Obama & His Loyal Follwers

in the MSM:

In Ye Olden Days, CBS Reported News:

These days they work for Barack Milhous Obama in his Dirty Tricks Unit.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

TV as Prophecy

Although this is aimed at Obama's foreign policy, I've been thinking of H. Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. She reminds me very much of Hacker but without having learned as much as he did.



She still thinks she's entitled to the Presidency, though: "I'm a woman, I'm inevitable".

Obama's Foreign Policy Explained:

(Via Campaign Standard.)

Not News

To my jaundiced eye there is a never-ending drip, drip, drip confirming the blatant bias of the MSM. But once in a while I like to point it out:

:

The nice thing about having a Democrat in the White House is that there is never any bad news...

...for Democrats.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)

Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women?

This is an interesting overview of some of the gender issues in culture and politics:

Of all the political gambits that ought to be torn from the playbook once and for all, the idea that a national “war on women” is afoot has got to top the list. It’s an ideological whopper that demands more scrutiny than it has so far gotten — because underneath it are solid rocks of myth, especially myths about the sexual revolution and its real fallout. Let’s turn over a few of these to see what facts they hide.

(Via SoCon Or Bust.)

Speaking of Nuns

JImmy Akin has some interesting analysis of the apparent turnabout of the Catholic Health Association and Sister Keehan, their spokesnun. I'm intrigued by his concern that a too-detailed analysis of how the Administration can achieve it's immoral aims could be immoral itself (enabling). And the mention that late Friday news is ignored by the MMS, when convenient. Give it a read and see what you think.

A closer look at Sr. Carol Keehan's turnabout...:

The move is momentous because Keehan famously broke with the U.S. bishops to endorse the original passage of the administration's Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and then broke with them again to endorse the Department of Health and Human Services abortion drug and contraception mandate, providing political cover for the administration. Both acts were widely criticized, and it appeared to many that Sr. Keehan was a willing tool of the administration's "divide and conquer" strategy for dealing with the Catholic community--playing the role of an alternative Catholic authority that could be pitted against and thus neutralize the voice of he bishops.

Read the whole thing.

(Via New Advent.)

Speak the Truth

Here's an articulate discussion of the HHS mandate, contraception and gender in the light of the Catholic Faith by (gasp!) a Catholic laywoman:

The HHS Mandate gets Pwned:

Here’s how you fight it:

Don’t just call it an attack on religious liberty: make it clear that contraception is *morally wrong*, and don’t let people think it’s just ritually impure like eating pork.

And do it in the confidence that this is a winning issue for the Church and a losing issue for Obama. Don’t back down. Resist the Tyrant!

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Our Problem is

We have the attention spans of goldfish. If something is broadcast that confirms our beliefs or our suspicions we accept it without further thought. Actually investigating the basis for our beliefs and opinions risks disconfirmation, something we are ill-equipped to deal with.

The case in point is the Liberal/Moderate contempt for the Fox News network and it's viewers:

Are Fox News Viewers Misinformed?

This is a great example of:

Are Fox News Viewers Misinformed?

This is a great example of how the internet undermines the biased academic class.



Via Roger Ho.

(Via Lex Communis.)

Thought and Prejudice

In this instance I'm struck by the reflexive approval of most, if not all, things homosexual. When I started on a reasoned argument (rant) about why homosexual unions should not be elevated to equality with marriage, my daughters, bless them, were embarrassed and demanded we stop talking about the subject. It didn't help this was in a public place (a restaurant for Sunday Brunch).

Their aversion to disagreements with the homosexual agenda puzzles me. They have or are getting a University education. Shouldn't reasoned disagreement be the heart and soul of their intellectual life? Even if they strongly disagree with me, I'm wanting reasoned arguments and facts. They seem to recognize no value to these things independent of achieving the results they have chosen to endorse. Is this how far the intellectual rigour has fallen at Universities?

Ok, rant mode off. Here is an interesting article about how research itself is produced and disseminated in a doctrinaire fashion to promote the ideology of the day:

Who could possibly have predicted this?:

Research showing the risks of lesbian and gay parenting is ignored in the race to make a political case

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

More Evidence

that the MSM is heavily filtering the news to promote their world-view:

:

I did not know this stuff....

...which, apparently, is the point of the news media's practice of suppressing news reports about leftist violence:

While the media is all over the recent bombing attempt in Times Square, they quickly swept the 2008 bombing of the Times Square military recruiting station under the rug. The hometown New York Times relegated the terror attack to regional news, even

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lex Communis.)

Fraud

from the MSM?

Media Malpractice at March for Life

via Heart, Mind & Strength.

A Different Perspective

on the Copenhagen Climate Conference:

If the Marx Brothers Held a Climate Conference:

It would look like this

Read the whole thing.

(Via Campaign Standard.)

Less Babies

equals happiness? The dark underside of the environmentalist religion has started showing a little more prominently. Promoting the totalitarian regime in China as a leader in the CACC(GW) movement doesn't inspire confidence. These are the children of Mao and he had millions of deaths on his conscience when he died. The current leadership hasn't renounced a single one.

The One-Child policy continues, albeit slightly less draconian in places, and forced sterilizations and abortions still occur. This kind of madness is only now having deleterious effects that are being recognized by these leaders. This is not the kind of leadership anyone needs. Alas, the Financial Post hasn't caught up with the news. As Mark Shea says: "Just enough of me, too much of you". So the following isn't entirely unexpected:

Carbon Scheme: Offset Your Jet-Set Lifestyle by Eliminating African Babies:

Population control groups have been using the hype surrounding the Copenhagen climate change conference to promote their solution to hypothetical impending environmental catastrophes. Earlier this month, two pieces appearing in the same edition of the Guardian revisited a report by Britain's Optimum Population Trust (OPT) that suggests that people in wealthy first-world countries should "offset" the carbon cost of their jet-setting lifestyles by paying to prevent the births of poor children in the developing world.

Read the whole thing.

(Via LifeSiteNews.)

The Sky is Falling!

While I wrestle with the vexing issue of whether and how much the base climate change data has been manipulated there is still the uneasy feeling of salesmanship. When I took a Business Communication course many years ago, one technique they mentioned was "backing the hearse up to the door".

This is a sales technique that uses naked fear to sell some good or service to the prospective customer. Examples of it are on TV all the time. If they're not using sex to sell something, it's about our fears. And the sense that there is an overplayed emotionality to the sales pitch for CACC(GW) reminds me uncomfortably of this technique.

Mark Shea brings in some nice insights from GKC while expatiating on this theme:

PANIC!!!!!:

The pattern that emerges over the decade is that the preferred governing style of our Ruling Classes is to scare the daylights out of people with some sort of world-imperilling threat and then use the panic to stampede us toward this or that consolidation of massive power.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

A LIttle More Direct

than I would put it:

Jimmy Akin Shares My Skepticism About AGW:

in spades.

When they tell you "Shut up about Climaquiddick! We need to adopt a global one child policy right now!" you should be very skeptical about what the Stampeders in our Ruling Classes are up to.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Doubt and Belief

are two sides of the same coin: our attempts to achieve knowledge. In the CACC(GW) debate I'm still on the fence. And the recent brouhaha over the hacked emails (I prefer "the CRUtape letters" as a moniker) I'll let others parse their meaning and import before giving anything like a settled opinion.

It's the uneasy feeling that there are agendas behind some the alarmism. The movie clip that was part of the Copenhagen summit has a little girl screaming while holding on to the branch of dead tree and surrounded by raging waters. That creeps me out: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!".

And I'm reminded that this isn't the only alarmist nonsense that was used to advance radical change in recent history. Who can forget the "Population Bomb"?

Scientists Behaving Badly:

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s--as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil

Read the whole thing.

(Via Campaign Standard.)

ClimateGate: What You Need to Know

In case you didn't get the previous reference to "climategate":

ClimateGate: The Very Ugly Side of Climate Science - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com:

When we think about “scientists,” most of us probably envision people toiling away in the lab or the field, accumulating and analyzing data in order to test theories, leaving their personal biases at home, scrupulously considering any confounding data or theories and willfully distancing themselves from the political implications of their research.

Read the whole thing.

More LIght, Less Heat Please

The relatively abysmal state of Catholic education and literacy is making for a lot more heat and very little light when Church teaching on moral principles is concerned. For example, the phoney war Rep. Kennedy has been waging on the Catholic Church for his own political advantage has been illustrative of this problem. Bishop Tobin has been exceptional amongst his brother bishops in that he has not let the calculated ignorance of the scion of the Kennedy clan to go unremarked. He has been temperate and reasonable in his dealings with the CINO politiican. The resulting circus of condemnations from the ignoranti who were, no doubt, educated in the "Spirit of Vatican II" and little else, has been proof positive that the revolution in catechesis since the Second Vatican Council has been a spectacular failure. Could this be one of the most illiterate Catholic generations ever?

So here is a little light to dispel the darkness:

Abortion, Capital Punishment, and War — One of These Things is Not Like the Other:

Ed Stoddard of Reuters’ religion blog Faithworld carries a roundup of the skirmish between Congressman Patrick Kennedy, the son of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, has claimed that Rhode Island Bishop Thomas Tobin.

Read the whole thing.

(Via First Thoughts.)

Politics Must First Be Entertaining

or so Bill Buckley once said back in the sixties. I wasn't sure if he was being facetious. Now in my old age, I see the wisdom. Limited to choices that look like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, they can at least keep us entertained through the show-democracy that we have settle for.

On this basis, I quite enjoy the madness that arises whenever Sarah Palin is in the spotlight. And I'm not the only one to notice:

AP Goes Full Sullivan on Palin:

...devotes ***11*** freakin' reporters to pore over ghost-written piece of self-promotional fluffery.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Catholic and Enjoying It!.)

Obama

seems to define himself by his perceived enemies. He becomes President and starts identifying the Republican party with Rush Limbaugh. Now he's using his bully pulpit to try to isolate Fox News. Who's the last President to focus so much attention on his "enemies"?

Quote of the Day (So Far!):

It comes from today's classic Krauthammer column on the White House's war on Fox:

Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She's been attacked for extolling Mao's political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one's own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Campaign Standard.)

Manipulating People

is a skill Saul Alinsky perfected with his "community organizers". President Obama has perfected these skills and so have his students. It comes as a revelation to me that Father Mitch Pacwa was a student of Alinsky's while the President was still getting his early education in Indonesia:

Fr. Mitch Pacwa on the "Sol Alinsky style of community organizing":

This most recent newsletter from Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., received this morning, has some interesting historical information, some frank talk, and some strong opinions:

 I recently became upset when Newsweek's "Without A Doubt" feature published an article by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend entitled, "Why Barack Obama represents American Catholics better than the pope does." She commend President Obama's "pragmatic approach to divisive policy" and his "social justice agenda." Meanwhile, she claims that the positions of the pope, the bishops and the pro-life activists do not. In fact, Townsend asserts that the Chicago community organizer president could teach the pope a lot about a Catholic approach to politics and the ability to listen to other people's points of view with empathy. [snip]

 I recognize the community organizer approach that Townsend commends in this piece. I learned Sol Alinsky style of community organizing as a novice in Chicago when President Obama was a little boy living in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Insight Scoop | The Ignatius Press Blog.)