What Is ‘Good’ About Good Friday

Eternal life is a free gift to anyone who acknowledges that Jesus is Lord and believes “God raised him from the dead.”

Christians describe the day an innocent man was violently executed as “Good.” Unless you know the whole story, it doesn’t make much sense.

This is Holy Week on the Christian calendar. It began with Palm Sunday, which commemorates the Triumphal Entry. As Jesus rode a young donkey into Jerusalem, the people shouted, “Hosanna!” and “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

The symbolism may not be obvious now, but it was then. Hundreds of years before, Zechariah had prophesied that Israel’s king would come “riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”

This was just one of the many prophecies about the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled. He was born to a virgin in Bethlehem, yet was called out of Egypt. He was from the line of David. He healed the blind, deaf and lame.

The people had every reason to believe that the Messiah had arrived to deliver them. And they knew just what they needed deliverance from — the Roman Empire.

King Herod believed this new king threatened his power and tried to kill Jesus after his birth. John 6 says the people wanted to make Jesus king by force. Even the Apostle Peter attempted to fight the guards who arrested Jesus. They were waiting for a Messiah to usher in a new earthly kingdom.

But Israel’s greatest problem wasn’t Roman rule, but sin. The same is true for us today because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” as Romans 3:23 says. Sin separates us from God and the “wages of sin is death” as Romans 6:23 states. That means even the best person can’t earn his or her way into a right relationship with God. Uh oh.

God, however, had a plan that was foreshadowed in the Passover meal. Right before God rescued Israel from Egypt, he commanded each Israelite household to slaughter a lamb without defect. Each family then put blood from the lamb on the doorframe of their house. The Lord would see the blood and pass over that home while punishing the Egyptians.

When John the Baptist called Jesus “the Lamb of God,” he was referencing this. Jesus, who was fully God and fully man, lived a perfect life. He was crucified on Good Friday taking the penalty — death — that you and I deserve for our sins.

Good Friday was agony for Jesus. It wasn’t just physical pain. He was forsaken by God the Father. He bore the punishment that you and I deserve.

But he didn’t stay dead. Easter is a celebration of God raising Jesus from the dead. This confirmed what Jesus said in John 11, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.”

What good news and the offer still stands. Eternal life is a free gift to anyone who acknowledges that Jesus is Lord and believes “God raised him from the dead,” as Romans 10:9 says.

And that’s the full story of Good Friday. Happy Easter.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/126362-what-is-good-about-good-friday-2026-03-30

HUGE March Jobs Report Leaves Democrats Speechless

The so-called experts didn’t just miss the mark on March jobs numbers; they got steamrolled by reality.

Economists predicted a weak 59,000 jobs. The actual number came in at a stunning 178,000. Talk about getting it completely wrong.

And it’s the latest reminder that the same crowd that spent months warning about economic doom under President Donald Trump still doesn’t understand what’s actually happening on the ground.

Even CNN couldn’t deny that this was huge.

CNBC couldn’t contain its excitement.

Unemployment dipped again, falling from 4.4% to 4.3%. Even more telling, the rate dropped across multiple groups, including women, black Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and veterans. That kind of broad-based improvement doesn’t happen in a weak economy. It doesn’t even happen when a Democrat is in the White House.

Meanwhile, jobless claims are now hovering near a two-year low. In other words, fewer people are losing jobs, and more people are finding them. That’s the formula for sustained momentum. Manufacturing and construction both saw real growth, the kind that signals strength in the backbone of the economy.

Let’s keep going, shall we?

Since Trump returned to office, the private sector has added 609,000 jobs. At the same time, federal government employment has dropped by 352,000. On top of that, native-born Americans are benefiting, too. A total of 218,000 native-born workers have gained employment, and 193,000 have entered the labor force.

That’s no accident; that’s by design. Trump’s design.

Wages are also moving in the right direction. Average hourly earnings rose 0.2% in March and sit 3.5% higher than a year ago.

It gets better.

Blue-collar workers, who took a beating during the Biden years, have now recovered those lost wages in just one year under Trump.

As for inflation, it continues to cool. It now sits at 2.4%, down from 3.0% when Trump took office — and way below the 9% it reached under Biden. Core inflation has dropped to 2.5%, its lowest level in five years. That’s a major shift after the price spikes Americans endured not long ago.

Related: Here’s How the Media Is Manipulating You on Gas Prices

What does this mean for Americans? It means prices for everyday staples like bread, meat, fruit, and dairy have all come down. Egg prices, which became a symbol of runaway inflation, have plunged nearly 50% since Trump took office and 60% compared to last Easter. Housing is showing signs of relief as well. Mortgage rates have declined, and rents are down 1.7% over the past year.

Put it all together, and it’s clear that the Trump economy is working. Jobs are growing faster than expected. Wages are rising. Inflation is falling. And everyday costs are easing. The “experts” can keep predicting collapse if they want. The numbers keep telling a very different story. Trump’s golden age is coming through.

Neither Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, DNC Chairman Ken Martin, nor the Democratic Party has addressed the new jobs report on X.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2026/04/03/huge-march-jobs-report-leaves-democrats-speechless-n4951416

Victor Davis Hanson--A Foolish NATO Was a Big Loser in the Iran War

NATO members are not legally required to join any member's military operations that are not formally sanctioned by the alliance or not aimed at protecting the homelands of the membership.

But they often do just that.

Some NATO members joined the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq on the theory that, in the post-9/11 environment, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were dangers to all Western security.

They followed the precedent set by America's 1999 intervention in the distant Balkans, leading a three-month NATO campaign to dismantle Slobodan Milosevic's often bloody ambitions of a Greater Serbia. The U.S. also joined the 2011 U.N.-approved, and French- and British-inspired, NATO "coalition of the willing" bombing campaign in Libya.

That effort proved a seven-month misadventure – especially since the targeted Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi had given up his nuclear weapons program and was desperately trying to cut a deal with the West.

When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the U.S., as NATO's strongest member, for overt help.

For nearly 40 years, the U.S. had offered logistical, intelligence, reconnaissance, refueling, and diplomatic support to the French in their unilateral and postcolonial efforts to protect Chad from Libya and, later, Islamists.

During the 1982 Falklands War, a solitary Britain faced enormous logistical challenges in steaming halfway around the world to eject Argentina from its windswept and sparse islands.

U.S. aid was critical to the effort.

So America stepped up to help with intelligence, reconnaissance, the supply of some two million gallons of much-needed gasoline, and crucial restocking of Britain's depleted Tomahawk missiles.

The American tilt to Britain prompted anger from most Latin American nations of the shared Western hemisphere, as well as from many Hispanic American citizens at home.

No matter – President Ronald Reagan rightly saw the importance of solidarity with a NATO member and a long-time American ally. So he gave Britain a veritable blank check for American aid.

Currently, America has not asked NATO members to help bomb Iran – even though Europe, not the U.S., was in range of Iranian ballistic missiles, and soon perhaps nuclear-tipped ones as well.

Europeans are far more vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamic terrorism. They are more reliant on foreign oil from the Middle East, some of it passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

All the U.S. had initially asked for was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill a U.S. president and secretary of state.

But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some damned the U.S. effort as either illegal or unnecessary.

The American public watched the British waffle for days over permitting Americans to use their Diego Garcia base.

The Spanish banned American use of their NATO bases and airspace.

The Italians refused a request from American bombers to land and refuel at a Sicilian NATO base.

Many NATO heads of state rebuked the U.S. to their domestic audiences while, in typical two-faced fashion, publicly offering empty verbal support for the U.S. effort.

The NATO response to an Iranian missile aimed at fellow NATO member Turkey was anemic.

Even worse was the pathetic British reaction to another Iranian missile launch at a British base at Akrotiri, Cyprus.

Yet a successful American effort in neutering a theocratic Iran was clearly of benefit to Europe. So is preventing the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz from becoming a toll booth run by the Iranian mullahs.

Such passivity was in sharp contrast to the five-year-long Ukraine War on the borders of Europe.

Ukraine was not in NATO.

Ukrainian politicos and ambassadors had sometimes played an intrusive, partisan role in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 American presidential elections.

Nonetheless, there were urgent European requests for the U.S. to honor the spirit of NATO solidarity and to get across the Atlantic as quickly as possible to protect the territorial integrity of Europe.

Yet continental Europe is not intrinsically weak. The combined population of the European Union and European NATO members is around 450 million – a population more than 100 million greater than that of the U.S.

These same European nations enjoy an aggregate annual GDP of more than $22 trillion, 10 times the size of the Russian economy.

European diffidence comes on top of the perennial American effort to harangue NATO members to honor their 2 percent of GDP defense commitments – especially in the case of deadbeat Spain and Canada, who for years welched on their pledges.

Trump's harangues were not what was undermining NATO.

Instead, he ripped off a happy-face scab and exposed a festering wound of increasingly anti-American hypocrisy beneath.

If you wanted to wreck the alliance, there would be no better way than to follow the duplicitous examples of Western European NATO members.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2026/04/02/a-foolish-nato-was-a-big-loser-in-the-iran-war-n2673864

Mass robotaxi malfunction halts traffic in Wuhan China

A mass robotaxi outage in the Chinese city of Wuhan caused at least a hundred self-driving cars to stop mid-traffic, sparking renewed debate around the safety of driverless vehicles.

Local police said initial findings suggested a "system malfunction" caused multiple vehicles to stop in the middle of the road on Tuesday.

Videos on social media have documented the outage, with one appearing to show it resulting in a highway collision, although police said no injuries had been reported and passengers exited their vehicles safely.

Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to the police statement, posted on social media site Weibo, the cause of the incident is still under further investigation.

Baidu operates its Apollo Go driverless taxi service in dozens of cities across the world, mostly in China.

In December 2025, ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft announced partnerships with the Chinese technology giant to test its Apollo Go cars on UK roads, aiming to start trials in 2026.

However, both still need approval from regulators before they can begin the pilot programmes.

ReutersSocial media users posted photos and videos of Apollo Go cars stranded in the middle of the roads due to the outage

Jack Stilgoe, professor of science and technology policy at University College London said while driverless tech "may be safer on average" than human drivers, this incident showed it could "still go wrong in completely new ways".

"If we're going to make good choices about this technology, we need to understand entirely new types of risk," he told BBC News.

The outage is not the first time self-driving cars have faced technical difficulties.

In December 2025, a large power outage in San Francisco led Waymo taxis to stop working around the city, causing huge traffic jams.

Meanwhile in August 2025, an Apollo Go robotaxi carrying a passenger in Chongqing fell into ​a construction pit.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvge91r9j80o

NYT: Democrats’ ActBlue May Have Misled Congress on Donor Vetting Process

The Democrat fundraising machine, ActBlue, was reportedly warned by a law firm working for the platform in early 2025 that it possibly misled congressional leaders regarding its vetting of foreign donations, according to the New York Times.

The newspaper on Thursday noted its article was based on internal legal memos, emails, resignation letters, Slack messages, and interviews with current and former employees of the Democrat National Committee’s donor platform, adding the fundraising group is facing investigations as the November midterm elections approach.

The outlet said:

The firm concluded that ActBlue’s chief executive had given a potentially misleading response to congressional Republican investigators in a 2023 letter explaining how the organization vetted donations to ensure that they were not illegally coming from foreign citizens.

The letter from the chief executive, Regina Wallace-Jones, said ActBlue carried out “multilayered” screenings of contributions that helped “root out” those from overseas. In fact, the law firm found, some of the steps she had described were not always followed.

The firm, Covington & Burling, said the issue presents “substantial risk” for the fundraising platform, and the Times article noted “One memo raised the specter of a criminal investigation if prosecutors believed that ActBlue had tried to conceal facts about its efforts to prevent foreign contributions.”

In a social media post Thursday, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) shared the Times report, writing, “This ActBlue investigation is among the biggest bombshell campaign finance corruption and actual foreign election interference stories in American politics. And it was all so publicly obvious, with many urging the media to look into this, but until recently, the media refused to cover it.”

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In early March of 2025 while Republican lawmakers were probing ActBlue as a potential money-laundering operation, it was facing “internal chaos” with several senior officials reportedly leaving, according to Breitbart News.

That same month, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) alleged that former President Joe Biden’s (D) administration covered up “hundreds” of suspicious activity reports for ActBlue. His comments came as his Oversight Committee was investigating the platform over potential fraud, according to Breitbart News.

Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) at the time also called for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to investigate ActBlue regarding “suspicious donations,” the outlet said:

Biggs’s letter cited concerns that ActBlue had “been used to skirt the integrity of federal campaign finance laws,” and noted that while the “U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Committee on House Administration have been investigating these allegations of misconduct,” the Biden administration had “stalled access to the necessary documents.”

The following month, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate ActBlue, according to the Associated Press (AP).

More recently, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Election Commission (FEC) for records connected to alleged fraud by ActBlue, the organization announced February 3.

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “There are legitimate, grave concerns that ActBlue has enabled illegal fundraising. By failing to prevent widespread straw-donor schemes and other tactics, it is likely that fraudulent and even foreign-sourced contributions have crept into Democrat campaign coffers.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/04/02/nyt-democrats-actblue-may-have-misled-congress-on-donor-vetting-process/

Will Gov. Spanberger Ignore Detainers for These Violent Criminal Illegals? ICE Is Warning Her Not To.

Woke Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger ran for office as a moderate, but she's not. She's a radical who has turned her state into a tax hell and a sanctuary for illegals just weeks after taking office.

Several illegals have been arrested in recent weeks for committing violent crimes. This includes Abdul Jalloh, who stabbed 41-year-old mom Stephanie Minter at a Fairfax County bus stop, and Marvin Fernando Morales-Ortez, who murdered someone a day after Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano set him loose.

Yesterday, we told you about Anibal Armando Chavarria Muy, another illegal charged with second-degree murder. Muy allegedly stabbed a man to death with a machete at Bailey's Crossroads in Fairfax. There was another horrific murder in Fairfax recently, too, when Misael Lopez Gomez murdered his three-month-old daughter.

Fairfax County Sheriff Stacey Kincaid has a history of not honoring ICE detainers for these violent illegal aliens. ICE is asking Spanberger and Kincaid to not free these monsters back into the community.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/04/02/ice-spanberger-free-illegals-n2673850

Iran's tallest bridge collapses after reported US airstrikes; Iran threatens American allies in retaliation

Iran's IRGC reportedly identified bridges in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi as potential targets

Iran’s biggest bridge near Tehran has crashed down in a stunning scene captured on camera following reports of U.S. airstrikes, President Donald Trump announced Thursday, as he pressed the regime to make a deal before tensions escalate further.

The B1 highway bridge, a key link between Iran’s capital and the western city of Karaj, is considered the tallest in the Middle East and was only inaugurated earlier this year.

Iranian state TV reportedly warned of potential retaliation, claiming the state's military has identified multiple bridges in American-allied Middle East nations as targets, according to Iran International.

Trump posted a video on social media capturing a massive plume of smoke and debris after the bridge’s apparent collapse.

KAROLINE LEAVITT FIRES BACK AT NBC NEWS REPORTER WHO ASKED IF TRUMP'S IRAN THREAT AMOUNTS TO A 'WAR CRIME'

The B1 bridge near Tehran collapsed after reported U.S. airstrikes.

"The biggest bridge in Iran comes tumbling down, never to be used again — Much more to follow! IT IS TIME FOR IRAN TO MAKE A DEAL BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE, AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT OF WHAT STILL COULD BECOME A GREAT COUNTRY!" Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

The strike on the bridge was aimed at cutting drone and missile supply lines to Iranian firing units targeting U.S. and Israeli forces, Middle East outlet i24NEWS reported, citing sources.

Iranian state TV also said the bridge was hit twice, roughly an hour apart, resulting in civilian casualties, Fars News reported.

TRUMP TO ADDRESS NATION ABOUT IRAN AS HE SIGNALS WAR COULD END WITHIN WEEKS

President Donald Trump pauses as he finishes speaking about the Iran war Wednesday, April 1, 2026, in Washington. 

"A few minutes ago, the American-Zionist enemy once again targeted the B1 bridge in Karaj," the broadcast said, noting that the first strike killed two civilians.

Fars News also reported that other areas of Karaj were struck.

Iran's IRGC reportedly identified several bridges in American-allied nations as potential targets after the collapse of the B1 bridge. 

The outlet reported that Iran is considering plans to rebuild the bridge with the help of its engineers and experts.

In retaliation, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has reportedly identified several bridges in American-allied nations across the Middle East as potential targets, including infrastructure in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi and the Jordan-West Bank region.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/irans-tallest-bridge-collapses-reported-us-airstrikes-iran-threatens-american-allies-retaliation