The media is calling the Barack Obama attack on the Catholic Church a “culture war.” Culture War. The words and graphics are everywhere. It was the ABC News headline one morning, “Candidate’s Culture War” is what the graphic said. As if this is some sort of battle between Obama and the Republican candidates. Yes, it is that, but it us much, much more.

This is also a fight much larger than “culture.” Culture is something that defines art and common belief. Culture is something that changes with the times and can actually be defined as you wish. Much of our culture today is not what it was 50, 100, or 200 years ago. What I think is culture, may not be what you think is culture. Yes, there is an “American culture, and I believe I know what it is, but I certainly don’t trust the media or this President (who would probably see me as a “bitter” American who “clings to guns and religion”) to tell me what it is.

The Constitution doesn’t work that way, certainly not the First Amendment which guarantees religious liberty and expression. I would like to think the Constitution would define our culture, but sadly that is not always the case. For the media to call this a “culture war” greatly diminishes its value, this is a battle over the First amendment of the US Constitution. Obama wants the Constitution circumvented to pander to his base, I would hope that most of us would be united with the Catholic Church in wanting it protected.

The new part of the ObamaCare law (that nobody read before they voted on it) says that churches that provide health care and insurance, must also provide contraceptives. The Catholic Church opposes contraception.

“The White House insists this achieves a balanced approach that respects women’s health care and religious liberty, but that’s not how the Republican candidates see it,” said Jake Tapper of ABC this morning. Jake, this does nothing to protect religious liberty. It tries to destroy it.

Thankfully, the presidential hopefuls joined in the fight.

“We must have a president who is willing to protect America’s First right, a right to worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience. This is a violation of conscience,” said Mitt Romney

Rick Santorum says Obama has been “hostile to people of faith particularly Christians and specifically Catholics.”

Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul have also been avid opponents to Dear Leaders actions on this. Not just because they want to be seen as opponents, they all believe what he is doing in inherently wrong.

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We’re having tea with the Mad Hatter.

If you look a little closer at the debate over the Obama administration’s betrayal of the Catholic Church, you’ll see that we’ve already lost.  Obama and his media allies have effectively shifted the argument away from the grounds upon which it should take place and on to grounds we never thought possible. Rather than debating the outrageous overreach of the government demanding insurance companies pay for birth control, we’re instead debating whether the Catholic Church should be required to do so. 

It’s all smoke and mirrors, isn’t it? We’re so busy arguing over the outrage of the White House forcing Catholic-run schools and social service outlets to provide birth control and the morning-after pills to their employees, that the very idea of forcing  private insurance companies to do the same, sounds perfectly reasonable. It’s a genius sleight-of-hand meant to have us look over there instead of over here.

Moreover, if you’ve watched the MSM coverage, you can see that the Constitution and Bill of Rights means nothing to our media overlords. Here we have the federal government violating the fundamental right upon which this country was founded — Freedom of Religion — and yet the media is taking seriously that a valid counter-argument is a woman’s non-existent right to free birth control.

Do you see the words “birth” or “control” anywhere in here:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

And yet, all day I’ve had to read and listen to the media take seriously access to free birth control as some sort of competing right.  

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UPDATE: The Carnahan Campaign has amended their filing to list the real address of Veritas Research. The St Louis Post Dispatch, acting on the information uncovered by 24thstate, today posted a story establishing the direct involvement of Arango and Dillon. Veritas Research LLC is the media company hired by the Carnahan campaign, and it was registered by Dillon on July 23 in Colorado (and updated to include Arango on Oct 1). At this point, the two journalists are in danger of having violated federal election law by creating and promoting a website with no disclosure that was paid for directly by the Carnahan campaign. The story told by Michael Corwin now has serious credibility problems, as does the reputation of Jeannine Dillon and Victor Arango.

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On October 19th, a website popped up alleging a cover-up in the Catholic priest sex scandal by Missouri congressional candidate Ed Martin. The site, TheRealEdMartin.com, did not get much attention until Ed Martin threw a press conference denouncing the site as a smear against him and all Catholics by his opponent, Russ Carnahan.

The site, and the supposed investigation behind the site, was created by Michael Corwin, a Democrat opposition researcher out of New Mexico, in tandem with Jeannine Dillon, a former Dateline producer who had teamed with Corwin to win a prestigious Edward R. Murrow award. Martin claimed that Corwin was a paid Carnahan operative. Corwin and the Carnahan campaign admitted he was paid $2000 to do opposition research, but Corwin claims he quit the campaign in June when they wouldn’t run the story. At that point, Corwin maintains he connected with Dillon to push the story over Carnahan’s objections.

There is quite a bit of controversy about the timing, payment and timeline of Corwin’s story, but lost in the shuffle is the attempt to use the Dateline brand to give credibility to an obvious smear campaign. Dillon put her credibility on the line for this story, but she isn’t the only former Dateline producer to do so. An investigation by 24thstate.com turned up evidence that a second former journalist, a veteran of Dateline, CBS, and NBC, an Emmy winner and Edward R. Murrow winner, conducted the online smear campaign, using anonymous names to push the story. (more…)

I don’t write about Maureen Dowd simply because she rarely offers anything worthy of serious, intellectual discussion. I don’t claim any sort of high intellect for myself, of course, and don’t necessarily claim to be able to thoroughly judge the work of the deepest of thinkers but Dowd’s work is like the old saying about pornography inasmuch as when it comes to stupid prattle. I know it when I see it.

Breaking my own no-Mo-Dowd rule, though, her April 10 column must be singled out as a prime example of just how silly, inconsequential, and, well, just plain dumb MoDo really is. In it she equated radical, oppressive, dangerous Islam to today’s Catholic Church, as if they were entirely equivalent in their treatment of women. It is astonishing that she thinks that radical Islam and the modern Catholic Church are indistinguishable in this respect, but there you have it, she apparently really does.

Dowd started her piece last week by relating a recent encounter she had in Saudi Arabia with a “group of educated and sophisticated young professional women.” Dowd asked her hosts how they could stand living in that oppressive Saudi culture and she wondered how such “spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?”

But as she asked that provocative question, it struck Dowd that she, too, lived in such a culture: (more…)

Here is one of the sneaky tricks that the Old Media plays in order to support a cause. In this case it’s the Associated Press coming to the aid of Obamacare with “news” that a “Catholic” hospital group is coming out in support of Obamacare. Of course, the AP does not inform the reader that this purported Catholic group is not associated with the Church and is not authorized to speak for Catholics but it conflates this “Catholic” group with Catholics as if they do anyway.

With a headline that screams, “Catholic Hospitals Support Health Care Bill,” the AP’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports that the Catholic Health Association has come out in support of Obamacare despite its hidden provisions for the federal funding of abortion.

Naturally this report of Catholics in support of Obamacare is meant to fool readers into thinking that the Catholic Church itself, or some important segment of Catholics, are in support of Obamacare. If all you read is the headline and the first two paragraphs you might come away thinking that “Catholic Hospitals” support Obamacare.

Later in the story, after the lede, Alonso-Zaldivar does delve into some of the controversy amongst Catholics concerning the federal funding for abortion in Obamacare and states that the Church itself is still not supporting Obama’s takeover of our healthcare — this is good — but he never does fully explain that the group he is discussing is not a real “Catholic” organization.

You see, the Catholic Health Association is a for-profit company that works for some Catholic hospitals as a sort of trade association. It isn’t part of the Church nor does it represent any official group of religious Catholics, nor does it serve as a source of Catholic teachings. (more…)

In researching my article on “Rubber Room” teachers, who are paid not to teach after being accused of a crime, I came across some information that deserves further discussion. The problem is much worse than the media would have you believe.

The teachers in these programs are the ones who managed to escape prosecution but are considered too great a risk to be allowed to return to teaching. Or else they’re the accused waiting for judgment. Or they’re people the schools can’t get rid of due to tenure deals.

In 2004, Hofstra University professor Dr. Carol Shakeshaft published a report for the United States Department of Education titled “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of Existing Literature.” It was presented to Congress as part of the No Child Left Behind Act. In it, Shakeshaft stated:

As a group, these studies present a wide range of estimates of the percentage of U.S. students subject to sexual misconduct by school staff and vary from 3.7 to 50.3 percent. Because of its carefully drawn sample and survey methodology, the AAUW report that nearly 9.6 percent of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career presents the most accurate data available at this time. (more…)

To “storyboard the news” is to replace straight news reporting with a pre-shaped comic-book narrative, an edited fable sustained by selective reporting.

Victims of media fraud suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will be excused for hearing the phrase as a riff on Guantanamo, that “storyboarding the news” occurs when the MSM submerges the facts underwater until the truth surrenders.

The truth about Honduras – such as why the so-called “coup” was not a coup at all – was left by the MSM on the cutting-room floor, edited out of the news reporting because it did not fit into the storyboard.

A storyboard is a sequence of pictures that tell a story, like a comic strip.  In Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, the storyboard is used as a production guide for building a narrative.  In the hands of the MSM, the narrative becomes a news fable in which what gets left out is just as important as what gets included, and the story is frequently written years before the events themselves unfold.

Hence, the 2009 Honduras news fable can be seen as a sequence of iconic images: (more…)