By Sandy Fitzgerald | Tuesday, 24 March 2020 02:33 PM
President Donald Trump Tuesday said he was the person who canceled the deal to pass coronavirus legislation in excess of $2 trillion after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi included "a lot of things" that had nothing to do with people who have been put out of work because of closures over the spreading coronavirus epidemic.
"I canceled the deal," he said in a Fox News virtual town hall. "I said, 'I'm not going to send that deal.' Nancy Pelosi came and put a lot of things in the deal that had nothing to do with the workers, that has to do with an agenda they've been trying to get passed for ten years."
Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence and several other key Republicans that there was "no way" he would sign the deal.
"We almost had a deal the day before," said Trump about an agreement between the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
"It was really a good, solid deal," said Trump. "All (of a) sudden they start throwing all the little green new deal stuff in. The board rooms, what they look like. 'We want clean energy; we want all this stuff. Let's stop drilling oil.' They had things that were terrible. Windmills all over the place, all sorts of credits for windmills. To kill the breeze and ruin the real estate, right? A lot of problems."
But the bill does have "great things" for the nation's companies and workers as well, said Trump.
"I want to protect our workers," he said. "Workers first. But you have to protect companies like Boeing. They had a real bad year, let's face it...we can't lose a Boeing. We can't lose those companies. If we lose those companies we're talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs."
But the faster the economy can reopen, the better, said Trump.
"We have a pent-up energy that's going to be unbelievable," he said. "We will bring it back fast."
Democrats have continued to block consideration of legislation that would provide crucial emergency relief to Americans
Direct payments to the American people ($1.2K/person, $2.4K/couple, $500/child)
$350B for small businesses·$250B in unemployment insurance
$100B for hospitals
$4.5B for the CDC·$11B for vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and other preparedness needs
$5B for FEMA Disaster Relief Fund·$1.7B for Strategic National Stockpile·$12B for the military
$20B for Veterans health care
$12B for K-12 education
$6B for higher education
$10B for airports
$20B for Public Transportation Emergency Relief
Democrats are using this emergency legislation to force adoption of some of their most controversial and ideologically driven priorities. Rather than work together to do what’s right at a time of great national emergency, Democrats are trying to exploit this crisis by insisting items like the following be included in the bill:
Expansive new tax credits for solar and wind energy
New emissions standards for airlines and requirement of full offset by 2025
Increased collective bargaining and carve outs for Big Labor
Required same-day voter registration and early voting
A bailout for the U.S. Postal Service, for the union pension fund, and for student loans
Retirement plans for community newspaper employees
Publication of corporate pay statistics by race and race statistics for all corporate boards
A requirement for companies receiving assistance to impose job-destroying $15/minimum wage
$1B “Cash for Clunkers”-style program where government buys planes from airlines
$1.5M to study climate change mitigation efforts in civil aviation and aerospace industries
New burdensome OSHA requirements on hospitals
$1Bto build on program expanded by President Obama that provides discounted phone service for low-income consumers
The American people deserve action now. Lives and our economy are on the line. It is indefensible that Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer are blocking emergency aid in order to push a political agenda.
Here’s 4 Reasons COVID-19 Should Be Spot-Welded Forever To China
Written by K. Walker on March 19, 2020
President Trump continues to call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” much to the Media’s disdain. Here is why President Trump is right and the Leftists in the Press are wrong…
First, it has nothing to do with Sinophobia — which is xenophobia against China and the Chinese people. This isn’t about Chinese people at all. This has everything to do with the government of China.
This global pandemic can be set squarely at the feet of the brutal, totalitarian dictatorship that is the Chinese Communist Party.
Today, the economy is in freefall, restaurants are closing, people are losing their jobs, schools are closed, and people are isolating themselves thousands of miles away from where this illness began.
And it all could have been avoided.
In the Washington Post, Marc Theissen wrote, “We are in the midst of a pandemic lockdown today because the Chinese Communist regime cared more about suppressing information than suppressing a virus.”
Theissen then went on to outline several ways that they allowed the disease to spread.
They Lied About The Risk Of Human-To-Human Transmission
As early as December, doctors in Wuhan knew that the coronavirus was being spread human-to-human because medical workers were contracting the virus. Despite this, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television in mid-January that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.”
They also allowed a major gathering to occur in the epicenter of the outbreak knowing that the virus could be passed between humans putting thousands at risk and allowing the virus to spread around the globe.
Theissen writes:
On Jan. 18, weeks after President Xi Jinping had taken charge of the response, authorities allowed a Lunar New Year banquet to go forward in Wuhan where tens of thousands of families shared food — and then let millions travel out of Wuhan, allowing the disease to spread across the world.
If the Chinese regime had taken action as soon as human-to-human transmission was confirmed, the spread could have been contained.
Critics Were Silenced To Cover Up The Communist Party’s Terrible Handling Of COVID-19
The Chinese Communist Party cannot be seen as wrong or weak, so if they make a mistake, they erase the mistake. This is the way totalitarian regimes work.
Thiessen continues:
According to the Times of London, Chinese doctors who had identified the pathogen in early December received a gag order from China’s National Health Commission with instructions to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news.
We know that the Chinese government silenced more than doctors, it was anyone critical of the way that the regime was handling the spread of the virus.
Related: Here Are 5 People That Have Been Silenced For Criticizing The Way The Chinese Gov’t Handled COVID-19 Outbreak
China Won’t Close Wet Markets
These markets have questionable if any food safety standards with exotic animal meat for sale. Often, animals are held live in cages and killed on the spot to prove that they are “fresh” despite, as Melissa Chen writes in The Spectator, that the animals are “sometimes festering in their own fecal matter.”
Pictures and video clips circulated on Weibo and other social media platforms showed the range of animals on sale — wolf pups, rats, peacocks, raccoons, porcupines, snakes, crocodiles and foxes, all jammed side-by-side in flimsy cages awaiting their own slaughter, making it easy for zoonotic diseases to leap from species to species and from animals to humans…
…The Chinese preference for wet markets and exotic wildlife has deep social, historical and cultural roots. Around 1960, Chairman Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward led to agricultural collapse and the starvation of tens of millions of people, a trauma that continues to make an indelible print on China’s collective psyche today. For one, it necessitated a scarcity mindset. Under starvation conditions, does it really matter what vessel of bodily flesh was delivering your next caloric intake? Why would you squander any body part? There’s an old Cantonese saying that goes, ‘anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible’.
Chen, who writes about the traumatic experiences of visiting a wet market in Singapore’s Chinatown with her mother as a child concludes the article stating that it’s not xenophobic to criticize lack of hygiene in wet markets and the consumption of exotic animals that can pass along diseases to humans.
It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize China’s rampant consumption of exotic animals, lack of hygiene standards and otherwise risky behavior that puts people at risk for zoonotic infections. Until these entrenched behaviors based on cultural or magical beliefs are divorced from Chinese culture, wet wildlife markets will linger as time-bombs ready to set off the next pandemic, which in a globalized age is proving only too easy to do…
…After countless infections and death, the obliteration of trillions of dollars and the radical retooling of modern life as we know it, the least China could do is introduce higher food safety regulations, eradicate all wet markets and ban the wildlife trade, once and for all.
Simply put: China lied. But then, that’s what China does. They’re good at it.
The Chinese propaganda apparatus is a formidable, well-oiled machine.
It isn’t a free and transparent government accountable to the people, it controls people by authoritarian means.
They also control the narrative. China just ordered several U.S. journalists from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal to return their press passes within 10 days.
The same totalitarian system that lied about putting 1 million Uighurs in concentration camps lied about the outbreak of this virus, creating a global pandemic. If China were an open and transparent society, with an accountable government, Americans might not be on lockdown today.
The Useful Idiots on the Left, in the Partisan Press, and even at the World Health Organization (WHO), have parroted the Chi-Com talking point that acknowledging the origin of the virus is suddenly a racist thing to do. They have lambasted the President for countering a Chinese conspiracy theory stating that the virus originated with the U.S. Army and was spread to China.
Some have suggested that calling this pathogen the “Wuhan virus” — or as President Trump recently called it, the “Chinese virus” — is racist. That is absurd. MERS is called the “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” because that is where it originated. Moreover, the Chinese regime continues to lie, spreading a conspiracy theory that the source of the virus is really the U.S. Army.
This global pandemic began in China, spread from China, and is completely a result of suppression, coverup, denial, and lies by the Chinese Communist Party.
POLITIFACT: “Sleepy Joe” Biden Flubs Claim On WHO Virus Test Kits
“Sleepy Joe” Biden
During Sunday night’s debate, while leveling criticism at President Donald Trump’s handling of the national response to the coronavirus pandemic, former Vice President Joe Biden said the Trump administration refused to get coronavirus testing kits from the World Health Organization.
“Look, the World Health Organization offered the testing kits that they have available and to give it to us now. We refused them. We did not want to buy them. We did not want to get them from them. We wanted to make sure we had our own,” Biden said. READ MORE
