Source: Christian Science Monitor
by Abraham McLaughlin
“Keeping up with today’s national and global developments can feel like living in a cauldron of political pressure. If we’re not in the storm ourselves, the sheer volume of political twists and turns can make us feel numb to the news. Yet, looking to those who have withstood the storm and triumphed shows us that responding with grace and confidence in good starts with the truths we hold in our heart. The Bible offers compelling examples. Consider the spiritual clarity and bravery of four individuals: Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and Daniel. They’d been taken from their home in Israel and were being indoctrinated by their Babylonian captors. Yet they held in their hearts strong spiritual truths – and got to witness dramatic turnarounds. In Babylon, the pressure – political, religious, and cultural – was ferocious. One of the world’s most powerful kings was insisting that all his subjects worship a lifeless statue (see Daniel 3).” (02/03/25)
“By now, we have heard the mantra that President Donald Trump was right to close the border, but wrong in his heavy-handed approach to immigration enforcement. We are also told that if he would have simply done what most Americans wanted, that is, arrest and deport violent criminals, then his poll numbers would be higher, and his administration wouldn’t find itself embroiled by crisis in the aftermath of two killings at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. But this claim (that the problem with Trump’s immigration agenda is mainly about enforcement tactics) is flawed. Seriously addressing this country’s ongoing immigration crisis will require policy change, and to get to that point, there needs to be a narrative shift in this country away from indiscriminately criminalizing all undocumented people to humanizing them.” (02/04/25)
“Billie Eilish won the Grammy Award for ‘Best Anti-ICE Tantrum’ on Sunday night by declaring that ‘No human being is illegal on stolen land.’ Unfortunately, the blowback against her is serving as the latest in a long line of reminders that Hollywood celebrities should lay off the politics and stick to doing what they do best, which is cocaine. Now, obviously, I have no idea if Billie is taking any drugs whatsoever, but you’d have to be on SOMETHING to think all of this Trump bashing is helping awards shows. Ratings were down 9% year over year for the Grammys, and of course, we all know that viewership has fallen by 50% in the last two decades for that Well-Dressed-Group-Therapy- Session we call the Oscars.” (02/04/25)
“A preview to this year’s congressional primary season kicks off, unusually, on Thursday. Former Rep. Mikie Sherrill won a landslide to become New Jersey’s governor last year, and a crowded primary to replace her in the state’s 11th Congressional District is being held tomorrow. It’s a light-blue district, but the winner of the 11-candidate Democratic primary is expected to easily prevail in the general election in early April. That’s brought a familiar face out of the shadows to help determine the outcome: AIPAC. Though some reports indicated that the pro-Israel PAC was pulling back on electoral spending, it has thrown down nearly $2.3 million in television ads through its subsidiary United Democracy Project (UDP), and $1.83 million more in direct mail and phone banks, to block former Rep. Tom Malinowski from winning the seat. As is typical for single-issue groups, the ads are 100 percent pretextual.” (02/04/25)
“The U.K. government agreed Wednesday to release documents casting light on the decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, despite his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, as it tries to stem mounting anger over the revelations. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced the wrath of opposition lawmakers, and his own Labour Party backbenchers, after acknowledging that he had known at the time of the 2024 appointment about Mandelson’s friendship with the convicted sex offender. Starmer said that he was unaware of the depth of the relationship, and that Mandelson ‘had lied repeatedly’ about his ties to Epstein. A trove of documents about Epstein released last week by the U.S. Justice Department has finished off Mandelson’s long political career — and left Starmer facing angry questions about his judgment in making him Britain’s envoy to the Trump administration, the country’s most important ambassadorial post.” (02/04/25)
“A wave of school protests sweeping the US in response to the fatal shooting of two anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota has revealed how teachers unions have weaponized classrooms for their own left-wing agenda. The unions have revealed themselves as political operatives more concerned with indoctrinating kids than teaching them reading, writing and arithmetic. These disruptions didn’t materialize out of thin air. The teachers’ unions fired the starting gun by blasting out anti-ICE propaganda to teachers, urging them to rally against immigration enforcement and turn schools into battlegrounds for their partisan fights. The National Education Association is also pushing teachers to print out immigration-related political propaganda posters and put them in their classrooms.” [editor’s note: Anti-ICE isn’t “left-wing,” it’s “anti-gang” – TLK] (02/04/25)
“President Trump’s budget office is instructing the Department of Transportation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to claw back more than $1.5 billion from blue states on grounds the money was being mishandled, officials told The Post. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told the DOT Wednesday to cancel more than $943 million, while the CDC was ordered to nix at least $602 million meant for New York, California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota. An OMB spokesperson said that the states were being targeted for ‘waste and mismanagement’ of taxpayer funds. Illinois was slated to receive the largest of the transportation-related grants, with $100 million provided to the state’s Environmental Protection Agency to build electric vehicle (EV) charging stations.” (02/04/25)
“President Trump has been clamoring for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates on the grounds that inflation is much lower than what’s being officially reported. It turns out Trump is spot on, with today’s real inflation rate being only one-third of the official metrics. These numbers come from the real-time price aggregator Truflation, which monitors millions of prices daily. That is orders of magnitude higher than the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which observes only a few thousand prices three times per month. According to Truflation, prices have risen an average of just 0.9 percent over the last 12 months. That’s about as good as it gets outside of a recession, especially when the Fed is engaged in money printing, euphemistically called ‘quantitative easing’. Truflation’s annual inflation rate is now much lower than the official inflation rate of 2.7 percent reported by the consumer price index (CPI).” (02/04/25)
“Officials in Georgia’s Fulton County said Wednesday they have asked a federal court to order the FBI to return ballots and other documents from the 2020 election that it seized last week, escalating a voting battle as President Donald Trump says he wants to ‘take over’ elections from Democratic-run areas with the November midterms on the horizon. The FBI had searched a warehouse near Atlanta where those records were stored, a move taken after Trump’s persistent demands for retribution over claims, without evidence, that fraud cost him victory in Georgia. Trump’s election comment came in an interview Monday with a conservative podcaster and the Republican president reaffirmed his position in Oval Office remarks the next day, citing fraud allegations that numerous audits, investigations and courts have debunked.” (02/04/25)
“A small crowd of abortion rights advocates gathered at a public comment session of the Gwinnett County Department of Planning and Development in July 2025. The most diverse and second-most populous county in Georgia, Gwinnett County distributed millions of dollars in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grants to local nonprofits in 2025, with most recipients receiving something in the tens of thousands. One organization, Georgia Wellness Group, was set to receive a much bigger prize: $450,000. According to its website, Georgia Wellness is a clinic that provides ’compassionate holistic care’ for women and families. But this is a rebrand from its longstanding religious, explicitly anti-abortion identity. The group arguably fits into a category known as ‘crisis pregnancy centers,’ or CPCs, part of a project from the Christian Right dedicated to replacing public reproductive healthcare with anti-abortion ‘clinics.'” (02/03/25)
