Townhall Review | Conservative Commentary On Today's News

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.

‘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.

Townhall Review -- December 23, 2017

In this spec…

Everyone knows about George Frideric Handel, but …

Townhall Review -- December 23, 2017

In this special edition of the Townhall Review, Michael Medved tells the story of Christmas, from the humble beginnings of Jesus Christ’s birth to Saint Nicholas to Santa Clause. Medved shares how Christmas was both frowned upon and celebrated in colonial America and how General George Washington used the holiday to his advantage in the Revolutionary War. Dennis Prager rounds out the show by expressing his gratitude for religion and particularly Christianity in America, even though he is a Jew.

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.

During the eight-day festival of Hanukah, it’s wo…

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.

“If they would rather die they had better do it, …

“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.