THIS YEAR’S CHRISTMAS DEBUNKING: The Christmas season always seems to induce an irresistible urge among Lefty “scholars” and “journalists,” with a result that one of the latter interviews one of the former and publishes something like the New York Times’ December 21 “A Conversation About the Virgin Birth that Maybe Wasn’t” by columnist Nicholas Kristoff.

“Hate to barge in on your Christmas joy as you reflect on the miracle of the Incarnation, but The New York Times has delivered its annual dose of skepticism wrapped in tinsel. This time, it’s an interview with Elaine Pagels, a famed Ivy League biblical scholar. You’d expect some highbrow insights from the hoity toity Times, but instead, it’s a predictable grab bag of speculation and lazy thinking,” Is Jesus Alive proprietor Erik Manning writes in a lengthy dismemberment of this comedy of factual errors, fallacious logic and uninformed analyses.

Just to cite one of the many examples Manning addresses, Pagels makes a big deal out of the fact that the Gospel of Mark, which is commonly thought to be the earliest written of the four Gospels, makes no mention of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.

“There’s also a whopper of an argument from silence here that needs addressing. Just because Mark doesn’t mention the virgin birth, it doesn’t mean he’s unaware of it. Omitting a detail isn’t the same as denying it, and history is full of examples where major events go unmentioned.

“Take Pliny the Younger, for instance. In two detailed letters to Tacitus, he describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius but says nothing about the destruction of Pompeii or Herculaneum—two of the biggest stories from that disaster. Or consider Henry Oldenburg, who wrote extensively during the Great Plague of 1665-1666 but barely mentioned the plague itself. Paul doesn’t mention Jesus’ miracles, but I’m guessing Pagels still believes Jesus was known as a wonder-worker. If these omissions don’t equal denial, why assume Mark’s silence does,” Manning writes.

Manning’s is a lengthy piece and it requires an attentive reader to follow the Pagels arguments and Manning’s critique. But it’s well-worth your time to have such a chronicle of the weaknesses in so much of the popular skepticism about Jesus, the Gospels and the miracle at the heart of Christmas.

WHERE ARE THESE CHILDREN? Do you know that at least 500,000 children, many of them toddlers, have been brought illegally into this country and then they disappeared? Most likely, they were sold by the Mexican drug cartels into hellish lives of sex trafficking or child slavery.

“Where Are the Children: Crisis at the Border” is a new two-part documentary by Epoch TV that digs deep into how something so horrible could happen in America, based on the testimony of whistleblowers from within the federal government. You will want to share this once you’ve seen it because evil like this cannot be allowed to happen in our America.

WHY TRUMP’S ‘UNQUALIFIED’ NOMINEES ARE GREAT: They should be confirmed precisely because the Washington Establishment in both political parties, as well as the mainstream media, think President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees are ‘unqualified,’ according to former Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Donald Devine, writing in the The American Spectator.

“Knowing how government really works, the Washington Establishment types know that the secret to political success is to understand that any change from the bureaucracy’s status quo will be reported immediately to the media, with complaints that it will destroy the essential health, education, welfare and national security of the U.S. in some way or another,” writes Devine, who is among the nation’s top outsider experts on managing and reforming public bureaucracies.

“The story will begin in the Washington Post and be picked up nationally and beyond. And the targets seeking change will look foolish with no supporters beyond family. That is why the secret to political ascendancy in government is not to do anything but to follow the herd and be considered a success by all,” he continues.

The nation’s capital is entering a period of radical political reform flowing down from the ongoing radical cultural conflict. This confrontation will spark trench and guerrilla warfare, plus every other kind of resistance the Washington Establishment can summon, producing continuous uproar, controversy, mis-representation, and endless predictions of catastrophic national and world consequences.

But at some point, possibly at about the third year of Trump’s second term, it could become clear to the American people that the country is being reformed, reinvigorated and restored. That is when the Washington Establishment will finally have to concede they no longer are.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND THANK YOU: It has been my great privilege for a number of years to post on my friend Glenn Reynolds’ amazing Instapundit. The variety of voices Glenn opens Instapundit to is a perfect illustration of how the First Amendment is supposed to work, for all of us.

During the past year, I’ve posted a great many links to events and reports that in my judgement bear great importance to the struggle to preserve individual liberty and restore the blessings of the limited government America’s Founders gave us.

I’ve also posted many links to material on HillFaith that, judging from the comments, many found interesting, some even uplifting, while others, well, as Glenn so often puts it, not so much.

To the former, I thank God for the opportunity to add something positive to your day, and to the latter, may we both always be open to understanding how and why others think and believe as they do. I mean that for myself as much as for anybody else.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and God “bless us all and everyone” in the New Year.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Love having you here, Mark! Right back atcha.

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: Lee Edwards was my first boss in the nation’s capital way back in 1975, a mentor in the decades thereafter and an admired friend through it all. My tribute in PJMedia.

THE FACTS ON BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP: James Agresti of Just Facts Daily explains how totally wrong is the media narrative that birthright citizenship protects the children born to illegals in this country:

“In reality, the legislative history of the 14th Amendment is clear that it only grants birthright citizenship to the children of people who are legally and permanently living in the United States. This does not apply to the children of illegal immigrants, temporary residents, visitors, or tourists,” Agresti writes.

TERRIFYING QUESTION ABOUT THOSE DRONES: How many of the 36K+ young Chinese men who have entered the U.S. illegally under President Joe Biden are drone operators? Check out my latest PJMedia column.

UPDATE: Everything you ever wanted to know about drones, quad-copters and other UAVs.

JOLLY OLD ENGLAND IS NO MORE: Roger Kimball laments the passing of the England that gave the world the English Bill of Rights, Maggie Thatcher and C.S. Lewis.

MOST HILL STAFFERS THUMBS DOWN ON BOSSES’ PAY RAISE: It’s only one percent below half in the latest CNCT Capitol Pulse survey, but even that razor-thin margin is amazing.

And check out the partisan agreement on this issue. Maybe more of the staffers are accurately assessing the significance of the November election than are the senators and representatives for whom they work?

ERNST DEMANDS FEDS END TELEWORK DEALS: Whistleblowers are making themselves heard at HUD, letting Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) know that Biden officials there are dickering with the local AFGE chapter to extend teleworking for another five years. Ernst has been raising the roof about teleworking abuses for more than a year and the DOGE twins are listening very closely now.

HANNIBAL LECTER SAID THAT? Well, no, actually it’s the guy who portrayed Lecter so frightfully well, the Academy Award-winning Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins. What Hopkins says in this short video on HillFaith is a series of antithetical analogies that, whatever else you may think about Jesus, you likely didn’t expect to hear such things ever uttered by Lecter, I mean Hopkins. And taken together, they remind all of us of just how deeply unique is the former Jewish carpenter from Nazareth.

AL-ASSAD FAMILY’S WORST GENOICIDE: Richard Pollock details how the father of the now deposed Syrian dictator, Baashar Al-Assad encircled, starved, then executed residents of Hama, Syria, en masse in 1982.

“To this day, the name Hama stirs trepidation and rage among the country’s citizens. And it should be listed among one of the al-Assad family’s worst crimes while the deposed leader now apparently enjoys refuge in Russia.

“Certainly, the al-Assad dictatorial family is notorious for carrying out many atrocities. In 2011, it’s estimated Bashar killed 500,000 and displaced half of the country’s 23 million. He also is believed to have killed as many as 1,400 by nerve gas in 2013.”

Tragically, there is more, much more, to this record.

IF YOU TAKE A FALL IN THE FUTURE: And your treatment includes spending some time with a Neuropsychologist, don’t be surprised if your views on race issues become a topic of analysis. Seems the American Psychology Association (APA) is seriously considering revising standards based on Critical Race Theory (CRT)/Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) agit-prop.

“The guidelines are the latest example of how DEI has captured the credentialing apparatus of American health care, transforming what once seemed like an ideological fad into a formal requirement of medical licensure,” Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon reports.

HARD TRUTHS FOR GOP FROM CHIP ROY: The Texas Republican reminds GOP colleagues in both chambers of Congress that they were elected to change Washington, D.C., top to bottom. If they don’t, if they continuing merely paying lip service to draining the swamp, then they will soon go the way of the Whigs.

HOW HILL AIDES VIEW BIDEN PARDON: Might not be quite as expected, given the intense partisanship, as seen in the latest Capitol Pulse results on HillFaith.

WHY THE SPECIAL PAYMENTS TO MICHAEL BYRD? Byrd is the U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) officer who shot and killed Ashli Babbit during the January 6, 2021, riot on the Capitol grounds.

Just the News’s Steve Richards reported earlier this week that Byrd received substantially more financial and other assistance than any other USCP officer on duty during the riot. Byrd got a $37,000 retention bonus, help with $160,000 in private fundraising, housing, and a promotion to captain.

Today, Richards quotes the head of the USCP Union asking some very tough questions for which the incoming-House GOP leadership should demand answers from Democratic leaders of the 117th Congress, including most especially then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

First question: Why did Pelosi, then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) pressure the USCP leadership to go to extraordinary lengths to keep Byrd quiet?

“Not sure what makes Mike Byrd so special that he thinks he needed to be ‘taken care of’ by the Department. USCP should give every officer a $37k bonus or have Mike Byrd pay it all back,” USCP Union Chairman Gus Papathanasiou told Just The News.

THE ‘IMMOVABLE OBJECT’ DOGE MUST CONQUER: Having covered waste, fraud and abuse for three decades, I know full well why President-elect Donald Trump calls the Elon Musk/Vivek Ramaswamy DOGE initiative the biggest challenge since “the Manhattan Project.” My latest Special Report for The Epoch Times lays it out in great detail today.

DON’T EXPECT THANKSGIVING FACTS FROM AXIOS: Just Facts illustrates yet another example of why two-thirds of Americans don’t trust journalists.

LEFT BASHING BLUE COLLARS ISN’T NEW: Go back to the 1960s and the “New” Left and there you find Neo-Marxist intellectual Herbert Marcuse. He basically told his comrades to stop looking to the downtrodden working class to lead the Revolution.

Instead, Richard Pollock writes in his latest column, Marcuse pointed to the newly emerging class of college-educated upper middle class twit-brains we know today as Harris/Sanders/AOC enthusiasts.

But don’t assume things will remain as they are, with elitists like Alex Baldwin and Sharon Stone driving every last working class stiff out of the Democratic Party. Pollock tells us there a few lonely voices on the Left who see this path as a huge mistake.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR: Have you noticed it? Something different in the air since November 5. People smiling more, happier. It’s called optimism, something that became a rare commodity between 2021 and this year’s elections.

Issues & Insights (I&I) certainly noticed and they present multiple measures demonstrating it’s not our imagination. To cite but one such example, I&I points out that “the RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index jumped 13.4 percent in November to 53.2, the highest in more than three years. Anything over 50 indicates a positive for optimism, and this is the first time the index has been positive since September 2021.

IMPOUNDMENT FACTS THAT CAN’T DOGE’D: Democrats and their Mainstream Media allies are in full cry against the prospect of Donald Trump reviving the presidential practice of “impoundment.” To hear them tell it, no prior chief executive, except possibly that previous evil one, Nixon, ever refused to spend money appropriated by Congress.

Don’t believe that nonsense for a second. As Issues & Insights (I&I) puts it, “while the Constitution forbids the president from spending more money than Congress has appropriated, there’s nothing in the Constitution that forbids the president from spending less. And lo and behold, the nation survived and thrived for nearly 200 years while the president had this authority.”

OH, THE OUTRAGE! THEY CAST A JEW TO PLAY MARY!!! The absurd lengths to which anti-semites go to find justifications for their rotten malice are on full display in the gathering protests of the coming Netflix film about the Mother of Jesus. Rod Dreher documents demented stench today on The Free Press.

LINCOLN’S THANKSGIVING PROCLAMATION: The Tapscotts, then of Scottsville, Va., were, like the nation, deeply divided when the Civil War came in 1861. Some of them fought for the North, more for the South. And yet look how far we as a nation have come in the decades since the war.

Lincoln’s 1863 Proclamation of Thanksgiving Day as a national holiday is a remarkable document considering the circumstances surrounding its issuance. The battlefields were strewn with the dead and everywhere the issue of the war remained unresolved, stalemated even. But Lincoln pointed Americans to the blessings we enjoyed even in such a hellish midst.

A century and more later, Ronald Reagan often talked of America as the City on the Hill. It’s become increasingly difficult in the present times to recall how deeply felt that vision was and could be again. Take a few moments today and share Lincoln’s Proclamation with family and friends.

FOUR AD FIRMS GOT RICH ON HARRIS LOSS: Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr dug into the FEC reports and found four ad firms that collectively received almost $600 million of the $1 billion+ raised by Vice-President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign.

“The latest available FEC data show the Harris campaign exceeded $880 million in total spending as of October 16, though that number is expected to balloon to $1.5 billion after the Harris campaign files its post-election FEC report on December 5,” Kerr reports.

“Seventy percent of the campaign’s known total spending flowed through four firms: Media Buying & Analytics, Gambit Strategies, Bully Pulpit Interactive, and Dupont Circle Strategies.

“Together, these four Democratic firms were largely responsible for distributing Harris’s campaign messaging across the nation—an effort that ultimately saw Harris lose all seven swing states and the popular vote but directed huge sums of donor money the firms’ way.”

Perhaps as Harris sits on the beach in Hawaii contemplating her campaign and why she lost, the word “refund” may well keep recurring in her mind regarding those four firms.

MIXED REVIEWS FOR DOGE AMONG HILL AIDES: One might expect a roughly 50-50 split among Republican and Democrat congressional aides in terms of their view of the forthcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be headed by Elon Musk and Vivik Ramaswamy.

But the latest Capitol Pulse CNCT informal survey finds a big split, with Senior GOP policy aides very much in favor, but the younger ones not so much. Not surprisingly, opposition among Democratic aides was all but unanimous.

The age split is the reverse of what might typically be expected among GOP Hill staffers, with the “cooler heads” of the older aides cautioning about taking a $2 Trillion spending cut leap and younger aides pushing for radical action now.