May your day be spent with loved ones. And may you know the thrill of hope. No matter what you are facing, hold onto hope and never let go.
O holy night! the stars are brightly shining;
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope–the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born!
O night divine! O night, O night divine!
Truly he taught us to love one another;
His law is love and his gospel is peace.
Chains shall he break, for the slave is our brother,
And in his name all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we;
Let all within us praise his holy name.
Christ is the Lord! O praise his name forever!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!
His pow’r and glory evermore proclaim!
O night divine! O night, O night divine!
When the Justice Department began releasing documents about the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, they included a number of photographs of former President Bill Clinton, which administration officials quickly pointed out publicly.
On Tuesday, when a second batch of documents had repeated references to President Trump, including unverified or unsubstantiated accusations against him, the administration struck a notably different tone.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. right before the 2020 election,” the department said in a statement issued on social media. Such claims, the statement said, “are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
But of course he did:
. . .Mr. Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate former President Bill Clinton and others for their “involvement and relationship” with Mr. Epstein.
The report notes that about 130,000 pages have been released online since Friday. That is just a fraction of the total number of pages expected to be released.
P.S. Bill Clinton posted this statement on his X account in response to photos of him being released:
There is something so beautiful inside this note of heartache. To be so keenly aware of the finer things in life, like family and love and hope, is such a lovely reminder during Christmas week. My prayers for the Sasse family during what is certainly a very difficult season.
Friends-
This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die.
Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do.
I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.
Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints.
There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come.
Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son.
A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears.
Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet.
Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective:
“When we’ve been there 10,000 years…We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise.”
I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape.
But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9).
With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices,
Ben — and the Sasses
[United States Deputy Attorney General Todd] Blanche on Epstein files: “Today is the 30 days. I expect we’re going to release several hundred thousand documents today, and those documents will come in all different forms — photographs … just so everybody appreciates — President Trump has said for years that he wants full transparency … now, the most important thing that the AG has talked about, that Director Patel has talked about, is that we protect victims. We are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected.”
Blanche tells us that not everything will be released today:
Now, the most important thing that the Attorney General [Pam Bondi] has talked about, that [FBI] Director [Kash] Patel has talked about, is that we protect victims. So what we’re doing is we are looking at every single piece of paper that we are going to produce, making sure that every victim, their name, their identity, their story — to the extent it needs to be protected, is completely protected.
So I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks. so today several hundred thousand and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more.
There is a lot of eyes looking at these. We want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim. A judge in New York has required the U.S. Attorney in New York to also look at the materials to make sure that the victims’ information is protected
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is leaving the possibility of a war with Venezuela on the table.
“I don’t rule it out, no,” he told NBC News in a phone interview.
. . .
But when he was pressed, he confirmed it was a possibility and said there will be additional seizures of oil tankers. Asked for a timeline, Trump replied: “It depends. If they’re foolish enough to be sailing along, they’ll be sailing along back into one of our harbors.”
Democratic officials and strategists blasted the Democratic National Committee on Thursday for withholding its autopsy of the party’s loss in the 2024 presidential election, despite repeatedly pledging to release it.
Why it matters: Several Democrats — including many advising possible 2028 presidential candidates — said burying the report unfairly helps former Vice President Harris if she runs again, and shields top party consultants by hiding potentially damaging information about their efforts.
A Wisconsin judge accused of concealing an undocumented man to prevent his arrest by immigration authorities was found guilty of felony obstruction, according to ABC Milwaukee affiliate WISN, which was in the courtroom for the trial.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was charged in a two-count federal indictment that alleges she obstructed official Department of Homeland Security removal proceedings and knowingly concealed the man from immigration authorities at a courthouse in April.
Dugan was found guilty of obstructing federal agents and not guilty of concealing an undocumented immigrant from arrest during an April courthouse incident.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine says Russian troops carried out 6,540 chemical attacks in 2025, with the highest number recorded in April at 894 incidents. Since the start of the war, nearly 12,000 cases of chemical weapon use have been documented.
According to Ukrainian officials, Russian forces deployed K-51 and RG-VO gas grenades containing CS and CN irritants—substances typically used by police for riot control. Their use in combat violates international law, including the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
“The use of CS and CN as weapons on the battlefield is aimed at temporarily incapacitating military personnel, violates international law, and poses a direct threat to the life and health of personnel,” the General Staff said. The chemicals cause severe irritation, suffocation, coughing, disorientation, and temporary loss of combat capability.
And Putin again openly admits that the peace talks are but nonsense:
Putin also claimed Russia had made compromises during peace talks with U.S.
President Donald Trump in Alaska in August, stressing that the next steps lie with Ukraine and Western governments. While praising Trump’s “serious” efforts to end the war, Putin reiterated Russia’s demand that Ukraine withdraw from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. . Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently said Washington had floated the idea of a “free economic zone” in parts of Donbas as a possible compromise, but Kremlin officials insist the entire region must fall under Russian control.
Putin says that if NATO countries start a blockade of the Kaliningrad region, Russia will start a full-scale war in Europe.
“If threats to the Kaliningrad region are created, Russia will destroy them. Everyone must understand and be fully aware that such actions will lead to an unprecedented escalation of the conflict, taking it to an entirely different level, up to a full-scale armed conflict,” Putin said.
Tina Davis, who worked with Ford Models in the mid-1990s, said in an interview that her Ford booker instructed her to get dressed up and attend a Mar-a-Lago party in late 1994. Just 14 and new to Miami, she was told to “dress sexy,” according to her mother, Sandra Coleman, who had accompanied her to Florida. Eight or nine other models came along on the bus. “All the girls were really young,” Ms. Coleman recalled in an interview. “Some of them could have been in training bras.”
When they arrived at Mar-a-Lago, Ms. Coleman said, her daughter was promptly handed a glass of champagne. She took it away, but waiters kept offering more. Each time one of the middle-aged men at the party approached her daughter, Ms. Coleman would walk over and introduce herself as Ms. Davis’s mother.
During a trip to the bathroom, they ran into Mr. Trump’s new wife, whom they had met earlier. Ms. Maples clasped her hands, Ms. Coleman recalled, and looked her in the eye. “Whatever you do, do not let her around any of these men, and especially my husband,” she told Ms. Coleman. “Protect her.”
Ms. Maples denied having said that specifically about her daughter’s father.
President Donald Trump’s promise Wednesday to pay troops a “warrior dividend” bonus is actually a military housing stipend already approved by Congress, and not a generous new White House program.
The rebrand, confirmed by a senior administration official and two congressional officials, follows a pattern for the president, who has previously claimed credit for routine military pay increases that weren’t his doing.
P.s. The $1,776 per person bonuses, unveiled by Trump in his nationwide address Wednesday night, will be covered with funding approved in the Big Beautiful Bill that passed in July, according to the congressional officials and later confirmed by the Pentagon.
Construction workers on Friday added Donald Trump’s name to the sign on the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The board of the cultural institution voted to change the name of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Trump-Kennedy Center, despite any formal change requiring congressional action. . .
The move came after Trump had repeatedly suggested that the Kennedy Center become the Trump-Kennedy Center for months, both in public remarks and on social media.
The board of trustees consists of mostly Trump loyalists after he fired multiple members shortly after returning to office and named himself chairman.
Yes, it’s illegal. Like changing it to Department of War, like ten thousand other things. Part of the Trump strategy is to break the law and convey “the rule of law is weak and feminine and laughable and should be overridden by Our Guy.” Trump is fundamentally anti-law.
And people in authority who openly defy the rule of law and encourage contempt of it, who openly use it to help their friends and hinder their enemies, are not morally entitled to its protection, in any way.
One of the sponsors of the law requiring the release of the investigative files relating to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein said he’s giving the Justice Department the “benefit of the doubt” that it will make the files public by Friday — warning that there would be repercussions if it doesn’t.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law last month by President Donald Trump, “calls for the release, publicly, of these files,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told NBC News in an interview.
He said officials at the Justice Department have not responded to requests for information about how and when the files will be made public but noted that DOJ successfully moved to unseal grand jury records in the case, which he takes as an indication they’re trying to comply.
The law requires DOJ to make the files public by Dec. 19.
President Donald Trump announced that his “gold card” immigration plan has officially launched – a system the administration claims will fast-track residency and citizenship for wealthy immigrants for $1 million or more.
“Very excitingly, for me and for the country, we’ve just launched the Trump gold card. About 30 minutes from now, the site goes up and all funds go to the United States government,” Trump said at a roundtable with business leaders.
The website, which is now live and accepting applications, states: “For a $15,000 DHS processing fee and, after background approval, a contribution of $1 million, receive U.S. residency in record time with the Trump Gold Card.”
Trump described the card as “somewhat like a green card, but with big advantage,” adding that companies will now be able to “buy a card and keep that person in the United States,” including graduates from top schools like “Wharton School of Finance, Stern Business School, Harvard and MIT.”
The Senate rejected dueling health care bills Thursday, all but guaranteeing that Obamacare subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans will lapse at the end of the year.
Senators voted 51-48 on advancing a GOP health care plan that would have expanded health savings accounts as an alternative to the expiring tax credits. Democrats’ plan to extend the Covid-era enhanced subsidies for three years also received a 51-48 vote. Both proposals fell well short of the 60 votes needed to vault a key procedural hurdle.
A former Colorado clerk who was convicted of attempting to breach voting systems in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s claims of election malfeasance in 2020 will receive a pardon.
Trump announced his pardon for Tina Peters on Truth Social, saying she has been sitting in prison for the “crime” of demanding honest elections.
For years, Democrats ignored Violent and Vicious Crime of all shapes, sizes, colors, and types. Violent Criminals who should have been locked up were allowed to attack again. Democrats were also far too happy to let in the worst from the worst countries so they could rip off American Taxpayers. Democrats only think there is one crime – Not voting for them! Instead of protecting Americans and their Tax Dollars, Democrats chose instead to prosecute anyone they can find that wanted Safe and Secure Elections. Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest. Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the “crime” of demanding Honest Elections. Today I am granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election!
President Donald Trump’s administration wants the International Criminal Court to amend its founding document to ensure it does not investigate the Republican president and his top officials, a Trump administration official said, threatening new U.S. sanctions on the court if it did not.
If the court does not act on this U.S. demand and two others — dropping investigations of Israeli leaders over the Gaza war and formally ending an earlier probe of U.S. troops over their actions in Afghanistan — Washington may penalize more ICC officials and could sanction the court itself, the official said.
Indiana state senators will decide the fate of a Republican-drawn congressional map Thursday, settling a divisive, monthslong clash between GOP lawmakers who have resisted the redistricting push and President Donald Trump, who has urged them to forge ahead.
The proposed map, which the state House passed last week, would dismantle Indiana’s two Democratic-held districts, the latest front in Trump’s national campaign to shore up the GOP’s slim House majority in next year’s midterm elections.
But then I see this, and I’m convinced that it’s more like a shakedown taking place:
Screenshot
Republicans in Texas, North Carolina and Missouri all submitted (or surrendered) to Trump’s demand to gain additional seats. Indiana may be the state to say NO to the president.
I loved my time at Heritage Action and was proud to be a co-founder of what was such an important part of the conservative movement. So I say this with respect and sadness:
There is nothing conservative about backing threats to a state’s federal funding because it declines to push a President’s own political agenda – that is unconstitutional and coercive to states.
What would conservatives say if a Democrat threatened states federal funding to redraw congressional maps?
Indiana lawmakers voted 19 to 31 against the congressional redistricting called for by President Donald Trump in his attempt to help Republicans win the 2026 midterm elections.
A few of the reasons given by Republicans who went against Trump’s wishes, inclined: principles, common sense, and a “mid-decade redistricting would undermine the people’s faith in the electoral process and was not in line with conservative principles.” Excellent.
The Supreme Court said Thursday that Texas can use its new gerrymandered House map in the upcoming midterm elections, likely yielding as many as five additional seats for Republicans in the battle for control of the House.
The decision is a major boost for President Donald Trump’s bid to preserve the narrow GOP majority in the House by urging Republican-led states to conduct unusual mid-decade redistricting aimed at shrinking the number of Democrats in congressional delegations in Red states.
By an apparent 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency request from Texas officials to block a lower court ruling that ordered the state to return to the district lines adopted in 2021.
Interestingly, the Supreme Court “took note of recent Democrat-led redistricting in California, signaling that the justices may not be inclined to interfere with those efforts or similar drives in other states”.
The US military carried out a strike Thursday on a suspected drug boat in the Eastern Pacific, killing four people on board, according to a social media post from US Southern Command.
“Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel in international waters operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route in the Eastern Pacific. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed,” the post says.
Alongside the post is a 21-second-long video showing the boat being struck.
Reps. Adam Smith and Jim Himes: “The video we saw today showed two shipwrecked individuals who had no means to move, much less pose an immediate threat, and yet they were killed by the United States military… this was wrong.”
Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington.
The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters
Third news item
Why does anyone believe that Putin is interested in peace? Fools:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow would seize Ukraine’s Donbas region “by military or other means,” digging in on one of his key demands as Ukrainian officials prepare for more peace talks that have yet to yield a deal.
President Trump’s pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was the result of something extraordinary for a Central American leader and convicted cocaine trafficker—a web of powerful advocates stretching from Washington to Mar-a-Lago. . . The decision allowed Hernández, who had been serving a 45-year prison sentence for conspiring with cartels to ship 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S., to walk free this week as the Trump administration escalates its war on narco-traffickers by launching airstrikes on low-level smugglers at sea.
. . .
After Castro took office, projects with links to Trump allies and donors, as well as Silicon Valley investors, were canceled or audited. Those included Warren’s utility on the tourist island of Roatán, which came under scrutiny by Castro’s government, and Próspera, a libertarian “startup city” backed by Silicon Valley investors including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
Hernández had made special zones known as ZEDEs—where investors could set their own tax, labor and regulatory rules under long-term legal guarantees—a hallmark of his presidency. Foreign backers embraced the idea, selling Próspera as a “Hong Kong of the Caribbean.” After Castro came into office and rolled back the ZEDE framework, its developers hired Washington lobbyists to pursue an $11 billion arbitration claim against Honduras—amounting to roughly two-thirds of the country’s annual budget.
. . .
Democrats alleged that the Trump administration and its allies had pardoned Hernández as part of an effort to influence the outcome of the election in favor of the conservative party linked to the business interests of Trump allies.
Less than a year before the critical 2026 midterm elections, Speaker Mike Johnson is losing control of the House floor.
The Louisiana Republican suffered a bruising defeat before Thanksgiving when Donald Trump foe, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and a trio of GOP women defied Johnson and his top lieutenants and teamed with Democrats to force a near-unanimous vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files to the public.
Seeing Massie’s huge success in getting the Epstein bill signed into law, other Republicans are now turning to that same playbook to go over the speaker’s head.
. . .
That’s a far cry from the 218 signatures needed to go around the speaker and force a floor vote. But the signatures are notable; it was once unheard of for members of the majority to use discharge petitions against their own leadership.
Further confirming that Trump’s brand of “Christianity” is nothing more than an ugly mockery of what Jesus teaches:
“When you look at what [Walz has] done with Somalia, which is barely a country … they have no anything, they just run around killing each other,” Trump said. “And when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar—who I don’t know at all—but I always watch her, for years I’ve watched her complain about our Constitution, how she’s being treated badly … hates everybody, hates Jewish people, hates everybody. And I think she’s an incompetent person.”
“She’s a real terrible person … I hear [Somalians] ripped off that state for billions of dollars … I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody’ll say ‘Ooh that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ’em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ’em in our country.
“We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.… When they come from hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch? We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.”
Trump unleashes xenophobic tirade against Somalis, branding them "garbage" in an outburst that was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry even for a president known for his history of insulting Black people, write @KannoYoungs and @ShawnMcCreeshhttps://t.co/OGZSMKl60i
He has always been a bigot. But almost one year into his second term he knows that he can spout his hate with little or no pushback. Because, like clockwork, his fellow ghouls will clap like demented seals in approval of his dehumanizing attacks:
Trump’s Cabinet members started banging on the table, clapping, and cheering as the meeting concluded on that note. [after Trump’s racist comments].
There is no defending this behavior, and there is no defending anyone who supports it because it is completely indefensible. Trump, the self-professed Christian has no love for his neighbor and does not demonstrate a reflection of Christ, in word or deed. The stench of rotting fruit and foul deceit trails after him like a noxious gas polluting the air. He holds in contempt those that he considers less than, while his personal delusions of grandeur have convinced him that he is better than everyone around him. The only ones he tolerates are those that he can manipulate and “make a deal with”.
And unfortunately, be they Somalis, Mexicans, Haitians, Venezuelans or anyone who isn’t white, they will be demonized by Trump. When the goal is to eject those whom he views as deplorable, why expect anything else from him.
More:
Q: The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, is saying he's proud to have the largest Somali community in the country–
TRUMP: Then he's a fool. I wouldn't be proud to have the largest Somalian– look at their nation. Look how bad their nation is. It's not even a nation. It's just… pic.twitter.com/7LxJeTa5sq
A Pentagon watchdog concluded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked exposing classified information that could have endangered U.S. troops when he relayed details about a planned military strike in Yemen using the Signal commercial messaging app, according to a person who read the classified investigative report and another source with knowledge of the findings.
I don’t see how they could have possibly come to any other decision given what we know about Signalgate. I’ll be curious to see where this leads, if anywhere.
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