The guerilla camera crew got the goods on the body-parts sales people, the county charged the the crew! To no avail!

What was it all about?

It’s clear enough that Harris County’s prosecutors were running interference for Planned Parenthood. Perhaps the state of Texas should look into the conduct of these prosecutors, who took a regular investigative-journalism technique and attempted to criminalize it. This looks like a clear abuse of power — certainly more clear than the supposed felonies committed by CMP [Center
for Medical Progress].

Center for Med Progress being the investigators, who used hidden cameras to catch the Planned P people in the act, making deals with supposed buyers.

​She needs this guy in the worst way.​

Ed Driscoll today (the whole thing, as intro to him, among other things):

SOMETIMES, PERCEPTION IS REALITY: The New NY Times Public Editor Goes There: ‘Why Readers See The Times as Liberal.’

Well, our source was the New York Times, to quote from the legendary Soviet Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky. As Daniel Okrent, the Times’ first public editor (“ombudsman” is probably too sexist a word for the vaporous Gray Lady) noted in 2004, after the body blows of the Jayson Blair debacle and Howling Howell Raines’ weird obsession with the Augusta National Golf Club in the wake of 9/11, “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”

And as with the party its serves, its leftwing bias has only gotten worse in the years since.

NYT is Hillary’s most loyal warrior in the flight to The Left.

Put this in your churchgoing, pewsitting pipe and smoke it, from a reigning expert in how to love Jesus:

The decision to make versus populum [facing the people] celebration [of the mass] a possibility rested on a profound theological insight, one which is profoundly traditional. The Eucharist is the action of the church—head and members. This sacred action is a sacrifice (self-offering along with Christ) that takes the form of meal, in which the body and blood of the Lord are given and shared.

(This latter point invites more emphasis than I can expand on here. Suffice it to say that current attitudes toward receiving Communion in a consumerist culture often obscure the fact that Communion is something we share with one another as the body of Christ).

Oh that consumerist culture. Puts food on the table more than any other we have allowed to happen, but it’s still a favorite whipping-boy of churchly (churchy) idealism (idealists).

It was perfectly clear to St. Paul (I Cor 10-11) and St. Augustine (Sermon 227, 272) that we receive the body of Christ in order to become the body of Christ. Hence the importance of the council’s clarion call for full, conscious and active participation in the liturgy.

“Become the body of Christ,” eh? Toss that off in a Sunday sermon and watch heads nod, eyes glaze over.

Last, as the church historian Massimo Faggioli has frequently and astutely argued, liturgical reform is an interpretive key to the whole of the council. A reversion to the pre-conciliar position of the priest at Mass [not facing the people] would be a profound signal that the forward steps the church took in Vatican II are in question.

I suspect that a good number of people who make the ad orientem argument [for the
priest looking at the people while saying mass] are in favor of just such a reversal.

Hey. Not me, brother, no sir. Not in a month full of Tuesdays. No sir.

If stuff like that isn’t perfect for silencing lay opposition, what is?

Rev. James Martin, SJ, puffs this fellow on Twitter as “a liturgical scholar.” I’m sure he is that.

. . . in this case-by-case rundown of the Obama record.

Town hall meeting at the Oak Park library, July 17, 2013 — from Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters — vigorous nodding, oratorical jujitsu:

The evening wore on. An aide brought Harmon two frosted water bottles. Rep. Camille Lilly swigged an orange drink.

An audience member praised an activist who said the state should amortize its pension debt, asked why not.

“I had the opportunity to present that,” said Lilly, recounting her experience in Springfield, as she did frequently in these town halls. She spoke dramatically, as she did frequently, and as Sen. Don Harmon explained what was wrong with this proposal, nodded vigorous assent, as she also did frequently.

Someone mentioned Mike Madigan, speaker of the house and the state’s most powerful official, as part of the Illinois problem. Lilly mused. It was “interesting” how legislation comes forth in the house, she said, as if to be ironic, drawing laughter. She paused, then added that she had “gone and asked the speaker” to bring a bill forth (pause), “and it was brought up.”

It was a sort of oratorical jujitsu, checking laughter, presenting Madigan as not so bad after all. She was all smiles, kept hand gestures going throughout, sure of herself, as if toying with her listeners, perhaps unaware of what she was doing, in view of her often unfocused speechifying.

Illinois Blues is available in paperback, epub and Amazon Kindle formats.

Case in point:

The liberal media’s determination to elect Hillary Clinton to the White House has become blatantly transparent in their coverage of the Republican National Convention here.

Anyone who ever doubted that major network news operations are staffed with partisan Democrats needed only have observed the way allegedly “objective” reporters inflated Melania Trump’s opening-night speech into a phony scandal that absorbed hour after hour of coverage.

The immediate reaction to Mrs. Trump’s speech was positive, but then someone pointed out uncanny similarities between three sentences in her speech and Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention. The media went into hysterics: “Plagiarism! Scandal!”

They had their opening, they took it.

Glenn Reynolds sums up the mass-media problem:

Think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines (and no consciences) and you won’t be far wrong.

And press credentials.

In this “conversation,” as CNN’s Don Lemon refers to it several times, L. is to ask questions, Sheriff Clarke is to answer them. Not with a question either — even if that is one way to advance a discussion, or argument, and this is an argument.

Do not answer L’s question with a question, especially one that leaves L stuck for an answer. Nothing to stop L with putting another question if he were up to it and the producer allowed it.

Sheriff C. got repetitive, yes, but only after L insisted on the q&a, interview format, where it’s C’s role to respond. Which is no way to have a conversation.

Rare is the interviewer that wants or can handle an interviewee who acts like an independent agent. (O’Reilly is no paragon in this respect.) Which is why so much TV interviewing is useless and boring.

The main bullshit here is the “conversation” gambit, which underpins Lemon’s (and most interviewers’) performance.

The Aleppo scene, now. Obama’s Samantha blaming Bush once upon a time.