Helping us to fight the boredom of being housebound . Enjoy ! Nancy P.S. The Imagine video has a rather surprise ending !!!
As much as $1 in every $4 from the first $8.3 billion aid package approved by Congress could be spent overseas or on foreign affairs.
The short answer is … a good bit may end up overseas.
The title of the first legislation was the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2020. President Trump signed it into law on March 6 after a bipartisan vote of Congress. The law appropriated $8.3 billion in initial response monies.
To put that into perspective, the first COVID-19 legislation exceeds the $1.1 billion appropriated for Zika in 2016, the $5.4 billion for Ebola in 2014, and the $7 billion for swine flu in 2009.
As much as $2.3 billion of the first $8.3 billion in funding falls into the categories of foreign aid, foreign affairs or overseas disease surveillance. Here’s how some of that breaks down:
Here are some other major categories where the monies can be spent under the law:
Beijing has a plan to gain ground after the setback it experienced from the Wuhan virus. It is deploying all its resources—industrial, economic, and information—to achieve its goal.
Remember that when you hear “respected voices” such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers or the Peterson Institute for International Economics call for lifting tariffs on China.
Like the New York Times, they are simply swallowing Beijing’s sophisticated propaganda.
The virus that originated in Wuhan, China poses a double threat to America.
The first is to our health as the virus spreads through the U.S. population. The second is to our economy as more businesses, schools, and events shut down to slow the spread of the contagion.
We must not underestimate the economic threat because the Chinese Communist Party is using the pandemic to achieve its goal of supplanting the United States as the world’s leading economic, diplomatic, and military power.
Daniel John Sobieski is a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
What Xi didn’t say is that the coronavirus that has sickened more than 76,000 and claimed more than 2,200 lives escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”
As Mosher points out, not only is the Wuhan lab China’s first level-4 facility, but it is the only one, and it is under close and active supervision by the Chinese military:
[T]he People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.
First of all, Wuhan is a place and not a race, and to identify the coronavirus by its place of origin, like naming the Ebola Virus for a river in Zaire, is not racist or xenophobic — it’s merely accurate. There is no racism or xenophobia in labeling an infection “Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever” or calling something “Lyme Disease” after a nearby town in Connecticut.
What calling this latest virus the Wuhan Virus is is a reminder of the multiple contagions China has spawned and released on an unsuspecting world. Nor is connecting some very big, ugly, and obvious dots just another conspiracy theory to be dismissed out of hand.
From the beginning China has been less than forthcoming about this virus and resisted sharing critical data and access to WHO and CDC specialists. And have we forgotten Dr. Li Wenliang, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist based in Wuhan, the epicenter of the contagion, who tried to tell the world that China was hiding something malevolent, only to be silenced and imprisoned by Chinese authorities for allegedly fabricating lies about the disease’s deadly potential? He would later die of the disease he tried to warn us about and the Chinese tried to keep under wraps:
In an interview with the Communist Party–controlled Beijing Youth Daily newspaper in late January, Dr. Li recalled seeing reports in December of an unusual cluster of pneumonia cases linked to an animal market in Wuhan.
On Dec. 30, Dr. Li told the newspaper, he sent a message to former classmates on WeChat, a popular messaging app, warning them of new cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. He later corrected that, saying it was an unknown coronavirus.
As the Left and their collaborators in the media tried to score political points against the president, they ended up highlighting a deep concern: The fact that the Chinese could weaponize our dependence on them.
By Ned Ryun March 4, 2020
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: The fragile balance of our national security is perched in some ways on the precipice of China’s whims. We shouldn’t let this crisis go to waste. This is our chance to restore vital manufacturing, shift supply chains out of China, and, most importantly, to do it as quickly as possible and never allow America to be put in such a vulnerable position again.
Even first year political science students know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president and that it is nearly impossible to beat one leading a soaring economy; only five incumbent presidents have lost their re-election bids since 1900. No wonder the media and Democrats have linked arms to mislead the American people in yet another paranoia propaganda campaign.
It’s becoming fairly obvious that the media and Democrats are hyping the coronavirus outbreak to incite panic, harm the markets and economy, and score political points against President Trump. Of course, as with the Mueller investigation and impeachment, their efforts backfired as the president dealt with the outbreak forcefully and immediately.
There is one silver lining in this media circus surrounding the coronavirus epidemic. Their insistence on disseminating widespread fear and paranoia about it has allowed us, in turn, to diagnose our dangerous dependence on China.
It should be apparent to most by now that the corrupt and barbaric Communist Chinese regime has been enriched and empowered by the naïveté of the West. They have stolen intellectual property, used illegal subsidies, dumped their products, and now apparently are using slave labor to produce goods to sell to the West.
The Trump campaign is opening field offices in swing states targeted directly at attracting black voters, a demographic the president has been aggressively courting in his re-election efforts.
The offices are planned for 15 cities with large African American communities and will be used for campaign events and activities, as well as meet-and-greets with surrogates.
“We see the numbers coming up in the polls and the demand on the ground when we do these types of events, so it’s really important that we take this next step and really bring those voters into the party,” said Katrina Pierson, a senior Trump campaign adviser.
Campaign officials say the goal is get their message directly to African Americans, getting around what they can the “filter” of the media. Offices will feature promotional videos and pamphlets touting President Trump’s record on issues such as African American employment and addressing disparities in the criminal justice system.
The Trump administration bailing on Nevada’s Yucca Mountain as the nation’s long-delayed nuclear waste storage site has exposed the reality that the United States does not have viable alternative solutions.
“It’s clear we don’t have a way forward for a repository of nuclear waste at the moment,” said Rodney Ewing, a professor of nuclear security and geological sciences at Stanford University.
Until recently, the Trump administration had proposed funding to restart the licensing of Yucca Mountain despite a political onslaught from Nevada’s political delegation fighting against the site ever being completed.
President Trump, due to face voters this year in politically important Nevada, flipped the script with a tweet this month that seemed to take Yucca Mountain off the table. He said previous administrations “failed to find lasting solutions,” and he committed to exploring other “innovative approaches.”
His subsequent budget proposal vaguely pledged to initiate “processes to develop alternative solutions” by working with states and other stakeholders.
The administration plans to form an interagency working group to determine more precise next steps. In the few details described in the budget, the White House indicated that Trump supports the implementation of an interim storage program and research on “alternative technologies” to handle nuclear waste.
Democrats running for president also uniformly oppose Yucca Mountain, but they have not clearly articulated an alternative.
Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, the federal government promised nuclear power plants that it would handle the waste. The law, amended five years later, directed the Energy Department to take possession of the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and dispose of it in a deep geological repository at Yucca Mountain.
“We have seen every kind of ‘other than Yucca’ proposal,” said Jordan Haverly, director of energy and environmental policy for Republican Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, a longtime Yucca supporter. “All of them talk about these great new ideas, but eventually get to a point where Yucca is still the law as mandated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.”
Indeed, alternatives to handle the nation’s 80,000 metric tons of radioactive spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants have not yet borne fruit.
Do not insult our collective intelligence by suggesting that Donald J. Trump abused the Constitution and the office of president in a way that would have been unthinkable to Barack Obama.
Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause
By Victor Davis Hanson March 1, 2020
March 2, 2020
Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.
Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms.
Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico.
It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)
Fine—politicians and bureaucrats misspeak. It is no surprise that radical progressives like Holder are both partisans and tribalists or that they don’t always have positive thoughts about America, past or present. But Obama won the election. So voters had ample warning from his past that he would likely put as many leftists as he wished into government. He had the legal right and political rationale to do so, without his opponents inventing crimes to remove them.
At least he did before the Trump hysteria.