'They must know that we will protect our ships, and if they threaten us, they will pay a price.'

"With those words, President Ronald Reagan justified his approval of Operation Praying Mantis, a day-long engagement in which U.S. Navy and Marine forces delivered a powerful response to the Iranian assault of the USS Samuel B. Roberts. A hidden Iranian mine had struck the frigate in the open waters of the Persian Gulf on April 14, 1988. No sailors died, but several were injured and the ship was severely damaged.

"Operation Praying Mantis remains the largest surface battle engaged in by the U.S. Navy since World War II, and its outcome was decisive. According to official reports released afterward, using a combination of anti-ship missiles, naval gunfire, and aircraft launched from several ships, including the aircraft carrier the USS Enterprise, the Navy destroyed two oil platforms used by Iran for intelligence collection, sank 4 small Iranian Navy boats, sank an Iranian frigate, and severely damaged another Iranian warship.

"But that was all on April 18, 1988. Back when the United States believed in delivering swift, decisive responses to enemy provocations."

"Look, if Barack Obama didn't consider Barack Obama's presidency a success, who would? Of course his last State of the Union was filled with happy talk about the current condition of the United States and its limitless future. He has a year left to convince America and his posterity that his tenure has not been a failure.

"He's got his work cut out for him. According to Gallup, a mere 23 percent of the American people are satisfied with the direction of the United States. But since it's unlikely the president is going to get any part of his domestic agenda through Congress -- and since he really doesn't want to do much of anything abroad -- he might as well take a shot at it. ...

"In what was arguably the most boring major speech of his presidency, Obama didn't even attempt to make a consistent argument or prove the case he was making for his presidency and the glorious moment to which he has brought this country."

"A new report on the Syrian refugee resettlement program reveals that the United Nations -- not U.S. officials -- initially pick and choose who can move to the United States and even become an American citizen.

"What's more, the vetting system used by the U.S.-funded United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is wide open to rampant fraud, raising the specter that potential terrorists could buy their way into the United States, according to the analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies.

"The report focused on a little-known path to how refugees get into America: The United Nations makes the first pick, not the State Department."

"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!"