The big news over the past week were the American military strikes undertaken against proxies of Iran after the fatal attack upon an American military installation known as Tower 22 in Jordan. The deaths of those three American military personnel pushed America over a very important line. 

The Biden administration knew it had to act. And it finally did act, but it's act in a way that is confusing.

Iran has been doing its provocative work in recent months with deadly effect. They have been for a long time, a malignant force in the Middle East. 

Iran wants to eliminate Israel from the face of the Earth, and it refers to the United States as the “Great Satan.” 

Recent headlines have been applauding the Biden administration for their “restraint” up to this point. 

But let's face it, that kind of restraint is only effective as military action if it turns out to actually restrain evil. 

Right now, it looks like the restraint is more on one side than the other. 

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The highly successful financial advisor David Bahnsen has a new book coming out: 

“Full-Time: Work and the Meaning of Life” and the timing could not be better. 

America is suffering from the stultifying consequences of a work ethic recession. Millions of Americans of sound mind and body have stopped working. Young men used to be ashamed to be on the dole and not on the job. Now, they can play video games in their basements during working hours.

And it’s not just the young, America has an early retirement epidemic. For Bahnsen, this is first and foremost a religious and a cultural issue. 

Work used to be seen as a “calling” and laziness used to be one of the seven deadly sins. 

Economic historians have long understood that modern capitalism depended not just on free markets and personal virtue but also on the protestant work ethic. 

We need it back. We need it back now. 

Otherwise, America will sink into the economic stagnation from which our work ethic freed us. 

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Well, how's this for a telling headline? 

“Biden Campaign Sharpens Its Post-Roe Message”

That’s the headline of a recent piece in the New York Times and we ought to look at it. The article describes how the Biden administration is pushing the abortion issue and doing it through Vice President Kamala Harris, who -and I'm quoting the story here- quote, “Offered a preview of the administration's election year messaging to Americans when she visited ‘The View.’” Now, the vice president said, “We're not asking anyone to abandon their personal beliefs.” She went on to say, “the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies.”

The language throughout did not refer to abortion, but rather what she described as a woman’s “reproductive health.” All you have to have is the insight of someone like George Orwell to know that if you can rename something, then you can change the moral dynamic.

Democrats see a great opportunity to seize the abortion issue this election cycle. Sadly enough, they may be right.

We must remain undaunted. We must defend every single human life including the life of the unborn.

Because this is the challenge and an election year helps to make that point abundantly clear.

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First, government bureaucrats and even some of his own staff worked to subvert the Trump agenda. Now young staffers openly protest their bosses’ support for Israel.

The public, vocal policy protests by unelected government workers are troubling. It’s a sign our representative democracy isn’t working as intended.

Elected officials—the people’s representatives—are supposed to make the decisions. Bureaucrats and other staffers are supposed to carry them out.

Instead, over time, elected officials have ceded their authority and unelected staff have come to think of this authority as their due. The result is an increasingly vocal, arrogant, entitled and unaccountable government class.

Let’s return policymaking only to the elected, and rethink union rules that make too many bureaucrats untouchable. And if non-union staff protest their bosses without consequence, it’s safe to assume their principals actually agree with them—but lack the courage to say so.

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This is Albert Mohler for Townhall.com. 

We've just witnessed a huge story unfold in the United States. The biggest religion story, perhaps in recent days as the United Methodist Church has basically become…well…far less united. One historian calls this divide “the biggest schism in any American denomination in the history of our country.” 

For the most part, it took place between 2019 and 2023. It's the last four-year period. The end of the calendar year just passed, marked the end of the opportunity for Methodist congregations to leave the denomination with their property, and there were all kinds of arrangements that were made for that and cost paid, I should say, by many congregations. 

Over the course of that time, given what was at one point America's largest Protestant denomination. What we know now is that a quarter of the congregations left fully, 25 percent largely over L-G-B-T-Q issues.

In the Methodist Conference known as Northwest Texas, 81 percent of the congregations left the United Methodist Church. 

I think we need to recognize that’s seismic. 

The bottom line is a church can't go, a denomination can't go in two directions at once on key issues. Most importantly, the truth of Scripture, the integrity of the Gospel and the continuation of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. 

The church and a denomination is either going to stand or it's going to fall, but at least it's true right now, the United Methodist Church is no longer united with a quarter of its congregations leaving over principle. 

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The United Nations Relief and Works Agency is supposed to be devoted to the relief and human development of the Palestinians. In practice, it seems employees are far more radically committed to advancing Palestinian interests.

The Wall Street Journal has just reported that approximately twelve hundred of the agency’s employees in Gaza are actual operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.  More than half have close relatives who belong to the terrorist organizations.

It’s shocking to learn that the agency has links to high levels of the US government. Biden’s Senior Director for Intelligence Programs on the White House National Security Council staff was an official of this pro-Palestinian UN agency—even as the group was providing material support to terrorism.

It raises troubling questions about the administration’s judgment—and the information terrorist groups may have been able to glean about our intelligence capabilities.

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The projected stand-off between the Biden administration and Texas over the protection of our border may be about to fizzle out. All the rage last week, it was nowhere in the New York Times Monday. Part of this is that the news just revealed a record number of border encounters in the month of December—over 300,000.  

In other words, everyone knows our border is not secure—even as the Secretary of Homeland Security lies about it.

Everyone knows something else, too: The border crisis is entirely a Joe Biden production—his greatest domestic policy failure, which could lead to a national security failure as well. In fact, given the illegal migrants on our terrorist watchlist, it probably already is.

The Biden administration simply does not want video of the federal government cutting down the barriers Texas has installed. Watch for this Texas story, like so many others, to just fade away—even if our border crisis does not … until we have new leadership in Washington.

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For a few weeks now, a small group of senators have been busy trying to cobble together a bipartisan deal on legislation that would provide aid for Israel, for Ukraine, for Taiwan, and crucially something for border security. 

But the deal in the Senate appears dead now. Leader McConnell has said as much. Former President Trump has urged that it be rejected unless it's perfect. Members of the House, including Speaker Johnson said, dead on arrival. 

Why? Because it's a terrible deal. It should have been killed on the first day. 

It would've been a disaster to pass a bill. It does not have the step in it of 900 miles of border wall fully funded and authorized notwithstanding any other law. But the bill did not have the fence in it, and they've been trying to hide that inconvenient fact since they sat down at the negotiation table. 

The Democrats said, no, of course, it's not a negotiation when the thing that the Republicans must have, the wall is said—no. 

More than 8 million illegal aliens have entered the country in the three years of Joe Biden's tenure. We know that those 8 million have had encounters with border patrol. We do not know the number of getaways. We don't know for certain the exact number of people on the Terror Watch List who have entered our porous southern border, but it was 165 people in fiscal year 23, and we're already a couple of months into the fiscal year 24, meaning that number has gone higher. 

It's time to stop playing games with our border and our national security. Yes, fund Ukraine. Yes, fund Taiwan. Yes, by all means, get money to Israel, but build the wall or don't bring us a bill. 

Build the wall. 

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Apparently, Joe Biden is at least dimly aware of political reality. He knows the open border could be his electoral downfall. So he’s finally admitted there’s a border crisis—and claims he needs Republican cooperation to fix it.

Good luck with that. Everyone knows former President Trump’s brand was “build the wall!” Pretending otherwise won’t cut it.

During the 2020 election campaign, candidate Biden actually invited the illegal migration, saying he’d “immediately surge to the border all those people who are seeking asylum.” 

They took him at his word. And now, according to former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director, Tom Homan, there are almost 100 thousand missing children, 440 thousand unaccompanied children have entered the country at the service of the cartels, and 112 thousand Americans have died from fentanyl.

Biden’s broken border epiphany is too little, too late.

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The American Family Association and the Alliance Defending Freedom just had  major victories in the fight to get corporations back to politically neutral. 

AFA proposed a resolution to be voted on at Apple computer company's annual shareholder meeting—a resolution addressing the company's troubling pattern of removing religious content from its platform and caving into censorship demands from the Chinese government.

They asked for greater transparency.

Apple fought against the resolution, arguing that they were already being transparent. But Apple has been far from forthcoming about how they decide who gets canceled and who does not. 

ADF's legal team went to work and … the SEC sided against Apple. 

The proposal will appear on the ballot. 

If you're an Apple shareholder, make sure to log onto that meeting and vote for transparency and religious freedom. But don't just vote, speak up, use the online portal; ask tough questions.

Speak up … or continue to see companies treat people like you and me as second-class citizens. 

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