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Christmas Message 2009 A message from Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us... -- Titus 3:4-5a Into this shadowed world light shines and joyous voices sing. Glad tidings cheer the heart and liberate hope. “A child has been born for us, a son given to us” (Isaiah 9:6). God our Savior has appeared! God’s saving goodness and loving kindness have arrived in Jesus, the Word made flesh. Though hidden in the humility of a manger, and later in the scandal of the cross, God’s promise is being...

Thousands of people logged on to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's first-ever online town hall forum to hear the denomination's head tackle some tough questions. Many of the questions on Sunday addressed the pro-gay actions of the churchwide assembly in August. "Can you give a good, solid reason why we, the dissident traditionalists, should remain in the ELCA as a decreasing minority instead of moving our memberships to other Lutheran bodies?" George Erdner of Lawrenceville, Ga., asked through an online submission. ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson first made plain, "Don't call yourselves dissident minorities." Hanson stressed that the...

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- The presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) hosted a "Town Hall Forum" here Dec. 6, fielding a variety of questions on topics such as leadership, mission, evangelism, anti-racism and racial justice matters, funding, churchwide staff reductions and actions of the 2009 Churchwide Assembly. The Rev. Mark S. Hanson responded to 19 questions -- posed by a live audience and members watching online -- during the hour-long forum. Carlos Peña, ELCA vice president, Galveston, Texas, introduced Hanson and posed questions from viewers. Hanson had said he wanted to use the forum to speak directly...

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- The Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), said he will share priorities and hopes for the ELCA, and wants to hear stories from members about the church's work in their own contexts, when he hosts an online "Town Hall Forum" Sunday, Dec. 6. The hour-long forum begins at 5:30 p.m. Eastern Time (4:30 p.m. Central Time). The program will be webcast live from Chicago, where Hanson will be joined by an audience of ELCA members. The audience will ask questions of the presiding bishop. Web viewers can watch the...

The head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America reported that 40 positions may be cut as the denomination struggles financially. "These have been very painful days in this organization," ELCA Presiding Bishop the Rev. Mark S. Hanson told the Church Council Friday, according to the ELCA News Service. Lutherans are looking to reduce their 2010 budget by 10 percent due to decreased giving over the past 30 years, the economic downturn, and the decision by some congregations to withhold funding. Several congregations have decided to cut all funding to the ELCA following the controversial vote in August by the...

Honest welcomes back Uncle Jimbo of Black Five of the Warrior Legacy Foundation and Bob Weimann of Defend our Marines, specifically the Sins of the Generals Series to layout the truth about the Fort Hood Terrorist Massacre. Join us at the link below at 8 pm est, Tonight Call in at 646 478 5613

I am re-posting because I provided the incorrect URL for National Review. Sorry about that.

Victor Davis Hanson writes that America's obssession with Obama may finally be lifting, due, in large part, to the fact that the American people are finally waking up and realizing that Mr. Obama is not the man they thought he was.

So Tom Cable walks. That's how you'd have figured it to play given the other characters and circumstances involved. But more than that, Napa County District Attorney Gary Lieberstein said that Raiders assistant coach Randy Hanson couldn't satisfactorily explain to Lieberstein's conviction rate how his jaw was broken. And that, ultimately, is the lesson here. Nobody told enough of a believable story for us ever to figure out what Cable, the Raiders head coach, actually did to Hanson's face, let alone what his intent was when he did whatever it was he did. With that kind of iron-clad certitude, is...

Raiders defensive assistant Randy Hanson continues to push his assault charges in public, this time challenging Raiders coach Tom Cable to a lie-detector showdown. "I will take a lie-detector test and a drug test, and I will pay for it - and I'll pay for Tom Cable to take those tests as well," Hanson told Yahoo Sports on Thursday. Cable was asked if he had any response. "None whatsoever," Cable said after practice Friday. Hanson has accused Cable of assaulting him and fracturing his jaw Aug. 5 during training camp. Napa police concluded their investigation last week and handed over...

Raiders defensive assistant Randy Hanson finally interviewed with the Napa police, telling them Friday that Raiders coach Tom Cable struck him and broke his jaw Aug. 5 at training camp, his attorney told NFL.com on Monday. Napa police confirmed (again) the potential felony case remains under investigation more than a month since the story broke. Hanson's attorney said Hanson handed over medical records showing he has a broken jaw. When the investigation ends, the district attorney will decide whether or not to press charges. Only then should anyone expect the NFL to take any disciplinary action in the matter --...

Our National 9/11 Schizophrenia The great debate over 9/11 and the American response — is it coming to an end? By Victor Davis Hanson Ninety-six months ago, 19 Islamic terrorists — led by Mohamed Atta, organized by Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and ordered by Osama bin Laden — hijacked four American airliners. They destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and murdered 2,974 people. The al-Qaeda–planned attack was the most lethal on the American homeland in our history. In response, the United States quickly attacked and removed the Taliban government that had offered sanctuary to the killers. About 15 months...

By 1930 Verdun had been transmogrified almost into a dirty word in French schools. Throughout the late 1920s, the First World War was increasingly reinterpreted in the West as a futile bloodletting. International “Merchants of Death” and greedy capitalists, not the Kaiser’s aggressive Prussian militarism, were now seen as the true causes of that recent horrific war. A punitive Versailles Treaty — and not the failure to invade, occupy, democratize, monitor, and transform a defeated Germany — was seen as the real mistake on the part of the victors. Britain and France all but disarmed. The Maginot defensive line, England’s...

Why does President Obama want to implement all at once radical changes in American foreign policy, environmental policy, education, health care and the tax code? The answer is easy: If he does not achieve these initiatives soon, he never will. Almost none of Obama's proposed policies any longer enjoy majority support among voters -- and many of them were not clearly outlined to voters during the campaign. Current polls show more Americans are against than in favor of his version of health-care reform. Nearly seven in 10 are wary of government takeovers of the economy, like the bank and car...

snip "Yes, he talks about change in America, but never tells the world exactly how an America of many races and faiths never descends into the hatred and violence we see most elsewhere in diverse societies. How, after all, does one apologize for success? (”I am sorry we are not killing as in the Balkans; so sad we do not follow the Rwandan model; schucks, no Kurd-Shiite-Sunni troubles here.”) It used to be cute to talk about how “Bush turned off the Europeans.” Perhaps. But beneath all the public demonstrations and burning effigies, the old guard knew that Bush, like...

We are beginning to see that the media is about to add humiliation to its moral failure, as it grasps that once you worship a Messiah, you cannot leave the cult. Mr. Obama tolerates no dissent among the believers. The recent Obama press conference showed what happens to the shunned New York Times or Washington Post once you even consider climbing over the fence of the compound. What were these sycophants thinking as they watched Obama produce all sorts of bogus figures in assuring that tripling the deficit, then halving it will translate into lessening the present red-ink? Again, imagine...

ELCA NEWS SERVICE March 16, 2009 ELCA Presiding Bishop Comments on Economy, Task Force Documents 09-064-JB ITASCA, Ill. (ELCA) -- Noting that 2009 is "a difficult year," the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) reported March 7 to the ELCA Conference of Bishops, focusing on the effects of the economic downturn on the ELCA, as well as two documents released Feb. 19 by the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality. The ELCA Conference of Bishops is an advisory body of the church, consisting of bishops who lead the 65 synods of the ELCA, plus the...

A D.C. woman filed suit in U.S. District Court yesterday, claiming that the city would not let her register a pistol because of its color. Tracey A. Hanson argued that her application to register a .45-caliber semiautomatic was denied because the gun is not on the California Safe Handgun Roster, which is the standard in the city. Hanson tried to register a two-tone, stainless steel/black pistol, according to the suit. But the list has that model in olive drab green, dark earth or black, not in two-tone, stainless/black, the suit asserts...

WASHINGTON -- A Maryland woman was charged Friday with exporting miniature controls for small unmanned aircraft to China. The government says the controls are the world's smallest and involve a technology that cannot be shared with China because of national security concerns. The devices can be used to fly small military reconnaissance planes. Yaming Nina Qi Hanson of Silver Spring, Md., is accused of taking the controls to China last August without a required export license. If convicted, she faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

I get loads of quasi-hate mail about questioning Obama’s candidacy and governance. But I am worried, not about Obama, or the politics of governance, but about the nation itself. The media has forsaken us. But after only two weeks we are in a crisis stage of confidence, and the story is spiraling by the hour out of control. I write here not to score points, but to warn readers that this is all very serious. Obama is our President, and we must hope he does something fast to save his administration from general ridicule that will incur real dangers for...

Victor Davis Hanson discusses Obama, Palin, McCain, Biden and the Culture Wars

November 27, 2008, 0:00 a.m. The Hysterical StyleBaby Boomers — the ungrateful-est generation — can’t help swinging from panic to frenzy. By Victor Davis Hanson Politicians now predict the implosion of the U.S. auto industry. Headlines warn that the entire banking system is on the verge of utter collapse. The all-day/all-night cable news shows and op-ed columnists talk of another Dark Age on the horizon, as each day another corporation lines up for its me-too bailout. News magazines depict President-Elect Obama as the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt, facing a crisis akin to the Great Depression. Columnists for the New...

I spent two hours with historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson yesterday discussing the election and the candidates, the war and the world. The podcast of hour one is here, and of hour two is here.  I rarely post an interview transcript on the front page, but to encourage you in its reading, here it is: HH: A very special two hours ahead, a prolonged conversation about the state of the election, the state of the parties, the state of the world, the state of the war with historian and classicist Victor Davis Hanson. ... Victor Hanson, welcome to the studio....

Suddenly there are no longer any more litmus tests — remember the Democratic primary bickering in autumn 2007? — over who was, and was not, always against the war in Iraq. There are no more hearings in which a Sen. Obama or Clinton seek to outdo each other in grandstanding condemnations of the war effort. We see no more discounted “General Betray-Us” ads in the New York Times. The protestors on our street corners have taken down the “No blood for oil!” signs and replaced them with “Hands off Iran!” placards. A Sen. Durbin or Rep. Murtha is quiet about...

Almost everyone is talking about Barack Obama’s flip-flops, as the Senate’s most liberal member steadily moves to the political center and disowns firebrands like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger. But less noticed is that Obama is not just deflating John McCain’s efforts to hold him to his long liberal record, but also embracing much of the present agenda of an unpopular President Bush on a wide variety of fronts. Take social issues. Obama is now a gun-rights advocate. Like Bush, he applauded the Supreme Court’s overturning of a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning the possession of handguns. The senator,...

Victor Davis Hanson, a former classics professor, is a renowned conservative scholar of ancient history and military affairs who's recently become a nationally syndicated columnist and blogger. The author of 17 books with titles like "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War," "An Autumn of War" and "Mexifornia: A State of Becoming," he is the senior fellow in residence in classics and military history at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus. Hanson, whose scholarship and interest in individual freedom recently earned him a 2008 Bradley Prize worth $250,000 from the Bradley...

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them...And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Here is what Sen. Obama now says...

. . . Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random (Asian, Mexican-American, and working-class white) Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama’s candidacy — and framed the question with, “Don’t you think that was a good speech?” The answers, without exception, were essentially: “Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage. . . . The sure thing of Democrats winning big in the House and Senate is now in danger of a scenario in which a would-be...

Gaza erupted in celebration last week to the news that a Palestinian had murdered Jewish religious students in Jerusalem. And almost daily terrorists send rockets from Gaza into nearby Israeli cities, hoping to kill civilians and provoke Israeli counter-responses — and perhaps start another Middle East war. This is not the way some imagined Gaza two and half years after the Israelis withdrew both civilians and soldiers from the territory in September 2005. At the time, the Palestinian Authority controlled Gaza, but in early 2007, Hamas took over in a violent civil war, claiming legitimacy after once winning a popular...

Kosovo Was Then, This Is Now... [Victor Davis Hanson] Quite apart from the undeniable merits of independence, in political terms Kosovo 2008 is not quite Kosovo of 1998. Let us count the post-9/11 ways: 1. The rise of radical Islam, especially in Europe, has made Western publics edgy about Muslim-identified states, especially inside Europe. 2. Russia is no longer a basket case, but rearming, aggressive, overflowing with petro-dollars, and eager to use oil — and more — as a weapon. 3. Milosevic is long dead. 4. For six years there has been a steady anti-American drumbeat in Europe and caricatures...

Vikings Go On Rampage At Lodge Presumedly seeking revenge against the Mid-Atlantic Hockey League for calling it quits in the middle of the season, several players with the Jamestown Vikings trashed the historic Vikings Lodge on the corner of Washington and West Fourth Street early Thursday, leaving most of the building in shambles. Trash and debris were everywhere, especially on the second and third floors where the stench of beer and rotting food was almost overpowering. Bar stools were smashed through doors, and virtually every piece of glass in the building had been shattered, the broken shards unavoidable underfoot. ‘‘They...

Last week’s U.S. National Intelligence Estimate states, with “high confidence,� that Iran quit trying to get a nuclear bomb in late 2003. That’s exactly the opposite of what the NIE reported just two years ago, when it claimed Iran’s ruling mullahs were still developing nuclear weapons. The reaction here at home to the new NIE was a good deal clearer than the often mealy-mouthed wording of the report. By an overwhelming margin, according to a Rasmussen poll conducted after the new NIE report’s findings were made public, Americans don’t buy that Iran has quit trying to go nuclear. They may...

C-SPAN2 (Book TV) airing a Manhattan Institute immigration panel featuring conservative heavy hitters Heather MacDonald, Victor Davis Hanson, and Steven Malanga, coauthors of The Immigration Solution. Panel was taped on 10/29/07 and reairs on Sunday at 2 a.m. and at noon, ET. Program is one hour.

At first glance, it would seem a straightforward thing to stop a relatively weak but volatile Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb. It would also seem to be something a concerned world community would be actively working to do. After all, the Sunni Arab states surrounding Iran don’t want a Shiite nuclear power on their borders. Europe, which isn’t all that far from Tehran and lacks a missile-defense shield, certainly doesn’t want to be in range of Iran’s missiles. Israel can’t tolerate an Iranian theocracy both promising to wipe it off the map and then brazenly obtaining the means to...

Hanson cites Bible urination as reason to stop immigration Thursday Aug 16 10:00 AEST By Hal Crawford ninemsn http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=286783 A resurgent Pauline Hanson has called for an end to Muslim immigration to Australia in a fiery television appearance peppered with references to female genital mutilation, terrorism and urinating on Bibles. Ms Hanson, the 53-year-old former One Nation leader, appeared on Nine's TODAY to promote her new Pauline's United Australia Party.

Is “ho”—the rapper slang for the slur “whore”—a bad word? Always, sometimes, or just when an obnoxious white male like Don Imus says it? But not when the equally obnoxious Snoop Dogg serially employs it? Is the Iraq war, as we are often told, the “greatest mistake” in our nation’s history? Because Israel and the United States have a bomb, is it then O.K. for theocratic Iran to have one too? Americans increasingly cannot seem to answer questions like these adequately because they are blissfully uneducated. They have not acquired a broad knowledge of language, literature, philosophy, and history. Sometime...

We’re sorry to see the lively debate on Iraq between Max Boot and Victor Davis Hanson end today. You can follow the debate’s fascinating progress below: Boot I • Hanson I • Boot II • Hanson II • Boot III • Hanson III • Boot IV • Hanson IV Click on Source for links

WASHINGTON, D.C. (ELCA) -- As the U.S. Congress debates its response to the dispatch of additional troops to Iraq, the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), sent a message Jan. 26 to ordained and professional lay leaders of the ELCA, asking them to engage ELCA congregations in dialogue on the war and to continue to pray for peace. In his letter, "A Call to Conversation on Iraq," Hanson encouraged ELCA members to engage in the national debate on the nature and direction of the Iraq war with "intentionality, seriousness and vigor." "We...

Let me start black history month a few weeks early. Barack Obama has plans of running for President of the United States, But will he be the first Black President or the 8th Black President? I know this posting will stir controversty but George Washington was not the first President of the U.S. Let's take a look at history. A "Black" Man, A Moor, John Hanson Was the First President of the United States! 1781-1782 A.D.??? George Washington was really the 8th President of the United States! George Washington was not the first President of the United States. In fact,...

December 01, 2006, 0:00 a.m. War StoriesTwo versions of what we should do next. By Victor Davis Hanson Five years after September 11, and three-and-a-half years after toppling Saddam Hussein, the U.S. is almost as angry at itself as it is at the enemy. Two quite antithetical views of the war on terror — and indeed, the entire American role in the Middle East — are now crystallizing. Ideology and political affiliation are no longer necessarily touchstones to either opinion — not at a time when The Nation and The American Conservative share the same views on Iraq and...

ELCA NEWS SERVICE November 2, 2006 ELCA Presiding Bishop, LWF President Preaches in Historic 'Black Church' 06-165-JB [Click for larger image] ELCA Presiding Bishop and LWF President Mark Hanson greets pastors and parishioners at the Black Church in Transylvania following his Reformation Day sermon. BRASOV, Transylvania (ELCA) -- Preaching in a historic Lutheran church here on Reformation Day, Oct. 31, was a "great privilege" and "very moving" experience, said the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and president of the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), as he concluded an eight-day visit to Hungary...

I just arrived back to California after a wonderful five-week teaching stint at Hillsdale College in Michigan—to blue skies, raisins safely in the roll, the farm in good shape thanks to the renter and my son, and constant televised clips from Bill Clinton’s embarrassing, but staged rant. Why when leaving office did we hear little, if any, second guessing—much less criticism of their successors—from Gerry Ford, Ronald Reagan, or George Bush, Sr.—but lots of self-serving revisionism from Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton? Ford and the elder Bush, after all, were both defeated at the polls and might have voiced hurt...

But what does the newly released tape tell us? Was 9/11 a result of American support for Israel? Or the presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia, or the U.N. embargo of Iraq -- the grievances that bin Laden himself in 1998 cited as grounds for murdering Americans? Not according to two of the captioned "Martyrs of the Manhattan Raid," who spoke freely in this newly released tape. Saudi nationals Hamza al-Ghamdi (who helped crash Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center) and Wail al-Shehri (who joined Mohammed Atta on Flight 11 to topple the North...

Depressing Times Oriana Fallaci, RIP, the Pope, and a Sad Age Rarely has the death of a public intellectual affected me as much as the passing of Oriana Fallaci. I never met her, and only received a brief note once from her accompanying a copy of The Rage and the Pride. The story of her career is well known, but her death, at this pivotal time, was full of paradoxes and yet instruction as well. Radical Islam is, among other things, a patriarchal movement, embedded particularly in the cult of the Middle-Eastern male, who occupies a privileged position in a...

The Bush administration should stop repeating that it is fighting the war on terror for truth, justice and the American way. Instead, the president and his staff should be blunt and explain that, since September 11, 2001, it has had to choose between options that are bad or far worse. By all means, the administration should invite critics to suggest constructive alternatives to the way it has handled this war. But it should also point out that those who have honed in on flaws in current U.S. antiterror policies have so far been bereft of other workable ideas. Take the...

They’re just as bad as we are, only worse. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was designed to interrogate terrorists and jihadists swept up from the battlefield: the idea was to keep them as prisoners of war in a war that was undeclared, and as enemy combatants without uniforms or officers. It had a no-win mandate, and will probably close soon due to international outcries about its supposed barbarity. Yet, for all the fury about its existence, not a single detainee has died there in over four years of operation. In contrast, the European Milosevic just dropped dead while under custody...

It is easy to damn the 1930s appeasers of Hitler — such as Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in England and Edouard Daladier in France — given what the Nazis ultimately did when unleashed. But history demands not merely recognizing the truth post facto, but also trying to reconstruct the rationale of something that now in hindsight seems inexplicable. Appeasement in the 1930s was popular with the European public for a variety of reasons. All of them are instructive in our hesitation about stopping a nuclear Iran, or about defending the right of Western newspapers to print what they wish...

Did Joseph Wilson expose his own wife as a CIA employee months before columnist Robert Novak published that information? Fox News military analyst and retired Major General Paul E. Vallely is being threatened with a lawsuit for saying that the answer is yes, and that he was there when Wilson confirmed her CIA status. What's more, Vallely tells Accuracy in Media that he is prepared if necessary to go to court to prove it. He may have to. Wilson's attorney, Christopher Wolf, categorically rejects Vallely's claim. He tells AIM, "It never happened I can assure you that. Vallely is making...

On Sunday, October 2 at 10:45 pm A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Victor Davis Hanson Description: Author and military historian Victor Davis Hanson speaks about his new book, "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." It chronicles the 27-year battle fought around 400 B.C. between Athens and Sparta. Mr. Hanson draws some parallels between the Greek war and the wars of today, including the present war in Iraq. The book classifies the Peloponnesian War as one consisting of enormous battles (on land and at...

Historian Victor Davis Hanson says the Arab world must realize Islam and freedom can coexist. Scholar-author Victor Davis Hanson says the Arab world is learning the hard way that Islam and freedom need not be mutually exclusive. Since Sept. 11, 2001, Victor Davis Hanson has emerged from the relative obscurity of his academic post at Fresno State University to become something akin to America’s “historian in chief.” Spurred by a legion of eager editors, Hanson has translated his expertise in classical military history to the war on terror. The result: some 300 essays – and counting – and an army...