"The very first order of business for this Congress should be to immediately reauthorize the Washington, D.C. school voucher program. Do it now. Hold a rally in front of the Capitol with the thousands of minority parents and kids who depend on these vouchers. Stand with them. Fight with them loudly and proudly.

"A first-rate education for the nation's poor children is a righteous fight and, as Jeanne Allen, the president of the Center for Education Reform puts it, 'the civil liberties issue of our time.'

"What is for sure is that Democrats will never stand with these parents. They can't because the teachers unions won't let them and the political contributions would dry up. So union brass and the leaders of the Democratic Party oppose programs that take control from Big Labor and instead empower parents. It's all about power and money for the education blob. The opposition has nothing to do with what's right for the kids. Only rare Democrats like former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman dare support the program -- and he was ousted from his own party. Nothing exposes the spectacular hypocrisy of the Democratic Party more than their brick wall opposition to education voucher programs. ...

"This is the perfect political fight for these times. Paul Ryan should announce tomorrow that there will be no budget this year without vouchers. If Mr. Obama wants to shut down the government to stop this from happening let him.

"What better way for Republicans to show that they believe black lives matter."

"State Department officials released roughly 2,900 pages of Hillary Clinton's private emails early Friday morning, several hours past their target of late Thursday evening. ...

"The new batch of records contains 45 classified messages, including one that was upgraded to 'secret,' a higher level of classification. Last week, the agency published a batch of emails that contained 275 classified records, raising further questions about Clinton's prior remarks that none of her emails included classified information -- she has said none were classified at the time the emails were sent. ...

"The email release came the same day as the publication of a scathing report by the State Department's own inspector general, which found Clinton's aides had deliberately and improperly ignored at least one Freedom of Information Act for her email records while she was still serving as secretary of State."

"President Obama inked a deal with the mullahs to delay their acquisition of The Bomb. The agreement was struck a few years after a peaceful, popular uprising appeared to threaten the tyrannical regime's stability. The Iranians have already violated the deal with two recent ballistic missile tests, acts that evince bellicose intentions. The Obama administration is already trying to paper over the violations, and Iran is already threatening to back out of the agreement if Obama does otherwise.

"The pattern is familiar and deeply discouraging. The situation in Iran's neighborhood is far more tense than anything going on in East Asia. Amid hints of a looming sectarian war within the Islamic World between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Obama's accommodation of Iran's ambitions in the form of the relaxation of sanctions echoes the gross mistake made with North Korea two decades ago.

"Obama is apparently obsessed with his legacy. It would be a tragedy if Americans found themselves looking back on his 2015 agreement as the crucial moment when a terrible regime secured its future and tipped the most unstable region of the world into a nuclear arms race."

"Gun carrying, private citizens who used firearms to stop criminal attacks saved at least 283 potential victims in a period between July 2014 and July 2015, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis.

"TheDCNF concluded its analysis as President Barack Obama announced Tuesday another push by his administration to tighten federal gun control laws in an attempt to curb gun violence.

"While Obama quotes the more than 30,000 gun deaths in a year -- omitting that 60 percent are suicides, 6 percent are gang related, 3 percent are accidents, and the vast majority of the rest occur in urban areas -- TheDCNF found that a noteworthy number of kids, the elderly, and women successfully defended themselves against criminals by use of gun fire."

"It was a muted Bill Clinton who stumped for his wife in New Hampshire on Monday.

"Only a few weeks back, Mr. Clinton was thought to be Hillary Clinton's 'secret weapon.' Well, he has just made his first two appearances of the 2016 campaign -- and the Associated Press describes him as 'subdued,' while the New York Time says he 'seemed to be on a tight leash.'

"Not to mention how adrift he looked when a reporter asked him about Donald Trump's slams about his treatment of women. ...

"As Christopher Hitchens once put it, Bill Clinton didn't lie about sex. He lied about women. The Clintons' problem today is that they are being called on these lies -- and neither he nor his wife has a good answer."

"In congressional testimony in December, Alan Bersin, assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Homeland Security -- the most cruelly misnamed bureaucratic concatenation since the Government Accountability Office -- was asked by Representative Mark Meadows (R-NC) to answer the simple question of how many aliens illegally overstay their visas every year. Bersin's answer as quoted in the Times was: 'We don't know.' ...

"From two of the 9/11 hijackers to one of the San Bernardino shooters, our visa program is a real source of national vulnerability to terrorism. And the fact is that the federal government is doing such a catastrophically poor job policing visa overstays that its minions are terrified even to keep track of how catastrophically poorly they are performing.

"We are perfectly capable of keeping track of these things: Miss the January payment on your Macy's card by two days, and financial firms around the world will know instantly, but flout federal immigration law, and the mighty, mighty Department of Homeland Security can't find its own ass with both hands, much less locate yours. Congress should give DHS a deadline -- say, June 1 of this year -- to at least get a handle on how bad a job it is doing. And if it fails to satisfy congressional demands, then DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson should be expected to resign or face impeachment. Impeachment is not something to be taken lightly, but we cannot afford to have intelligence operations that are this unintelligent. Institutional ignorance on this level does not happen by accident or through negligence -- it happens only by design."

"We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

"Good tidings we bring to you and your kin; We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"

"Every year millions tune in to 'A Charlie Brown Christmas,' a 50-year-old TV special that shows its age. The animation looks rudimentary by Pixar standards. The voice acting, performed by real children, isn'€™t exactly a Shakespearean triumph. So what makes this 'Peanuts' television special, in a word, special? It's that Charlie Brown knows what Christmas is all about. ...

"Half a century later, 'A Charlie Brown Christmas' is far more than a quaint historical artifact. The slow and yet sublime story proves that purposeful characters and a simple aesthetic can beat fancy computer algorithms. The annual spiritual validation on mainstream television is a breath of fresh air. Free from gross humor or double-entendres, the show is a reminder that Hollywood need not reach to the lowest common denominator. A lonely kid who hears deep truths and is comforted by flawed but well-meaning friends is enough."

"It's not Gitmo driving recruitment. It's our president.

"In truth, Muslims don't care a whit about Guantanamo Bay. I prosecuted one of the world's most notorious terrorists in the mid '90s, the 'Blind Sheikh,' Omar Abdel Rahman, who formed the cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. He got the gold-plated due process of a civilian trial and all the trimmings of top-shelf civilian prison -- no Gitmo for him. And you know what? Islamic supremacists continue to condemn his incarceration and jihadists have killed scores of people to try to extort his release. They don'€™t care where we detain jihadists; they care that we detain jihadists."

"Last Saturday, Barack Obama gained the second jewel in his foreign-policy triple crown: the Paris climate accord. It follows his Iran nuclear deal and awaits but the closing of Guantanamo to complete his glittering legacy.

"To be sure, Obama will not be submitting the climate agreement for Senate ratification. It would have no chance of passing -- as with the Iranian nuclear deal, also never submitted for the Senate ratification Obama knew he'd never get. And if he does close Guantanamo, it will be in defiance of overwhelming bipartisan congressional opposition.

"You see, visionary thinkers like Obama cannot be bound by normal constitutional strictures. Indeed, the very unpopularity of his most cherished diplomatic goals is proof of their prophetic farsightedness."