ARE MIRACLES HOAXES? Maybe, maybe not, according to the Colson Center’s latest “What Would You Say?” video on HillFaith. It’s not always unreasonable to conclude something beyond MEST is the most logical explanation of a phenomenon. (Matter, Energy, Space, Time).

REMEMBERING WES PRUDEN: My assignment this morning is to give a talk on journalism ethics to a class of aspiring young reporters and editors. In preparing, I was reminded of a lecture given in 2002 at the Heritage Foundation by my newsroom mentor, Wes Pruden, who was then the Washington Times’ editor.

He told this story in his lecture about a small town Arkansas politician talking about his young son. As it happened, this politician disliked journalists intensely:

“He’s a wonderful little boy. His mother and I love him more than we love life itself. We have such big dreams for him. If it turns out, in the fullness and passage of time, that that little fella has above average intelligence, and we certainly think he does, we hope to make a preacher of him, to send him out to preach the Gospel, to lead sinners to God.

“And if it turns out that he has just average intelligence, well, that’s all right, too, and we’ll just send him to law school. God has His uses for all of us, even for lawyers.

“But if it turns out that that little boy just doesn’t have a lick of sense, God will give us the grace to live with that, too. We’ll just send him downtown to be the editor of the morning newspaper.”

It’s a lecture worth recalling today.

SENATE DEMS MOVE TO KILL TUBERVILLE DOD HOLDS: Senate Rules Committee Democrats unanimously voted to adopt a temporary procedural change that allows them to circumvent holds on President Joe Biden’s Pentagon nominees by Sen. Tommy Turbeville (R-Ala.).

Tuberville first put the holds on the nominations of generals and admirals for promotions in February after Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a directive that the Pentagon would use federal tax dollars to pay the travel expenses of women in the U.S. military service who have to cross state lines to get abortions.

AND THEN THERE’S THIS GUY: James “Fergie” Chambers inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his family, which controls the Cox Enterprises media empire. Then Fergie started spending his millions to support “making people who support Israel actually afraid to go out in public. We need to make all of white America afraid that everything they have stolen is going to be burned to the ground. That’s what makes them listen.”

Jessica Costescu of The Washington Free Beacon has more.

DON’T BE FOOLED BY ‘FAITHFUL AMERICA:’ It’s a George Soros-funded Far-Left wolf in sheeps clothing, presenting itself as representative of conservative American evangelicals and Catholics.

In fact, according Hayden Ludwig, director of Research for Restoration of America, writing in The Federalist: “Faithful America was spawned in 2004 as a project of the Citizen Engagement Lab (CEL), which specializes in incubating new lobbying groups with funding from the Ford Foundation and Warren Buffett’s pro-abortion foundation. We’ve traced five- and six-figure grants to Faithful America from Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Arcus Foundation, a transgender mega-donor.”

And guess who Faithful America is now targeting – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), who has made no bones about his evangelical Christian faith being the center and source of his very populist conservative perspective.

TRUMP/JOHNSON TEAM IN 2024? Not as a president/vice-president ticket, but rather as an engine of reform. It will almost certainly come about if Trump is returned to the White House and Johnson retained as Speaker of the House.

YESTERDAY, IT WAS AYAAN HIRSI ALI: Today on HillFaith, it’s MIT’s Rosalind Picard, Sc.D., a former atheist scientist who became a Christian. Not only is Picard a scientist of world renown, she is also an inventor, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer.

You may also have read her book, “Affective Computing,” which, according to her MIT bio, “proposed and described how to give skills of emotional intelligence to computers — including voice assistants, robots, agents, and many kinds of interactive technologies.”

IT’S EVEN WORSE ACROSS THE POND: The Free Press reports on the case of “John A,” a working class Brit who dared to say out loud what millions of his fellow citizens likely think but fear to speak. The Woke mind-virus is serious here, but judging by the condition of the London Metropolitan Police and this from Tucker Carlson, things are going to be rapidly getting much worse.

REALITY CATCHING UP WITH GREEN ENERGY: Remember when President Joe Biden invested $370 billion in Green Energy with his “Inflation Reduction Act”? That’s when he declared it to be “the most aggressive action ever — ever, ever, ever — in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic — our energy security.”

Well, it’s been more than a year since and Issues & Insights took a hard look at the present realities of the American economy and the energy industry: “Electricity prices are up 3 percent since Biden signed that bill into law, and up 24 percent since he took office. Overall energy prices are unchanged compared with August 2022 and are up 44 percent since January 2021.”

But wait! There’s more!

“Well-paid jobs? According to the White House, ‘between January 2021 and March 2023, the economy added 11,000 jobs in electric power transmission and distribution, 8,000 jobs in solar power generation, 2,000 jobs in wind power, and 1,000 jobs in hydroelectric power.’ We’re not math geniuses, but that doesn’t seem to add up to “hundreds of thousands” of new jobs.”

And more!

“General Electric now expects to burn up $1 billion this year and again next year because of its offshore wind project losses, according to Bloomberg. Fortune magazine reports that “Siemens Energy shares fall 40 percent after company seeks government help as wind-turbine woes threaten gas and power division.”

Click on the link and, as Glenn says, just keep scrolling because Issues & Insights covers all the bases.

THIS IS THE REAL MIKE JOHNSON: Wow, can you believe this – Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has in the past endorsed a proposal whereby the people of the United States — you know, THE sovereign power, aka “We the People” — would do in 2023 what we did way back in 1784.

That is, call a convention of delegates representing each of the states to consider amendments to the present Constitution and recommend any the majority of them think should be submitted to the states for possible ratification. I mean, the horror of such a thing, the ultimate illustration of republican democracy in action! OMG, they could repeal the EPA, stop the government from borrowing more trillions of dollars, even limit how long anybody can serve in Congress!

Clearly, Politico thinks Johnson should be thrown out, not just of the Speakership, but also out of the House of Representatives and indeed out of American public life because he is obviously a mortal threat to our existing — i.e. Progressive — order.

THE CORE EVIL THAT IS DEI: Bari Weiss of The Free Press began grappling with the rottenness now known as the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) movement two decades ago as a college student. Early on, she recognized it for the threat it has become:

“What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.

“People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues. According to them, as James Kirchick concisely put it: ‘Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.'”

Even today after 20 years of aggressive Woke infiltration and infection of the academic, political, philanthropic and corporate worlds, otherwise sane people still often fail to recognize that DEI is a disease that threatens civilization itself, not just one particular ethnic group.

“End DEI,” which is part of the “What Now?” Tablet symposium featuring a number of thoughtful authors with something significant to say one month after the Hamas massacre in Israel, will go a long way to further public recognition of this reality.

ARAB ISRAELIS BACK ISRAEL AGAINST HAMAS: You won’t read this in the New York Times or the Washington Post, which is why Right media organizations like the Washington Free Beacon exist. Andrew Tobin has the story on the 2 million Arab citizens of Israel and their support of the war against Hamas.

A SMALL-TOWN KIND OF GUY: House Speaker Mike Johnson is from Benton, a small suburban town in Northern Louisiana, and now the most well-known member of the Cypress Baptist Church congregation. Darlene McCormick Sanchez of The Epoch Times went to Benton, talked to locals, and superbly captured the “feel” of Johnson’s roots.

THERE SHE GOES AGAIN: Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm to Puerto Rico, that is. This is her sixth trip to the island in a year, all allegedly for official government business, according to Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER WE DIE: Angel Studios’ latest production is “After Death” and it brings the same high production values and innovative approach to funding that marked “The Chosen” and “The Sound of Freedom.”

This latest effort addresses the significance of “near-deaths” of people who suffer a horrendously traumatic experience that to all appearances takes their life, but only temporarily. Many of them come back with vivid descriptions of what they saw and heard, with many, though not all, expressing wonder and awe.

HillFaith reprints Evolution News & Science Today editor David Klinghoffer’s review of “After Death” and you might be surprised by his evaluation.

UPDATE: I must admit that I am of a mixed mind about the veracity of near-death experiences, having had my own experience of being clinically “dead” for four minutes during an emergency double bypass operation.

NINE MONTHS OF HHS RUNAROUND NETS A SUBPOENA: Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, put up with nine months of “intentional stonewalling” by Department of Health and Human Services. Now, Wenstrup and three other House GOP chairmen, are starting to issue subpoenas to the stonewallers.

TIME FOR WOKE TO DIE: Woke may well be on life support, thanks to the outrageous spectacle of U.S. campuses in uproars because of genocide defending wokesters, but Issues & Insights isn’t quite ready to write the obit.

TIME FOR MAYORKAS TO GO? It is, according to Senators Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah), and probably many others who just haven’t said so, yet. Johnson tells The Epoch Times Mayorkas’ refusal to respond to his questions during a hearing earlier this week is reason enough to impeach him and, short of that, for him to resign.

YES, THE WEST HAS LOST ITS MIND: The Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reports the U.S. and other western nations provide an estimated $80 million every two weeks to the Taliban regime that enslaves Afghanistan. Yes, you read that correctly. And that’s over and above the billions in U.S. military equipment and technology we left behind in the shameful Biden withdrawal.

MAKING A MOCKERY OF THE FOIA: It happens every day. Bureaucrats at every level of government, but especially the feds, thumbing their noses at laws like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) approved by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966.

They redact, ignore, delete, overlook, wait, misconstrue, etc. etc., whatever it takes to avoid providing the transparency and accountability the law requires. And because there are no penalties attached to doing so, nobody in the federal government has ever gone to jail for violating the FOIA.

As is so often the case when federal agencies are involved, Hans Bader had to take the Department of Education (DoED) to court to force release of thousands of pages of documents he FOIA’d in February concerning proposed regulations of charter schools. After being ordered by a judge to produce the docs, what did DoED do? Hans explains it all here.

WHO DIDN’T KNOW THIS WAS COMING? The Hill reports Democrats have wasted no time in making new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) their “boogeyman” for the 2024 campaign.

IS MIKE JOHNSON RIGHT IN THIS ‘TIME FOR CHOOSING?’ – It’s hard to miss the numerous ways in which Mike Johnson’s sudden emergence on the national political scene recalls that which occurred 59 years ago today when Ronald Reagan delivered “The Speech” that launched him on the road to the White House.

MIDDLE EAST BURNS AS STATE DEPARTMENT CELEBRATES ‘INTERSEX AWARENESS DAY:’ Either these people — the Biden Administration appointees at the State Department and much of the career foreign service ranks — are as tone-deaf as a rock in the middle of the Sahara, or they are purposely putting their ideological obsessions ahead of life and death. The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles reports.

THE BACKSTORY ON HOW MIKE JOHNSON BECAME SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: Something remarkable happened between Monday night when the angry, frustrated House GOP Conference met to quiz eight Speaker candidates and Wednesday when Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) was unanimously elected by members of the same conference as Speaker of the House.

And don’t miss The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson’s richly detailed examination of Johnson’s path to Congress.

GAZA AS THE MEDITERRANEAN HONG KONG: Now that’s a thought, courtesy of Issues & Insights.