Day: January 2, 2021

Pro-Life Group That Recorded Planned Parenthood Undercover Ordered to Pay $13 Million in Legal Fees

BY HEATHER CLARK

SEE: https://christiannews.net/2021/01/01/pro-life-group-that-recorded-planned-parenthood-undercover-ordered-to-pay-13-million-in-legal-fees/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

SAN FRANCISCO — In addition to the $2 million in damages awarded to Planned Parenthood by a jury last year, a federal judge has ruled that the Center for Medical Progress (CMP), led by David Daleiden, must pay more than $13 million in attorneys fees to the abortion and contraception giant.

Planned Parenthood had originally requested over $14 million in attorneys fees for work done by 12 of the more than 130 lawyers who assisted with their legal action against Daleiden and colleague Sandra Merritt.

“Viewing the ample evidence plaintiffs submit regarding the time they spent on the categories of tasks in each phase of this highly contested litigation, and relying on my own knowledge and understanding of the unusually significant time required to develop and try this case, I have a sufficient basis to conclude that the hours plaintiffs seek are reasonable,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Orrick III.

He reduced the amount requested by $1 million, deducting payment requested for in-house counsel, and also declined to grant Planned Parenthood’s request for $37,500 in reimbursement for security costs for witnesses who spoke at trial.

Read Orrick’s Dec. 22 order in full here.

As previously reported, Daleiden and Merritt attended abortion industry conferences from 2013 to 2015 under the names Robert Sarkis and Susan Tennenbaum and with the impression that they were representatives of a company they called BioMax Procurement Services.

They recorded their conversations as they sought to learn about Planned Parenthood’s abortion practices and harvesting partnerships.

CMP then publicly released video footage of the undercover investigation, showing various Planned Parenthood leaders and representatives of biomedical companies callously discussing extracting unborn children from the womb so that their body parts can be collected and sold for research.

“We’ve been using them for over 10 years, really a long time, [and we] just kind of renegotiated the contract,” Katherine Sheehan, the medical director for Planned Parenthood Pacific Southwest, said of Advanced Bioscience Resources (ABR) in one video. “They’re doing the big collections for government-level collections and things like that.”

“I literally have had women come in and they’ll go to the OR and they’re back out in three minutes, and I’m going, ‘What’s going on?’” Parrin Larton of ABR also explained. “Oh yeah, the fetus was already in the [birthing] canal. Whenever we put her in the stirrups, it just fell out.”

“But most of the time, it is not intact,” she added. “The abdomen is always ripped open.. … Everything will just get ripped up, you know. Whenever we have a smooth portion of liver, we think that’s good, because most of the time, just the instruments they go in to pull and it’s just whatever presents first.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee released a report in light of the videos outlining its finding that ABR, StemExpress and Novogenics Laboratories purchased the bodily organs of aborted babies from California Planned Parenthood locations, and then resold them at substantially higher prices.

“[I]n June of 2014, an ABR technician obtained a 20-week-old fetus at a Planned Parenthood clinic, for which it paid $60,” the committee outlined. “From that one fetus, ABR sold its brain to one customer for $325, both of its eyes for $325 each ($650 total) to a second customer, a portion of its liver for $325 to a third customer, its thymus for $325 and another portion of its liver for $325 to a fourth customer, and its lung for $325 to a fifth customer.”

But Planned Parenthood accused Daleiden of initiating a smear campaign to try to harm its organization and soon sued CMP over the matter, alleging fraud, trespass, breach of conduct, and eavesdropping as part of a conspiracy under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

Both Daleiden and Merritt were also leveled with numerous criminal charges, which California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed against them. The charges could land them both in prison for a decade, if prosecutors are successful.

In November 2019, a jury awarded Planned Parenthood over $2 million after determining that Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress caused “substantial harm” to the organization. Orrick, who presided over the case, reportedly instructed the jury to find Daleiden guilty of trespass.

He also told jurors that they could not take into account any information that Daleiden discovered during his investigation but only what he knew before launching the undercover project.

“The First Amendment is not a defense to the claims in this case for the jury to consider,” Orrick additionally wrote prior to the trial, according to Courthouse News. “Defendants’ argument that they were citizen journalists was admissible as context for the defendants’ case, not as a legal defense.”

Jurors consequently concluded that Daleiden’s actions constituted the malice and fraud elements required in order to award Planned Parenthood punitive damages, settling on a payment of $870K. Another $470K in compensatory damages was granted for “security upgrades” and screening, and CMP estimates the total damages, when RICO is factored, to be nearly $2.3 million.

Daleiden’s attorneys have appealed that decision.

Courthouse News reports that the attorneys believe that the ruling will be overturned and that CMP will not have to pay any fees to Planned Parenthood.

“We think there’s no basis for Planned Parenthood to be awarded any fees,” attorney Paul Jonna of the firm LiMandri & Jonna LLP told the outlet. “We think there are a number of very serious issues on appeal that will result in reversal, and that there will be ultimately no fees paid to Planned Parenthood.”

This past September, Daleiden sued Planned Parenthood for defamation as it claimed that the video footage he released exposing the organizations’ practices were a “fake smear campaign.”

 

 

McConnell Calls $2,000 Stimulus Checks ‘Socialism for the Rich’

BY RICK MORAN

SEE: https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/01/01/mcconnell-calls-2000-stimulus-checks-socialism-for-the-rich-n1297948;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is digging in his heels in opposing the boost in individual stimulus checks from $600 to $2,000. McConnell believes that too much money would be going to people who don’t need it, calling the plan “socialism for the rich.” “Borrowing from our grandkids to do socialism for rich people is a terrible way to get help to families who actually need it,” McConnell said of an effort to boost the checks from $600 to $2,000, which is supported by Donald Trump.

This elicited a harsh response from Vermont’s resident socialist curmudgeon Senator Bernie Sanders: “The majority leader helped lead this body to pass Trump’s tax bill. You want to talk about socialism for the rich Mr. Majority Leader?!”

Tax cuts are the same as “socialism”? We’ll have to remember that.

Democrats and some Republicans want a “stand-alone” bill — an up-or-down vote on the stimulus checks. They aren’t going to get it. Any additional stimulus now awaits the presidency of Joe Biden and the outcome of the Georgia runoff elections.

Politico:

Led by McConnell, many Republicans say the measure the House approved earlier this week delivers too much aid to six-figure earners. The House’s bill would send checks to higher earners more than the two previous rounds of direct payments, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“Imagine a family of five where the parents earn $250,000 per year and have not seen any income loss this past year. Speaker Pelosi and Senator Sanders want to send them $5,000 from Uncle Sam,” McConnell said.

There’s no doubt that some of that money would be going to people who really don’t need it. But most of it would go to people who are really hurting. Besides the need, there is the rationale that disbursing money now will keep the locked-down economy from sliding deeper toward recession. Some Republicans may not mind seeing a recession in Joe Biden’s first months, but does anyone seriously believe that the media would allow one breath of a suggestion that any economic downturn was the fault of anyone but Donald Trump?

McConnell is preparing the ground for the coming battles on spending during 2021. Republicans will become born-again spendthrifts, having once again discovered they’re supposed to be the party of fiscal prudence and accountability. He is staking out positions now so that later, when Democrats get radically serious about emptying the treasury, he will fight on the ground of his own choosing.

The majority leader doesn’t think the measure has a prayer in the Senate.

On Wednesday, after Trump again insisted upon “$2000 ASAP!” in a tweet, McConnell said the proposal had “no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate” and refused to split the White House’s legislative wish list into separate measures. But that was exactly what Graham pressed the Republican leader to do on Thursday.

“Here’s what I’d like: I’d like a stand-alone vote in the new Congress on the $2,000 check,” Graham said. “We have seven Republicans who’ve already said they would vote for it. We need five more. I think if we had the vote, we would get there.”

McConnell can count noses as well as anyone and he knows the votes aren’t there. If he could sweeten the bill to draw in a few more Republican senators, there would be Democratic objections, rendering the bill dead in the water. Even if he supported the measure, there’s just no way to get there from here.

For Democrats and those Republicans who think a larger stimulus is needed, it’s “wait till next year.”

 

Mass. Lawmakers Override Veto of Abortion Bill, Allow 16-Year-Olds to Kill Unborn Without Parental Consent

BY HEATHER CLARK

SEE: https://christiannews.net/2020/12/30/mass-lawmakers-override-veto-of-abortion-bill-allow-16-year-olds-to-kill-unborn-without-parental-consent/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

BOSTON — Lawmakers in Massachusetts have voted to override Gov. Charlie Baker’s veto of a bill that allows 16 and 17-year-olds to obtain an abortion without their parents’ consent or knowledge. The legislation, known as the ROE Act, also essentially allows abortion up to birth for “fatal fetal anomalies.”

The House of Representatives obtained the two-thirds majority (107-46) needed to override the veto on Monday, followed by a 32-8 vote from the Senate on Tuesday.

“Today, the Commonwealth reestablished itself as a national leader in health care by removing political barriers to abortion and becoming the first state to legislatively ease burdensome restrictions on young people’s access to care,” the ROE Act Coalition remarked in a statement, according to local television station WCVB.

“The legislature’s leadership means no Bay State family who receives a devastating diagnosis later in pregnancy will ever be forced to fly across the country to access compassionate care and no 16- or 17-year-old will ever be forced to navigate the court system to access the health care they need.”

As previously reported, last month, lawmakers in Massachusetts passed an amendment attached to a budget bill that would essentially allow abortion up to birth for “fatal fetal anomalies” and lower the age of parental consent from under 18 to under 16.

According to text on the legislature website, the amendment permits abortion after 24 weeks when “in the best medical judgment of the physician, an abortion is warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly that is incompatible with sustained life outside the uterus.”

It permits nurse practitioners, physicians assistants and midwives to perform abortions and states that abortive mothers under 16 must obtain consent from one parent (or can go to the courts if that is not possible), and “in deciding whether to grant such consent, a patient’s parent shall consider only the patient’s best interests.” Those 16 and up will not be required to obtain parental permission.

The amendment passed in the Massachusetts House of Representatives on Nov. 12 by a vote of 108-49, followed by a 33-7 vote in the Senate on Nov. 18.

Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican who supports the so-called “right to abortion,” said that he was uncomfortable with the provisions that allowed 16-year-olds to obtain an abortion without parental consent and allowed abortion after 24 weeks in some cases. He presented his own version of the legislation that would eliminate those sections.

Both houses of the legislature rejected Baker’s changes and voted to retain the original language.

“Getting ready to vote down @MassGovernor amendment that will deny 16-year-olds the right to independently choose an #abortion,” tweeted lawmaker Marjorie Decker, D-Cambridge. “Let’s be clear; there is no age on prenatal care for young women girls needing #parentalconsent.”

Baker then vetoed the bill as written, and the legislature consequently sought to override his veto and force the matter into law.

“Pregnant people who once faced near-insurmountable barriers accessing abortion care can now seize the right to control their own bodies,” Senate President Emerita Harriette Chandler remarked on Twitter on Tuesday. “I am so proud of the policies included in the #ROEAct and of the (Massachusetts Senate) for our commitment to reproductive freedom.”

The Massachusetts Family Institute, led by president Andrew Beckwith, lamented the passage of the bill, reminding followers that the matter is not simply political; it is spiritual at its root.

“I have to remind myself that ‘we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places,'” he wrote. “For, surely, the celebrated, legally sanctioned murder of our children is a great wickedness promoted, ultimately, by ‘the rulers of the darkness of this world.'”

As previously reported, in early America, Christians were staunchly against abortion for any reason, seeing the shedding of innocent blood (Proverbs 6:16-17) and the discontinuance of a life created and given by God as murder.

In his 1869 sermon entitled “Ante-Natal Infanticide,” E. Frank Howe, the pastor of the Congregational Church of Terre Haute, Indiana, said, “[I]t makes no matter that the victim cannot stretch out its hands in defense. … It matters not that it … can utter no cry of pain or reproach. The sacred gift of human life is taken — is deliberately taken, and this constitutes the crime, and that crime is murder.”

He lamented that “men and women place their own ease and pleasure above God’s law” and that “public opinion is so corrupted there is no voice of reproach,” forthrightly declaring, “Put what face upon it the community will disguise it under whatever name you please, you can make no more or less of it than simple murder.”

In 1896, Dr. William McCollom lamented that even in his day, mothers would “unblushingly apply to the physician and to the druggist for medicine to abort [their] pregnancy.”

“Great ignorance of the criminality of the practice is manifested by educated women, but it is not ignorance alone but a downright lack of moral sense as well, which greatly needs educating,” he said, urging doctors to speak out.

Jon Tyson/Unsplash

McCollom expressed concern that pastors were seemingly not lifting their voice on the issue of abortion as he saw that the practice was both prevalent among the unsaved and “on the increase among professed Christian women.”

“Let us do our duty, if our spiritual advisors neglect to do this, in denouncing this common crime and great sin,” he wrote in addressing his fellow physicians.

“The field for missionary work is a large one and should be faithfully worked, both by the conscientious physician and the Protestant Christian clergy, who perhaps fully understand the enormity of the sin if they do not know how prevalent it is,” McCollom said. “It is not a pleasant subject to discuss before a mixed audience. Young women could be reached, instructed and warned by a properly published circular or tract sent to them by Christian organizations at intervals.”

Read his words, as published by the American Medical Association Press, in full here.

Scripture, in addition to speaking on the value of the unborn, also repeatedly addresses the precursor sin of fornication, teaching in 1 Corinthians 6:13, “Now the body is not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”

1 Thessalonians 4:3-5 exhorts, “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye should abstain from fornication, that every one of you should know how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honor — not in the lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God.”

Verses 7-8 add, “For God hath not called us unto uncleanness but unto holiness. He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man but God, who hath also given unto us His Holy Spirit.”

Please visit Christian News Network’s Outlaw Abortion page to help us work to abolish the worldwide holocaust.

 

Mike Pompeo calls for release of Chinese Christian journalist

Christian reporter Zhang Zhan, 37, was found guilty by Shanghai Pudong New Area People’s Court of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble" due to her reporting on the COVID crisis in Wuhan.

BY  Leah MarieAnn Klett

SEE: https://www.christianpost.com/news/mike-pompeo-calls-for-release-of-chinese-christian-journalist.html;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called for the release of Chinese Christian journalist Zhang Zhan, who was sentenced to four years in prison over her coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. He said her case is evidence the Chinese Communist Party fears “citizens who speak the truth.”

On Monday, Zhang became the first independent journalist to be sentenced to prison in China for covering the pandemic in Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus that sparked the ongoing global pandemic.

The 37-year-old Christian, who saw her work as “God’s will,” reported on the conditions of those suffering from COVID-19 infections as well as the overly harsh lockdowns implemented by the CCP.

In a statement Tuesday, Pompeo condemned Zhang’s sentence and called on China’s government to release her "immediately and unconditionally."

“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shown once again it will do whatever it takes to silence those who question the Party’s official line, even regarding crucial public health information,” he said.

“Because of the CCP’s gross malfeasance, the rest of the world relied heavily on uncensored reports from citizen journalists like Zhang to understand the true situation in Wuhan after the CCP-imposed strict media controls were enforced and a controllable outbreak turned into a deadly global pandemic,” he said. “Her hasty trial, to which foreign observers were denied access, shows how fearful the CCP is of Chinese citizens who speak the truth.”

Pompeo stressed that China’s "fear of transparency and its ongoing repression of fundamental freedoms are a sign of weakness, not strength, and a threat to all of us.”

Zhang was found guilty by Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge the Chinese government uses for human rights activists and other dissidents. Prosecutors accused her of publishing “large amounts of fake information” and receiving interviews to purposely “stir up the Wuhan COVID-19 situation.”

After her arrest in May, Zhang stopped commenting publicly and began a hunger strike in late June. By December, she was suffering headaches, giddiness, stomach pains, a throat infection, and had low blood pressure.

When one of her attorneys visited her in detention, she reportedly said she wished she had a Bible and quoted 1 Corinthians 10:13, in which the apostle Paul said, “God is faithful. He will not allow the temptation to be more than you can stand. When you are tempted, He will show you a way out so that you can endure.”

The Hudson Institute’s Michael Pillsbury told Fox News on Wednesday that Zhang is a “hero” for exposing “a great deal of things China doesn’t want out.”

“This hurts China's interest and excites really bipartisan anger at China,” he said. “There seems to be no limit to what they will do to crack down on whatever happened with the virus back in

January. It remains a mystery. There's been no explanation for it.”

Pillsbury said the case brings up bigger concerns and questions about how the incoming Biden administration “will handle China and combat China and be tough on China” like the Trump administration.

“We've got to take measures, steps, sanctions, punishment against China. We can't just get away with virtue signaling, condemning China rhetorically, and then doing nothing,” he said. “We still treat China as a friend in many ways. That's got to change.”

Though Zhang was the first of the citizen journalists known to face legal proceedings for her activities, other citizen journalists who covered the outbreak have disappeared without explanation, including Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua.

Interview With Del Bigtree: COVID Vaccine Could Make The Virus Far More Deadly, Leave Women Infertile

BY KELEN MCBREEN

SEE: https://www.infowars.com/posts/bombshell-interview-with-del-bigtree-covid-vaccine-could-make-the-virus-far-more-deadly/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

During an epic, Wednesday broadcast of War Room, film producer Del Bigtree sat down with Owen Shroyer to detail issues with rapidly manufactured COVID vaccines.

One of the key factors Bigtree notes is that the FDA admits there is a risk of a “vaccine-enhanced disease.”

Bigtree explained, “Vaccine-enhanced disease, this is immune enhancement I’m talking about, a deadly problem they’ve been seeing in all the animal trials.”

Reading from an FDA document on the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, Bigtree said, “Available data do not indicate a risk of vaccine-enhanced disease, and conversely suggest effectiveness against severe disease within the available follow-up period. However, risk of vaccine-enhanced disease over time, potentially associated with waning immunity, remains unknown and needs to be evaluated further in ongoing clinical trials and in observational studies that could be conducted following authorization and/or licensure.“

“Remember,” Bigtree noted. “They’re asking right there, ‘We want to be licensed, we want this emergency use. But we are telling you that this vaccine may get people killed because we haven’t overcome the issue where animals were dying in our trials.’ That’s terrifying!”

He also warned of the possibility that the antibodies meant to attack the Spike protein instead attack a woman’s placenta because the placenta’s outer lair, the syncytin, resembles the Spike protein so much.

“If it starts attacking placentas, no one will be able to get pregnant. These are legitimate theoretical issues.”

See the full interview below: