Townhall Review | Commentaries

California governor Jerry Brown has been everywhere, preaching the gospel of blue-state California. California wildfires are the curse of climate change, he told 60 Minutes, while he whisks off to yet another climate conference in Paris, warning that the world is on the road to hell. He says the new federal tax cuts are a “monstrosity,” while he raises taxes at home.

Brown has turned California into a blue-state model of governance, but all is not calm or bright. Even with higher taxes and Silicon Valley growth, the state budget has a deficit and its pension deficit has grown dramatically.

Meanwhile jobs continue to flee the state in the face of high labor costs, high taxes and over-regulation. California has the highest poverty rate in the nation. The cost of housing is sky-high and the roads are old and gridlocked.

Much has been made of Governor Sam Brownback’s failing red-state experiment in Kansas, but Jerry Brown’s blue state Christmas left lumps of coal in many stockings.

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It’s been an eventful year in American politics, but don’t let the hype distract from the reality.

It’s also been a year of significant accomplishments for the Republican Congress and, yes, President Donald Trump.

Congress passed significant legislation to cut taxes for many middle-class taxpayers, make our economy more competitive, and set the groundwork for long-term gains in wages, job creation and economic growth. The tax cut bill also dealt a big blow to Obamacare, by neutering the law’s unpopular individual mandate.

President Trump has worked with congressional Republicans to cut red tape and the size of the bureaucratic state. He’s also appointed conservative judges, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who will interpret the Constitution with deference to what’s actually in it—not what they think should be in it.

With the New Year comes yet another election and more challenges for lawmakers on Capitol Hill and President Trump. But let’s take a moment as 2017 draws to a close to acknowledge that much good work has been done and to give credit where it’s due.

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On Thursday December 14th, R.C. Sproul met his Savior, Jesus Christ, face to face.

My own pilgrimage as a theologian cannot be traced without the indelible influence of R.C. Sproul. He was one of the great defenders of historic Christianity of our times. It is fair to say that R.C. was the greatest and most influential proponent of the recovery of Reformed theology in the last century. He was a stalwart defender of the Word of God, and one of the primary architects of the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy in 1978.

In a tribute to his own beloved teacher, Professor John Gerstner, written in 1976, R.C. stated: “In an era of church history when theology is in chaos, the church is being shaken at its foundations, and Christian ethics shift and slide with every novel theology, we are grateful for the vivid example of one who stands in the midst of confusion as ‘a bright and burning light.’”

Indeed, we are grateful to God for the bright and burning light named R. C. Sproul.

Soli Deo Gloria.

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‘Tis the season for Christmas carols, and one of the beautiful of our carols asks the most important question of all: “What child is this, who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping?” Christmas demands an answer to that question.

Even with all the fanfare and frantic activity of the season, that question remains. Even though commercialism and secularism and political correctness try to push the question aside, the question still stands. In the stillness of a winter’s night, the question rings our loudly and insistently – who is this child?

You know the carol’s answer: “This, this is Christ the king, whom shepherd’s guard and angels sing.” “Joy! Joy! For Christ is born. The babe, the son of Mary!” That is the true answer to the question – the baby is Christ the king. May you know the full joy of Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

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Everyone knows about George Frideric Handel, but few remember Charles Jennens, but it was Jennens who wrote and conceived the idea of the “Messiah,” the massive oratorio that is performed thousands of times worldwide at Christmas. Jennens wrote the libretto—the text—of the “Messiah,” tying together the Bible’s central story: God’s salvation of His people through the work of the Messiah.

He used the very words of the Bible for his text. Jennens had a purpose in his project, and that was to remind his audience of the truth and power of the story of salvation. And thus his attention to the birth of Christ. In just 21 days, Handel put the words to majestic music. “For Unto Us a Child is Born.”

That is the prophet’s declaration of God’s great gift to us at Christmas. It is the reason for the unspeakable joy Christians know at Christmas.

Merry Christmas from the Salem Radio family.

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During the eight-day festival of Hanukah, it’s worthwhile to connect the holiday to recent controversies surrounding Jerusalem. The joyous holiday celebrates the purification and re-dedication of Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 164 BC, but today the official Palestinian position denies that this Temple ever even existed. That absurd notion not only contradicts hundreds of references in both Old and New Testaments, but also goes against incontrovertible historical and archaeological evidence.

This unbending extremism under-girds Palestinian insistence that Jewish people have no valid claims to any portion of Jerusalem—and their furious reaction to President Trump’s recognition of the Holy City as Israel’s capital. Neither the Trump administration nor the Israeli government rules out the idea that peace negotiations might one day establish a Palestinian capital in some section of Jerusalem.

But until Islamic extremists recognize the region’s actual history and drop the ridiculous fantasy of “Temple Denial,” there can be no progress—and no peace.

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“If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

With that quote, Ebenezer Scrooge makes perfectly clear the true political message of “A Christmas Carol.” Dickens was writing amidst a wave of hysteria about population growth, triggered shortly before by Thomas Malthus, who argued that reproduction would exceed growth in food.

Scrooge was both anti-procreation and anti-marriage. He fell out with his nephew Fred simply because the latter decided to marry. When the ghost of Christmas present said that he had more than 1,800 brothers, Scrooge lamented that this would be a large family to provide for.

Of course Scrooge and Malthus turned out to be wrong and nephew Fred and Christmas Present turned out to be right. In 1800 there were roughly 1 billion people on planet earth, now there are almost 7 billion.

So, this Christmas season when your friends try to use a Christmas Carol as a club against capitalism, tell them the true meaning of a Christmas Carol, that there is no such thing as surplus people.

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A political earthquake recently occurred in the state of Alabama.

For the first time since 1992, the voters of Alabama elected a Democrat to the United States Senate. That Democrat, Doug Jones, bested Republican Roy Moore who was embroiled in accusations of sexual misconduct with women who were minors at the time.

Ever since the 2016 presidential election, many people in America have been asking how voters will resolve the conflict between political convictions and the character of a candidate. 2016 clearly tested Republicans and, in particular, conservative Christians on this question, but it was a deeper test in Alabama.

What we find is that an incredible number of Republican voters in Alabama simply did not vote. They could not vote for a pro-abortion candidate like Doug Jones but they also would not vote for a Republican like Roy Moore.

The voters of Alabama demonstrated that there are limits to conservative tolerance when it comes to questions of character.

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Recent charges of assault and harassment have destroyed powerful figures in every field of endeavor. These accusations have afflicted liberals and conservatives, straight and gay, black and white, with only one factor linking every one of the accused: they are all men. That's not because women have no power to abuse: females occupy some commanding heights in politics, business and entertainment, yet no woman producer used a casting couch like Weinstein, and none of the 105 women in Congress have been accused of behavior like Franken's.

Females don't feel the same impulse to force themselves on unwilling objects of desire, and any men subjected to such assaults are better equipped to resist. That's not due to strength or size, but because of the obvious difference in the way males and females engage in sex.

Current headlines should force the Left to acknowledge an obvious point that they have long preferred to ignore: men and women are profoundly, unmistakably, undeniably different.

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The Washington Post recently reported that a former top FBI official, Peter Strzok, who had previously been assigned to and then removed from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, had “exchanged politically charged texts disparaging [President] Trump and supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton” and that Strzok was also “a key player in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server.”

This is a blockbuster revelation, carrying the possibility of shattering public confidence in a number of long-held assumptions about the criminal-justice system generally and the FBI and the Justice Department specifically. The Justice Department should appoint another special counsel to investigate Strzok’s actions as soon as possible.

A special counsel should conduct an inquiry, bring any necessary charges and make a report—and it should come from someone without ties to the president or his opponents. They do exist, such men and women.

Former federal judges make excellent candidates.

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