Opinion

He won’t be able to stop himself from doing it again. He’s not going to stop at doubling down. He’ll triple down on everything he’s pulled over the last four years.

In its original context, the claim that Jesus was born to a virgin mother places his birth in a long line of miraculous biblical births. The Bible tells of numerous old women, barren women and young unmarried women (“virgins” in ancient terms) who surprisingly bore children. Their offspring were seen as a sign of God’s blessing of new life, often in the midst of suffering or hardship.

Poor Donald Trump. They don’t let you rest easy. When the political trial—and its consequences—looms ominously over his head, the powerful evangelistic magazine Christianity Today published an editorial in which it violently attacks the American president and asks for his removal from power. His answer: “I will not read it again!” Trump said furiously.

On December 18, minutes after the U.S. House of Representatives voted to impeach President Donald Trump two articles of abuse of power and obstruction of justice, CNN's Brian Stelter took to Twitter to announce "there is no way to deny: Trump has been impeached."

If the media was informed by the public interest the continuing economic slide of working-class Americans, thanks to health care costs, would dominate the news. One would think with the Trump impeachment drama on holiday hiatus as Moscow Mitch plots to counter Speaker Pelosi’s gambit, the actual struggle of America’s families might get some daylight.

Editor’s Note: The House of Representatives has impeached President Donald Trump. Attention now turns to the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is known as a master of the Senate’s rules, and has been raising campaign donations with ads touting the power he would have over impeachment proceedings. Constitutional scholar Sarah Burns from the Rochester Institute of Technology answers some crucial questions already arising about what McConnell might be able to do, to either slow down the process or speed things along.

Celestial messengers, natural wonders and a virgin birth establish the baby Jesus as someone special. Why does the rest of the New Testament ignore these auspicious beginnings?

For all the hand-wringing I and many others have done over the past couple of months over the House leadership's impeachment strategy, its implementation went very smoothly. Traditionally, Democrats have always had a rather large contingent of right-leaning members who inevitably cause trouble in these partisan battles. At the very least I would have expected some public hemming and hawing from showboaters, if only for the camera time it would have given them.

The right-wing takeover of the U.S. courts continued apace Thursday as the Republican-controlled Senate, with the help of some Democrats, quietly confirmed a dozen more of President Donald Trump’s lifetime judicial nominees hours before leaving for Christmas recess.

The animating force of American political identity is war. For precisely this reason that all the candidates in the Democratic race for president (except for Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, polling at 1 or 2 percent) and the entire range of superstar liberal commentators — from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Rebecca Traister — have little or nothing to say about America’s destruction of Iraq, the existence of 800 military bases around the world, and the discretionary budget of the federal government, which allocates more than 50 cents of every dollar to the Pentagon.

Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, defended his controversial pardon of a convicted child rapist by claiming that the 9-year-old victim’s hymen was “intact,” which experts say medically proves nothing.