 per hour – which the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says will cost the economy 1.4 million jobs?
Certainly, the coronavirus stimulus bill does provide $473 billion in payments to individuals, $75 billion in cash for vaccines, $26 billion to restaurants, $15 billion to help fund airline payrolls, and another $7.2 billion in Paycheck Protection Program funding for small businesses.
However, The Wall Street Journal editorial board estimated that only $825 billion was directly related to COVID-relief and $1 trillion was “expansions of progressive programs, pork, and unrelated policy changes.”
For example, separately, our auditors found that $470 million in the bill doubles the budgets of The Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities.
$200 million in the bill to The Institute of Museum and Library Services (FY2019 budget: $230 million). This agency is so small that it doesn’t even employ an inspector general.
$270 million funds the National Endowment of the Arts and the Humanities (FY2019 budget: $253 million) – In 2017, our study showed eighty-percent of all non-profit grant making flowed to well-heeled organizations with over $1 million in assets.
A quick spotlight on agencies and entities receiving “coronavirus recovery” money in the bill includes:
$350 billion to bailout the 50 States and the District of Columbia. The allocation formula uses the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2020. Therefore, states like New York and California –who had strict economic lockdown policies and high unemployment – will get bailout money. States like Florida and South Dakota – who were open for business – will get less.
$128.5 billion to fund K-12 education. The CBO determined that most of the money in education will be distributed in 2022 through 2028, when the pandemic is over.
$86 billion to save nearly 200 pension plans insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. There are no reforms mandated while these badly managed pensions are bailed-out. Many of these pension plans are co-managed by unions.
$50 billion goes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). A portion of these funds is earmarked to reimburse up to $7,000 for funeral and burial costs related to COVID deaths.
$39.6 billion to higher education. This amount is three times the money – $12.5 billion – that higher ed received with the massive CARES Act funding from last March.
$1.5 billion for Amtrak – the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. In FY2020, Congress appropriated $3 billion for Amtrak ($2 billion in annual appropriations, plus an additional $1 billion in the CARES Act COVID relief bill). In the three years before the pandemic, AMTRAK lost $392 million – even after a $5 billion taxpayer subsidy (FY2017-FY2019).
We reached out to Speaker Pelosi for comment and will update the piece if there is a response.
During the past three years, Republicans and Democrats have helped drain the U.S. Treasury from the left and the right. Our national debt increased from $10 trillion (2008) to $19.6 trillion (2016) to $23.6 trillion (2020) and stands at $28 trillion today.
Continuing coronavirus responses and bloated legislation will drive the national debt much higher.
The Biden White House is pointing to polls showing that its $1.9 trillion spending bill is popular, and the press corps is cheering. Yet we wonder how much public support there’d be if Americans understood that most of the blowout is a list of longtime Democratic spending priorities flying under the false flag of Covid-19 relief.
Let’s dig into the various House committee bills to separate the Covid from the chaff. The Covid cash includes some $75 billion for vaccinations, treatments, testing and medical supplies. There’s also $19 billion for “public health,” primarily for state health departments and community health centers. One might even count the $6 billion to the Indian Health Service, or $4 billion for mental health.
The package also hands more to businesses and individuals most hit by lockdowns. That includes $7.2 billion more for the Paycheck Protection Program, $15 billion for economic injury disaster loans, $26 billion for restaurants, bars and live venues, and $15 billion in payroll support for airlines. The recipients of this taxpayer money will at least be required to prove economic harm, and in some cases repay loans.
Not so the recipients of the $413 billion in checks Democrats intend to send to households far and wide, at $1,400 per man, woman and dependent, that begins phasing out at $75,000 of individual income. The Congressional Budget Office says the bill’s unemployment provisions will increase deficits by $246 billion, and that its $400 a week in federal “enhanced” unemployment benefits through August “could increase the unemployment rate as well as decrease labor force participation.” So much for economic stimulus.
All told, this generous definition of Covid-related provisions tallies some $825 billion. The rest of the bill—more than $1 trillion—is a combination of bailouts for Democratic constituencies, expansions of progressive programs, pork, and unrelated policy changes.
McDonald’s Corp on Thursday said it will tie executive bonuses to new goals for diversifying the company and for the first time publicly release demographic details of its workforce (Reuters).
Under the new rules, CEO Chris Kempczinski stands to lose 15% of his approximately $2.25 million annual bonus if he fails to meet goals to increase the portion of women and Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and other minorities in senior leadership roles.
More organizations are seeking to increase opportunities for Black workers, women and other disenfranchised and underpaid groups, after a nationwide reckoning with racism sparked by the May killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police.
As activists have called for more transparency, companies are increasingly reporting demographic data for their workforces and tying executive pay to diversification goals.
Coffee seller Starbucks Corp in October linked compensation to diversity goals but did not provide details of how those goals would be weighted in performance reviews.
McDonald’s said in July that it would launch initiatives to increase diversity, but it had not yet developed exact mechanisms to do that.
McDonald’s announced that hiring too many white men would cause senior executives who did so to lose bonuses and instead they should prioritize women and “historically underrepresented groups” for top corporate positions.
For her part, HumanEvents.com writer Celine Ryan questioned this system and called it “McQuotas,” according to her Feb. 19 article.
“But even those who place value in the concepts of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ have repeatedly pointed out that these types of hiring quotas are misguided at best, and empty performances at worst, with unintended negative consequences,” Ryan wrote.
This well-known multinational company increased the percentages of employees it now prioritizes when hiring, without parameters such as demographic proportionality in each country, for example.
Likewise, the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft, maintains that “the company will focus on hiring women and minorities for top positions, regardless of their talent and abilities.”
Coca-Cola also generated a strong reaction when it was discovered that in its employee training instructions, it included a rule that participants “try to be less white” in their behavior, according to alternative media outlet The Scoop.
The Twitter user identified as @DrKarlynB denounced these indications in one of her tweets.
“Coca-Cola is forcing employees to complete online training telling them to “try to be less white. These images are from an internal whistleblower,” she wrote.
After this tweet, Coca-Cola denied the fact, but @DrKarlynB replied in another of her messages that the company’s institutional icon could be seen in the didactic material used for the training.
“For people asking to verify this, the course is publicly available on @LinkedIn,” the netizen confirmed.
She added: “You can see for yourself. The Coca-Cola icon is in the top right-hand corner on some of the images because they’re using LinkedIn content for their internal platform.”
McDonald’s has a perfect strategy for financial success and human resources management. They are based upon strict rules, turning the back towards the American First standards.
McDonald’s company executives’ bonuses will be shortened if they hire white people for better places.
The company’s politics allows them to include every type of person and have employees from minority groups and immigrants. This company will have employees from all races and types in the future.
Besides. they will eliminate all the stereotypes.
“From 2021, the Company incorporates quantitative human capital management-related metrics to annual incentive compensation for its Executive Vice Presidents.”
When 2025 ends, 35% of the workers in higher positions will include minority groups. This metric in 2020 was 29%.
In a Washington Examiner report for this theme, the company said they would add up to a 15% bonus for applying and reaching this goal.
“Inclusion Index” is the metric for these targets! McDonald promotes EQUALITY!
Of course, haters are around. Some people don’t agree with this decision.
Some people doubt in this program. For example, Celine Ryan suggested renaming the company in “McQuotas.”, other people also commented.
On Twitter she wrote:
“But even those who place value in the concepts of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ have repeatedly pointed out that these types of hiring quotas are misguided at best, and empty performances at worst, with unintended negative consequences.”
I am asking myself:
Promoting diversity and starting discrimination to the home nation, can you see the difference?
Cell lines derived from aborted babies used in the production or testing of various vaccines, including a number of COVID vaccines, most likely came from babies who were aborted alive, and according to the general practice as outlined in medical literature, may have been placed in a fridge while still living where they awaited dismemberment before having their organs harvested, a researcher has found.
Biologist Pamela Acker, who has a master’s degree in Biology from the Catholic University of America and who recently authored a book titled Vaccination: A Catholic Perspective, related what the literature says about how babies were aborted to obtain cell lines used in a number of vaccines.
“A number of these abortions that were done in that way were termed ‘abdominal hysterectomies’ in the medical literature. So in some cases, the women were actually being sterilized in the process as well,” she said.
“They had to maintain a sterile environment because you don’t want any contamination of the tissue with any kind of foreign agents, any bacteria, or viruses, or anything like that. The babies were — and, in some cases, the uterus as well — removed from the woman and, without even puncturing the amniotic sac, placed directly into the refrigerator where it was kept for no more than 24 hours.”
“So these babies were literally placed into the fridge alive and then stored between one and 24 hours until they could be dismembered, basically. And this is right there in the scientific literature,” she said.
Acker spent about nine months in a lab a decade ago working on a project to develop an HIV vaccine with a grant provided by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It was when her team decided to use HEK-293 cells for the project that she began to question her involvement.
“At this point, most people have heard of these (cell lines) because they are connected with the COVID vaccines, but at that time I hadn’t. So I asked (my colleague) what ‘HEK’ stands for, and she told me, ‘Human Embryonic Kidney,”’ Acker said in an interview last month with LifeSite Editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen.
Acker said that it was after reading Dr. Alvin Wong’s paper titled “The Ethics of HEK 293” that appeared in the 2006 autumn issue of The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly that she was able to arrive at some moral clarity on the issue.
Wong, an oncologist and senior consultant at Singapore’s National University Cancer Institute who has an interest in bioethics, wrote in his paper that due to evidence that the cells were “obtained from the embryo of a willfully induced abortion,” there is “a moral duty on the part of any researcher to discontinue using this cell line.”
“That moral duty should be particularly clear to Catholic researchers and institutions. Even if it may be extremely difficult to stop or modify the experiments in progress, an immediate cessation of the use of the cell line is the correct and just action to take,” Wong added.
Acker said that when she “expressed my concerns to my primary investigator, it ended up being the end of my career in his lab.”
The baby girl behind HEK-293
Acker explained to Westen during her January 12 interview the meaning behind the letters and numbers HEK 293, the cell line developed by Dr. Frank Graham in the Netherlands in 1973.
“HEK stands for Human Embryonic Kidney. But 293 stands for the 293rd experiment that this particular researcher did to develop the cell lines.”
The kidney was taken from a “completely normal” preborn girl aborted in 1972 who, according to Alex van der Eb, the doctor leading the team to develop the cell line, had “nothing wrong” with her.
Acker said at the time to Westen that there were likely more abortions behind the final development of the cell line since “for 293 experiments you need far more than one abortion.”
“We’re talking probably 100s of abortions,” she said at that time.
Graham, however, recently told Ian Jackson, who was conducting research in the HEK-293 cell line, that only one fetus was involved.
“On my arrival at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands I kept lab books in which I numbered my experiments in the order in which I carried them out starting in 1970. None of these experiments used human embryo kidney cells (HEK) until very late in my studies in Leiden (1973) when I carried out 2 (two!) experiments that utilized kidney cells from 1 (one!) human fetus.”
“Since abortion was illegal in the Netherlands at that time except to save the life of the mother I have always assumed that that fetus resulted from a therapeutic abortion. However, the kidney cells I used had been prepared and frozen away before I even arrived in Leiden. Consequently, I do not have first hand knowledge of the circumstances relating to that single abortion. The second of the two experiments I carried out with these HEK cells was experiment 293 and resulted in the cell line of the same name. The bottom line is that the 293 cell line resulted from cells obtained from a single fetus,” Graham told Jackson, who forwarded the doctor’s statement to LifeSite.
Acker told LifeSite for this report that Graham’s statement is “misleading at best.”
“Dr. Plotkin tried to say something similar, that the cell lines involved in the creation of vaccines only came from two abortions. But that ignores the other 74 babies that were a part of the research he was doing. It’s published in the literature that other HEK and HER (human embryonic retina) cell lines are attributed to Frank Graham. So his research definitely involved more than one abortion.”
“When a cell line is developed, it is usually produced using a sample of tissue from a single individual unless it’s a hybrid cell line. So on the one hand, it is technically correct to say that the cell line was developed using one aborted baby. However, this is not an accurate representation of how many lives were actually sacrificed in the whole process of developing an aborted fetal cell line,” she continued.
“If Graham wasn’t just working on fetal cell lines during his time at the University of Leiden, it may not have been hundreds of abortions,” she added, “but we would need to see his notebooks to know.”
Acker pointed out that there is every indication that the cells were derived from an “electively aborted” baby.
“In particular, the fact that the cells were stored in the freezer lends further credence to the conclusion that HEK-293 was derived from an electively aborted fetus,” she said.
“The success and longevity of HEK-293 suggests that the specimen was remarkably well-suited for culturing, and anyone who has studied cell theory should know that you cannot derive a living cell culture from tissue that is already dead. Because of the biological impossibility of creating a live cell line from dead tissue, and the practical and biological implausibility of obtaining live tissue from a spontaneously miscarried fetus, it is far more likely that the baby from whom HEK-293 was derived was electively aborted and alive at the time of tissue extraction,” she added.
Acker quoted Dr. C. Ward Kischer, an embryologist and emeritus professor of anatomy from the University of Arizona College of Medicine, who stated the following regarding the cells obtained for aborted fetal cell lines: “In order to sustain 95% of the cells, the live tissue would need to be preserved within 5 minutes of the abortion […] within an hour the cells would continue to deteriorate, rendering the specimen useless.”
Acker said that if the baby used in the production of HEK-293 “had already been dead (through a natural miscarriage), the tissue would certainly have been of no use to Mr. Graham in making a cell line after it had been stored in a freezer.”
She speculated that the tissue from the baby used for the production of HEK-293 was likely procured by the surgical method of whole-fetus extraction, often referred to as a C-section abortion, which can include the removal of the uterus along with the living baby still inside.
Acker quoted a 1952 study from Dr. Thomas Weller and Dr. John Enders (among others), who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954 for their polio research involving growing cultures in various types of tissue, where they explained how “human embryonic tissues” were obtained for their experiments.
“This material was employed in most of the experiments. It was obtained under sterile precautions at the time of abdominal hysterotomy for therapeutic indications. Embryos of between 12 and 18 weeks’ gestation have been utilized. Rarely tissues were obtained from stillborn fetuses, or from premature infants at autopsy … In the experiments on prolonged propagation of virus, three sorts of embryonic materials were used: elements of skin, connective tissue, and muscle; intestinal tissue; brain tissue,” the researchers stated.
“Embryonic tissues were prepared in the following manner. Whenever possible the embryo was removed from the amniotic sac under sterile precautions, transferred to a sterile towel and kept at 5 C until dissected,” (bold added) they added.
Acker then quoted from Dr. Gonzalo Herranz, Professor of Histology and General Embryology at the University of Navarra, Spain, who described how abortions must be done to obtain uncontaminated fetal material in Italian scientist Pietro Croce’s book Vivisection or Science? first published in English in 1991.
“To obtain embryo cells, embryos from spontaneous abortions cannot be used, nor can those obtained by means of abortions performed via the vagina: in both cases, the embryo will be contaminated by micro-organisms,” wrote Herranz.
“The correct way consists in having recourse to Caesarian section or to the removal of the uterus. Only in this way can bacteriological sterility be guaranteed. In either case, then, to obtain embryo cells for culture, a programmed abortion must be adopted, choosing the age of the embryo and dissecting it while still alive to remove tissues to be placed in culture media,” (bold added) he added.
Commented Acker: “Because of the necessity of maintaining a sterile culture of tissue for developing a cell line, it seems reasonable to conclude that there would — at minimum — had to have been some pre-arrangement to obtain sterile, unmacerated tissue from the fetus used for HEK-293. The easiest and surest way to do this is by the surgical method of whole-fetus extraction.”
Acker’s findings relate to the findings of U.S. pro-life investigator David Daleiden, who performed an undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood’s involvement in the illegal harvesting and trafficking of aborted baby body parts. Daleiden, who began to release videos of his sting operation in 2015, uncovered that biotech companies in the United States harvested numerous organs, including “live beating” hearts from aborted babies for research (see here, here, and here).
Multiple abortions behind various aborted fetal cell lines
Acker told LifeSite for this report that the formation of other cell lines derived from aborted babies and used for research purposes and in the development of numerous vaccines involved hundreds of abortions.
“Many aborted fetal cell lines and all the aborted fetal cell lines used in currently licensed vaccines are the culmination of a series of experiments that include multiple abortions,” she said. Acker listed the following examples:
The WI-38 cell line (used in MMR and shingles vaccines) came from the 32nd aborted baby that was used in a series of experiments. Other cell lines that came out of the Wistar Institute include WI-26 (from the 20th aborted baby) and WI-44 cell (from the 38th aborted baby).
The MRC-5 line (used in hepatitis A, measles, and shingles vaccines) required five abortions to develop.
WALVAX2, the most recent aborted fetal cell line, came from the ninth aborted baby in a series.
RA273, which is the virus used in the rubella vaccine, originated in the 27th baby that was aborted in search of the virus. Mothers who were infected with the rubella virus during pregnancy were actively encouraged to abort their children. Forty more elective abortions for rubella virus were performed after this, though RA273 was the strain that ended up in the final vaccine preparation.
Acker said that the use of aborted fetal cell lines in medical research, at any level, “fuels a growing acceptance of using aborted babies in other types of medical research.”
“This problem is irrespective of the original number of abortions performed to obtain a cell line, and will only be exacerbated by the acceptance of HEK-293-derived COVID vaccines,” she added.
‘New pro-life movement’
Kazakhstan Bishop Athanasius Schneider, during his presentation at today’s vaccine conference, called for the formation of a “new pro-life movement” that refuses to have anything to do with medicines or vaccines derived in one way or another from aborted babies.
Schneider said that until now, the pro-life movement has been “very meritorious” in raising a united voice against abortion. “But I think there now comes a new time, a new phase, a new period of all pro-life movements to protest, clearly and unambiguously, against abortion-tainted medicines, against the abuse of the body parts of the unborn.”
While the Catholic Church’s 2020 guidelines permit Catholics to receive abortion-tainted vaccines, the Bishop said that Christians cannot “simply resign” themselves to the fact that the production of various medicines is tied to the slaughter of preborn babies who are utilized for their body parts.
“The voice of the unborn children’s blood is crying to God from the abortion tainted vaccines, from the abortion tainted medicines,” he said. “This voice is crying all over the world, and we have to awaken.”
“No one who is really deeply concerned about the defense of life and the moral law can be silent or can be quiet and can resign to this situation,” he added.
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The curriculum, written by Barnor Hesse, an associate professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, claims, “There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities.
“People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse writes above the eight-point list.
“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ Hesse adds.
In between the two extreme “identities” of supremacist and abolitionist are such categories as “White Voyeurism’’ — defined as “wouldn’t challenge a white supremacist, desires non-whiteness because it’s interesting’’ — and “White Privilege,’’ or “sympathetic to a set of issues but only privately; won’t speak/act in solidarity publicly because benefitting through whiteness in public (some POC are in this category as well).”
“The 8 White Identities” according to Barnor Hesse are listed below.
These documents were passed out as part of an ongoing anti-racist work in the school community. It used to be that putting people into categories strictly based on the color of their skin was the definition of racism.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
