If federal workers were hoping for an early start on their Christmas vacation, they're out of luck! No one is turning off the government's lights any time soon, thanks to a deal struck in the Senate late Thursday night. With Friday's shutdown deadline breathing down Democrats' necks, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) decided that maybe it wasn't such a good idea for his party to preside over another disaster and finally caved to the conservatives' demand: a vote on the vaccine mandate.
A global social media movement asking #WhereIsPengShuai has yet to find convincing answers. The Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai disappeared after she publicly accused a former vice premier of China of sexually assaulting her. The social media posts in which she made the accusation were removed within 20 minutes of posting. But Peng's fans were faster than Chinese censors, saving her posts and demanding answers about her disappearance.
For several years, Family Research Council has focused attention on the troubled African country of Nigeria. We have frequently reported about the rampant violence and killing of Christians by radical Islamist terrorists -- in the eyes of many seen as a "slow-motion genocide." In early 2021, FRC updated an extensive report on the relentless violations of religious freedom in that vast and influential African nation.
There were plenty of surprises inside the Supreme Court on Thursday, but the biggest one might have been outside it. "It was like a pro-life block party," FRC's Mary Szoch beamed. "There was just a palpable sense of hopefulness in the air -- a feeling that this was the moment [we'd] been waiting 49 years for." From dawn until well after the justices adjourned, the atmosphere was almost jubilant -- a preview, conservatives hope, of the celebration to come when the court rules on Roe v. Wade this June.
There's only one December flurry that's bigger than the snow in D.C. -- and that's the rush to pass the NDAA. The National Defense Authorization Act has been the one constant in a city where consensus is rarer than a Santa sighting. The military's spending bill passes so reliably that it hasn't missed a year since West Side Story was in the theaters, and gas cost 27 cents a gallon! But that 60-year streak is on the line right now, and there's no one to blame but radical Democrats.
Woke radicals administrating our nation's schools want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to indoctrinating their students into the deceptive, destructive ideology known as critical race theory. Leftists routinely deny this, from the White House on down, insisting that conservatives are making it all up to score political points. Yet occasionally the truth leaks out. Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which insisted "Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools," invited the Director of UCLA's Center for Critical Race Studies in Education to give a presentation as they discuss curriculum for a class on Ethnic Studies.
