Free Republic

It is now fashionable to demonize Russia, but most Americans have forgotten key aspects of 20th-century history, including the Russians’ fight to stop the march of Nazi Germany. Seventy-five years ago this month, the Soviet Red Army surrounded — and would soon destroy — a huge invading German army at Stalingrad on the Volga River. Nearly 300,000 of Germany’s best soldiers would never return home. The epic 1942–43 battle for the city saw the complete annihilation of the attacking German 6th Army. It marked the turning point of World War II.

Seasoned Republican political handlers serially attack Donald Trump and his campaign as amateurish, incompetent, and incoherent. The media somehow outdid their propaganda work for Barack Obama and have signed on as unapologetic auxiliaries to the Hillary Clinton campaign — and openly brag that, in Trump’s case, the duty of a journalist is to be biased. We have devolved to the point that a Harvard Law professor teases about unethically releasing his old confidential notes of his lawyer/client relationship with Trump. Trump’s political obituary over the last 14 months has been rewritten about every three weeks. During the primaries, each time...

Victor Davis Hanson, whose family has lived in California for generations, has written a new book. Jarrett Stepman of Breitbart reviewed The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction, where Hanson paints a stark picture of California’s decline from a state that exemplified the American dream to one crushed under the weight of its utopian vision. …Clearly modeled on famous British historian Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hanson’s book makes it clear that the increasingly dystopian California has been the author of its own decline. A half-century of bad policy and failed ideology...

ATLANTA — Channel 2 Action news has learned former Altanta Braves pitcher Tommy Hanson, 29, has died. Multiple sources told Channel 2 Sports Director Zach Klein earlier in the day Monday that Hanson was in a coma after being moved to Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital late Monday morning due to catastrophic organ failure. Hanson was moved to Piedmont so doctors could run a variety of tests to determine why his organs failed. The source said Hanson's problems started early Sunday morning and Hanson was then rushed to a nearby hospital after he started having trouble breathing.

A large war is looming absent preventive American vigilance The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous — in a way we’ve seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon — and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising....

At some critical point, everyone makes choices based on incentives and his own perception of self-interest. Somehow the Obama administration has forgotten that natural law. A therapeutic sense of self-sacrifice is fine in the abstract, but in the concrete such magnanimity causes far more harm to the innocent than does a realistic appraisal of self-interest and a tragic acceptance of the flawed nature of man. The theme of the present administration is that it possesses the wisdom and resources to know better what people should do than they do themselves. From that premise arose most of catastrophes that have befallen...

<p>We are currently learning whether the United States really needs a president. Barack Obama has become a mere figurehead, who gives speeches few listen to any more, issues threats that scare fewer, and makes promises that almost no one believes he will keep. Yet America continues on, despite the fact that the foreign and domestic policies of Barack Obama are unraveling, in a manner unusual even for star-crossed presidential second terms.</p>

At the end of John Ford’s classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the editor of the local paper decides not to print the truth about who really killed the murderous Valance. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Legends now become facts in America at almost lightning speed. Often when lies are asserted as truth, they become frozen in time. Even the most damning later exposure of their falsity never quite erases their currency. As Jonathan Swift sighed, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”

My notes from the press conference: Bishop Hanson was first introduced, but it was announced he would not be taking questions: Hanson: Great honor to sit with bp elect Eaton. “Always being made new” theme of this assembly, and this call process was a call process for new leadership. In 25 years we’ve never looked back, always looked ahead. “A young church is a very mature church”—we have confidence we can engage in decisions that will not lead to divisions. It is wonderful to pass on mantle of leadership with confidence. We have a staff that will receive her as...

I’m sure you’ll understand: I have a little internet (ahem) “housekeeping” I must attend to today. So while I’m busy scrubbing, wiping and cleaning up my inner-tubes, I have a reading assignment for you - Victor Davis Hanson’s latest dissertation: Obama Being Obama. It’s sort of like Being Biden; only funnier. Professor Hanson makes the case that we shouldn’t be upset over the recent Scandalanche® surrounding his presidency, as it was we, not he, who changed the rules. Once Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature, his career as a statesman was mostly an afterthought — either voting “present”...

DUNLAP, Calif. (AP) — The investigation into a lion attack that killed a 24-year-old woman who loved big cats is focusing on a cage door that the 550-pound animal managed to escape through to reach the volunteer intern, officials say. Authorities said Thursday they believe the 5-year-old male lion broke the neck of the woman at a Central California animal park after it got out of its feeding cage and attacked as she cleaned its bigger area. The investigation is continuing into how the powerful beast and Dianna Hanson came tragically to be in the same place at the same...

In the old west Snake oil salesman peddled elixirs that allegedly cured everything from acne to gout, but in fact these “miracle cures” were simply watered down whiskey or worse. Con men used elaborate ruses, such as the scheme used in the movie, The Sting, to swindle their marks and steal their money. There are many e-mail and internet scams that attempt to wrest money and information from those who are greedy or simply unsuspecting and naïve. There are many ways to deceive, mislead, dupe and betray in order to pilfer another’s assets. But, some of those assets are far...

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and so on) wins reelection, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years — mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency, and Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their reelection wins. They believe that they are invincible and that their public approval is permanent rather than fickle. The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the...

ELCA presiding bishop shares a post-election message 12-69-MRC CHICAGO (ELCA) - With the 2012 elections coming to a close in the United States, the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), offers a post-election pastoral message on video at http://bit.ly/WwGcVT. “Whether you are rejoicing or lamenting the outcome of the elections, or maybe you are just relieved that campaigning is over, we need to ask, 'now what?'” said Hanson. Hanson has served as ELCA presiding bishop since 2001. He was elected to a second six-year term in 2007. From 2003 to 2010, he...

ELCA presiding bishop says church is 'always being made new' 12-66-MRC CHICAGO (ELCA) -- As the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2013 under the theme "Always being made new," ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson said the theme embodies far more than the anniversary in his report to the ELCA Conference of Bishops, which met here Oct. 4-9. The ELCA Conference of Bishops is an advisory body of this church that includes 65 synod bishops, the presiding bishop and secretary. The Rev. Jessica R. Crist, bishop of the ELCA Montana Synod, chairs...

It comes as a surprise to many when anti-Semitism is propagated by people and denominations operating under the banner of Christianity. The latest incident comes from a letter sent to the United States Congress by the head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Mark S. Hanson, and his liberal church cohorts telling the Congress to investigate Israel and consider halting military aid to them. That letter was broadcast far and wide by the ELCA News Service, with the subtitle “ELCA, other churches call for investigation of military aid to Israel.” So make no mistake, this is a call...

By Fantasy House I do not mean — or rather only mean — Barack Obama’s La-La land in which Austrians speak Austrian, Hawaii is in Asia, Afghans speak Arabic, the Maldives lie off Argentina, there are seven additional states, servicemen are zombie corpse-men, and Kansas twisters kill 10,000 at a time. Rather I refer to the fantasies that Obama employs to deal with a very real world he inhabits. The president just told Univision that you “cannot change Washington from the inside.” In other words, the president just shattered his own four-year fantasy that he, like Lincoln, would take the...

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America officially allows homosexual marriages, so says the “number two man” in the denomination, David Swartling. At the 2012 Southwestern Washington Synod Assembly it has been reported that, “(I)n response to a query from the floor of the assembly, Secretary of the ELCA David Swartling, at the assembly as the representative of the national church, said that the marriage of same-gender couples in states where that was legal was neither endorsed nor precluded by ELCA policy. Marriage in those circumstances was at the discretion of pastors and congregations.” (read here) One of the duties of...

I promised that I would review Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson’s Reconciling Works Keynote Address that he gave on July 7. The text was made available by the Bishop’s Office to Pastor Daniel Ostercamp of Webster, SD, who made it available to me. You can read it for yourself here. I will leave to others the critical analysis of Hanson’s remarkably rosy picture of the ELCA. I will also ignore the several self-justifications of his own partisan (or insufficiently partisan!) leadership that pepper the address. The theological question I posed in my previous post was whether the bishop would nurture God’s...

Some years ago the Luther scholar Scott Hendrix published Luther and the Papacy: Stages in a Reformation Conflict, an important study which demonstrated how Luther’s quarrel was never with the catholic faith as such but with “the papists,” modern innovators who had betrayed that faith universally held. Nevertheless, Luther respected the papacy as a pastoral office, according to Hendrix. Indeed, the primary source of his anger was the betrayal of the pope’s universal pastoral duty by Leo X and his successors. Hendrix showed that Luther’s underlying and consistent criterion in judging the papacy is that by divine right the papacy...