Father, let us be people who make space for you during the holiday season. Let us not crowd you out with copious amounts of gifts, wrapping, and decorating. Instead, let us remember the ultimate gift you have given us and live our lives knowing that we have already received the best gift of all.  

Are you limiting your prayers to what seems realistic, or are you tapping into God's unlimited power and love? Discover how to move beyond small requests and pray with boldness for what only God can do, transforming your faith and unlocking greater answers.

Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, sat down for a CBS News town hall after an interview with Fox News host Harris Faulkner. The town hall was moderated by CBS’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.…

It looks like ABC News' department of WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE' is still fully funded and churning out content. The media is enjoying hard-earned record lows in credibility. Even before Trump Derangement Syndrome,…

Eunisses Hernandez – Screencap of YouTube video. Eunisses Hernandez is a socialist city council member in Los Angeles. She makes almost a quarter of a million dollars a year and one of the public parks…

Screencap of Twitter/X video. Professor Xiao Wang is a law professor at the University of Virginia and runs the school’s Supreme Court Clinic. Last year, he argued a case before the Supreme Court that…

UK Special Coverage The Canada of the United Kingdom Turns Right Woke social policies and environmentalist deindustrialization have pushed Scotland too far. UK Special Coverage Scotland has long had a reputation for being a bastion of the left—the Canada of the United Kingdom. Over nearly two decades in power, Scottish National Party governments in the devolved Scottish Parliament have promoted every failed left-wing cause from universal basic income to transgender self-ID.  But change is in the air, and the signs are that Scots are becoming increasingly fed up with the progressive establishment that runs Scotland. Many are turning to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, a right-wing party condemned by the former SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon as “odious”.  This malodorous party has begun to make serious inroads into Scotland’s voting demographics. From zero representation in the Scottish Parliament currently, it is on course to win a significant bloc of lawmakers in next May’s elections. Some recent polls even suggest that the anti-immigration, anti-net-zero party could become the main opposition in Holyrood. And it’s not just here but elsewhere on the Celtic periphery that the right is gaining ground. In Labour-supporting Wales, Reform UK is also on the march after it came a surprise second in the recent Caerphilly by-election. And over the Irish Sea there is also unrest. Dublin and Belfast have been experiencing unprecedented demonstrations and even riots against immigration, to the dismay of the left-leaning establishment there. But it is in Scotland that the challenge to the waning left is most striking, not least because progressivism has been so entrenched. During Sturgeon’s decade as first minister, the Scottish government vehemently opposed oil and gas drilling in the North Sea; boosted welfare spending and public sector wages ahead of England; hiked income tax rates above UK levels; promoted mass immigration to Scotland; pushed through illiberal laws outlawing hate speech (even in the home); and sought to install a state guardian for every Scottish child under the so-called Named Person scheme. Nicola Sturgeon, who says she is “non-binary,” was proud to be compared to Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand. During Covid, Sturgeon imposed draconian limits on freedom of movement and claimed that Scotland could achieve New Zealand-style “Zero Covid.” It couldn’t, of course. Now, since the pandemic, almost every element of the SNP’s left agenda has been under challenge, as the Scottish government’s debts mounted. The nationalists’ nadir came in early 2023 after the Scottish Parliament had passed Sturgeon’s flagship Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which would have allowed any 16-year-old boy to change legal sex merely by making a declaration that they were now female. Inconveniently, it then emerged that a transgender rapist, Isla Bryson, also known as Adam Graham, had been placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s prison. He had changed sex by self-ID after he’d been charged with two rapes.  The political storm that followed helped precipitate Sturgeon’s resignation in February 2023. The UK government stepped in to block the gender bill under a clause in the 1998 Scotland Act, on grounds that it was incompatible with women’s safety under UK-wide legislation. But Sturgeon simply could not bring herself to call Bryson a “man” because of her commitment to gender ideology. The gender policy was always deeply unpopular in Scotland, but was a red line issue for the ultra-left Scottish Green Party, which Sturgeon had drafted into government in 2021. A year after Sturgeon’s departure, the coalition collapsed over a succession of policy disasters including a failed recycling scheme that cost businesses tens of millions and a stalled plan to make homeowners install expensive heat pumps. The biggest casualty of the progressive implosion has perhaps been net zero itself. After COP 26 in Glasgow in 2021, the SNP promoted the effective closure of the North Sea oil and gas industry, even though it employs nearly 100,000 workers. According to Offshore Energy UK, 1,000 of those are now being lost every month. Scotland’s last oil refinery at Grangemouth in Falkirk closed earlier this year, and the ethylene plant at Mossmorran is now doomed. Ironically, Grangemouth will now be an import terminal for the fossil fuels that the UK still needs to keep the economy going. There has been growing disquiet over this and Reform has made opposition to net zero policies a key plank of their platform, echoing Donald Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill.” This has horrified nationalists and the many left-wing commentators in the Scottish media, who have always insisted that the Scots loathe Trump and are fully signed on to green deindustrial policies.  But they were even more horrified when they discovered that Scots do not share the left’s love of immigrants. The current First Minister John Swinney repeatedly insists that “Scotland welcomes refugees” and claims anti-immigrant sentiments are somehow a passion of the English. Not true. A survey last month by Norstat showed that a majority of Scots think immigration is already too high. Sixty percent of Scottish voters support Reform UK’s policy of mass detention and deportation of illegal immigrants. Glasgow houses the largest number of asylum-seekers of any UK council—nearly 4,000. It is threatening to “pause” the influx on grounds of the risk to “social cohesion” in a city with a chronic housing shortage. One in three children in Glasgow no longer speaks English at home; such has been the impact of being a sanctuary city. There is mounting public pressure for an inquiry into grooming gangs preying on white girls.  So the immigration genie is now firmly out of the bottle. There have been protests outside asylum hotels in towns like Perth and Falkirk. Even the SNP council in Inverness is opposing UK government plans to house 300 asylum seekers in Cameron Barracks in the city. Swinney has shelved Sturgeon’s gender bill, is promising a grooming gang inquiry, and is beginning to talk about reviving North Sea oil drilling. It looks as if the woke era has come and gone in Scotland. It will not be missed. The post The Canada of the United Kingdom Turns Right appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Is the Indiana Redistricting Debacle the Future of MAGA? Fighting is good, but winning is better. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images) In our age of intense political polarization, there is one common belief that unites partisans of all stripes: Our side is led by a bunch of big wussies. This manifests itself in a variety of different ways, of course. Progressives believe Mitch McConnell is a big meanie who routinely ate Chuck Schumer’s lunch when the Kentuckian was still his party’s leader in the Senate. Conservatives believe he is a RINO whose commitment to “muh principles” meant Republicans had to play by rules Democrats would violate with reckless abandon. (Filibuster? More like old and busted!)  President Donald Trump has solved this problem for some Republicans, but not all of them and maybe fewer of them the longer his second term grinds on. It remains to be seen which is more ephemeral, Trump’s current relative rough patch or the political movement he has spawned; it is unclear that other Republicans are ready or even willing to lead. But Trump has shown Republicans that some things are possible when you are willing to exercise political power on behalf of your priorities—and also that bare-knuckled politics has its limits. Which brings us to the collapse of the Republican redistricting bill in Indiana. The debacle features a little bit of everything ailing the GOP these days. Wishy-washy red-state Republicanism that frustrates conservatives nationally; pugilistic outside conservative agitators making hamfisted threats that always seemed likely to backfire; an approach to the upcoming midterm elections that amounts to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Republicans should of course do whatever they can to counteract Democratic redistricting efforts (and preexisting blue-state gerrymandering) in places like California, which are in turn in response to Republican-drawn congressional maps in states like Texas.  But ultimately altering the political conditions that might bring about a Democratic wave election is the only real solution. Redistricting might expand the number of seats available to Republicans, but even if not canceled out by the Democrats or overturned by the courts, it will also produce some seats that only went for Trump by margins that won’t make them safe in a wave election. One of the many reasons the slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk is so missed is that he possessed a rare combination of skills inside the MAGA movement. He was a natural leader, but also a team player. He was not divisive by temperament, at least not within his own political coalition. Since his assassination in September, it has become readily apparent, if it wasn’t already, that not everyone who has been successful in his space can say the same. MAGA surely has its leaders and its team players. But as a political movement, it is not exactly teeming with people who are both. And as the race to succeed Trump heats up, many people are competing and jockeying for position. The process won’t always be pretty, and it may not yield a positive electoral outcome. When a sports team doesn’t need to do anything but win to secure a playoff berth, it is said to control its own destiny. World events make it impossible to totally control your own destiny in politics. But even with the dismal recent election results, Trump’s party still gets to govern in the coming months. It can influence, if not quite control, outcomes that are more consequential to the country. For now, the Trumpian form of the GOP and the party more broadly come as close to controlling their own destiny as possible in these uncertain times. Perhaps MAGA will squander those opportunities, or yet capitalize on them. It is good to have fighters. But to paraphrase an old John Wayne film title, there is no substitute for winners. The post Is the Indiana Redistricting Debacle the Future of MAGA? appeared first on The American Conservative.

A shining light. The post The nicest man in Britpop, according to Damon Albarn: “Really sweet” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

by Warner Todd Huston, Breitbart: A whistleblower claims that the Somali migrant community in Ohio is also involved in the same sort of massive social services funding fraud being uncovered day-by-day in Minnesota. Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke says that the same sort of theft of public funding seen in Minnesota has been occurring in the Buckeye State for more […]