Obama Czar: John Holdren

Obama's science Czar, John Holdren

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The ghoulish spirit of Margaret Sanger lives

Looks like Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t the only one who’s been channeling abortion champion/eugenicist Margaret Sanger.

Internet sleuth Zombie has a new report on John Holdren, President Obama’s science czar:

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A “Planetary Regime” with the power of life and death over American citizens.

The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both?

These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — informally known as the United States’ Science Czar. In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;

• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;

• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;

• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.

• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.

Impossible, you say? That must be an exaggeration or a hoax. No one in their right mind would say such things.

Well, I hate to break the news to you, but it is no hoax, no exaggeration. John Holdren really did say those things, and this report contains the proof. Below you will find photographs, scans, and transcriptions of pages in the book Ecoscience, co-authored in 1977 by John Holdren and his close colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. The scans and photos are provided to supply conclusive evidence that the words attributed to Holdren are unaltered and accurately transcribed.

Zombie’s got all the goods. Read the whole thing.
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/

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Remember, kids: Being a progressive means never having to say you’re sorry for advocating the racist, mass abortion of the “undesirables.” Refresher course

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"Holden's proposed cures to warming are, well, interesting. In that Harvard speech last November, he presented a "top 10" list of options. No. 1 was "limiting population," as if man was a plague upon the Earth, a major tenet of green dogma.

Never mind that with more bodies come more minds and more ideas for cleaner and more efficient technology. He does not say how we would do that. Adopt China's one-child policy perhaps?

Second on his list was reducing per capita GDP. Holden's long term goal is "equal per-capita emissions rights," meaning that a country may only emit an amount of carbon commensurate to the number of its persons, not on the basis of its production.

For example, the U.S. would be allowed to release only about 20 times as much carbon as Ecuador, although the U.S. produces 144 times the goods and services.

Interestingly, he puts nuclear power at No. 7, calling it a risky waste-producing option that includes the danger of proliferation. Never mind that here and around the world nuclear power has reduced the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by billions of tons. France gets 80% of its electricity from the atom, recycles its waste, and no one in the City of Lights glows in the dark.

And after the U.S. economy tanks, he says America and the rest of the developed world must pay "the up-front costs, offering assistance to developing countries," as they move to the new, green economy. This would be a global redistribution of wealth, but we have to spread the green around."

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Johnson outlined the book’s ugly eugenics plan and neo-Malthusian vision of enviro-crats engineering the population. Yet, there was scant mention of Holdern’s stomach-churning proposals during his confirmation hearings in February. Holdren’s defenders might have comforted themselves by claiming that the quotes were taken out of context. But last week, another online investigative journalist scanned copious pages from the book to show that his words had been unedited and accurately transcribed. The disturbing documents can be found at http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/.

There, you’ll find Holdren musing about how to infect the nation’s water supply to make women infertile for the benefit of Mother Earth:

"Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control…No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock."

Holdren’s planetary regime would also breed out undesirables “who contribute to social deterioration” and “insist that all illegitimate babies be put up for adoption—especially those born to minors, who generally are not capable of caring properly for a child alone.”

Single mothers who wanted to keep their children would be “obliged to go through adoption proceedings and demonstrate her ability to support and care for it.”

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The Ehrlichs also issued this challenge through the White House: “(A]nybody who actually wants to know what we and/or Professor Holdren believe and recommend about these matters would presumably read some of the dozens of publications that we and he separately have produced in more recent times.”

Well, I have indeed read one of Holdren’s recent works that reveals his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full powerpoint presentation (you can download the whole thing here.)

Take a gander at the opening slide that set the tone for his entire speech. Holdren admitted that his “preoccupation” with apocalyptic matters such as “the rates at which people breed” is a lifelong obsession inspired by scientist Harrison Brown: [see photo at link]

Who is Harrison Brown? And what’s in “The Challenge of Man’s Future?” Holdren’s hero was a “distinguished member” of the International Eugenics Society. And, lo and behold, Harrison Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience.

Surprise:

Harrison Brown, writing to us from the year 1954 in his book, “The Challenge of Man’s Future,” suggests a method that would strike us as a crass violation of the rights mentioned above:

Let us suppose that in a given year the birth rate exceeds the death rate by a certain amount, thus resulting in a population increase. During the following year the number of permitted inseminations is decreased, and the number of permitted abortions is increased, in such a way that the birth rate is lowered by the requisite amount. If the death rate exceeds the birth rate, the number of permitted inseminations would be increased while the number of abortions would be decreased. The number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.

But that wouldn’t be all. If we are to maintain a worldwide sustainable industrial society, we will need to control population across current borders. If we don’t, many members of overpopulated societies will soon be knocking at our doors asking for assistance or even entry.

Brown also suggests that such control over reproduction might be used to slow down the deterioration of the human species. This has occurred in industrial society because humans are no longer subject to natural selection to the same degree that they have been in the past. Those who are healthy and able might be encouraged through incentives to have several offspring, while those who have deficiencies, say, of sight or hearing or mental ability might be discouraged. The problem, he notes, is in deciding what really constitutes “fit” or “unfit” and overcoming our revulsion to such a eugenics scheme. Still, he adds, when one considers the bald evolutionary facts, it behooves human societies, if they want to remain resilient in the face of changing conditions on Earth, to somehow replace nature’s cruel hand in pruning the so-called “unfit” with something less drastic. It’s that or face eventual extinction.

Brown acknowledges that none of this will seem acceptable to the vast majority of his readers. But, he is concerned that unless population stability and other problems are addressed head on, arrangements that are far more restrictive and objectionable than the ones he proposes may be implemented in their place.

Harrison Brown’s book — the book that inspired Obama science czar John Holdren — also infamously likened the world’s growing population to “a pulsating mass of maggots.” Don’t just believe me. Believe your own eyes: [see photo at link]

A Time magazine profile of Brown published when his book came out in 1954 reported: “Scientist Brown is not confident that anything can be done, but he insists that population control is the first and essential measure; only by cutting their birth rates drastically can the crowded agricultural countries hope to enjoy the benefits of industrialization.”

If, as the White House claims, Holdren no longer believes that “that determining optimal population is a proper role of government,” then why does he still pay homage to one of the country’s most renowned population control advocates and plug his half-century-old tome advocating better-living-through-engineered-abortions? Don’t just take my word. Believe your own eyes: [see photo at link]

Maybe Holdren will adopt the Sotomayor strategy and chalk this all up to a “rhetorical flourish” that “fell flat.”

And yes, this is just one more reason to feel very, very nervous about the specter of Obamacare.

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*** In the 70s, Obama's Science Adviser Endorsed Giving Trees Legal Standing to Sue in Court

*** Christopher Neefus writes about Holdren’s views on “de-development” in the 1973 book, “Human Ecology:”

*** Barack Obama adviser wants uranium enrichment under international control

*** "There really are two kinds of people: those who see human beings as "maggots," "imbeciles," and "monsters" and those who see human life as precious and sacred. There's no common ground here. And these are the people we're going to put in charge of life and death health care decisions?"

*** Obama science czar: Redistributionism as the cure for American exceptionalism

*** Obama Science Czar: baby only a potential human

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When Barack Obama nominated John P. Holdren as his Science Adviser last December 20, the president-elect stated "promoting science isn’t just about providing resources" but "ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology." In nominating John Holdren, his words could scarcely have taken a more Orwellian ring.

Some critics have noted Holdren's penchant for making apocalyptic predictions that never come to pass, and categorizing all criticism of his alarmist views as not only wrong but dangerous. What none has yet noted is that Holdren is a globalist who has endorsed "surrender of sovereignty" to "a comprehensive Planetary Regime" that would control all the world's resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the "de-development" of the West, control a World Army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits. He has castigated the United States as "the meanest of wealthy countries," written a justification of compulsory abortion for American women, advocated drastically lowering the U.S. standard of living, and left the door open to trying global warming "deniers" for crimes against humanity. Such is Barack Obama's idea of a clear-headed adviser on matters of scientific policy.

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Lots more here:

Must Read!

http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/

Obama's Biggest Radical

Obama's (former) Czar: Van Jones

Obama's former "Green Jobs" Czar, Van Jones

Thanks to Trevor Loudon, Glenn Beck, WND's Aaron Klein, and Gatewaypundit for bringing us the resignation of Van Jones!!

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Born in 1968 in rural West Tennessee, Van Jones (whose birth name was Anthony Jones) attended the University of Tennessee at Martin. As an undergraduate aspiring to a career in journalism, he founded an underground campus newspaper as well as a statewide African American newspaper. After earning his BA degree, Jones abandoned his plan to become a journalist and instead enrolled at Yale Law School, where, as an angry black separatist, he first arrived wearing combat boots and carrying a Black Panther bookbag. "If I'd been in another country, I probably would have joined some underground guerrilla sect," he reflects. "But as it was, I went on to an Ivy League law school.... I wasn't ready for Yale, and they weren't ready for me."

Failing to develop a passion for legal studies, Jones contemplated dropping out of Yale. Realizing, however, that a law degree would furnish him with perceived credibility as a critic of the criminal-justice system -- which he believed was thoroughly infested with racism -- he persevered and earned his Juris Doctorate.

During his years at Yale, Jones served as an intern with the San Francisco-based Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), which views the United States as an irredeemably racist nation and "champions the legal rights of people of color, poor people, immigrants and refugees, with a special commitment to African-Americans."

Jones says he became politically radicalized in the aftermath of the deadly April 1992 Los Angeles riots which erupted shortly after four L.A. police officers who had beaten the now-infamous Rodney King were exonerated in court. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th," says Jones, "and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist."

In early May 1992, after the L.A. riots had ended, Jones was dispatched by LCCR Executive Director Eva Patterson to serve as a legal monitor at a nonviolent protest (against the Rodney King verdicts) in San Francisco. Local police, fearful that the event would devolve into violence, stopped the proceedings and arrested many of the participants, including all the legal monitors. Jones spent a short time in jail, and all charges against him were subsequently dropped.

Recalling his brief incarceration, Jones says: "I met all these young radical people of color. I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary."

After leaving Yale in 1993, Jones relocated to San Francisco, where he helped establish Bay Area Police Watch, a hotline and lawyer-referral service that began as a project of LCCR and specialized in demonizing local police. In 1996 he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which, claiming that the American criminal-justice system was infested with racism, sought to promote alternatives to incarceration. According to the Baker Center:

"Decades of disinvestment in our cities have led to despair and hopelessness. For poor communities and communities of color it's even worse, as excessive, racist policing and over-incarceration have left people even further behind."

Between 1999 and 2009, the Baker Center received more than $1 million from George Soros's Open Society Institute.

By the late 1990s, Jones was a committed Marxist-Leninist-Maoist who viewed police officers as the arch-enemies of black people, and who loathed capitalism for allegedly exploiting nonwhite minorities worldwide. He became a leading member of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a Bay-Area Marxist-Maoist collective that was staffed by members of various local nonprofits, a number of whom had ties to the Ella Baker Center. STORM would grow in influence until 2002, when it disbanded due to internal squabbles.

Jones helped organize an October 1999 rally in Oakland, California, calling for a retrial on behalf of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal. Around 2002, Jones, who had experience as a record producer, produced (for the Ella Baker Center) an album that starred Abu Jamal. Among the lyrics on this album were the following:

"The American way manufactured by white folk in office, by these rich men here to mock us. The United States; a piece of stolen land led by right-wing, war-hungry, oil thirsty ... And when it's all said and done, still can't [garbled] the wrong place cause they got people of color playing servant to do that sh** for them; mother f***ers ready to wipe out soft targets on territories harboring terrorists? Tragedy. The true terrorists are made in the U.S."

In 2000 Jones campaigned aggressively against California Proposition 21, a ballot initiative that established harsher penalties for a variety of violent crimes and called for more juvenile offenders to be tried as adults. Jones' efforts incorporated a hip-hop soundtrack that aimed to attract young black men clad in such gang-style garb as puffy jackets and baggy pants, who would call attention to the alleged injustices of the so-called "prison-industrial complex." But infighting and jealousies between various factions of Jones' movement caused it ultimately to fall apart. "I saw our little movement destroyed over a lot of sh**-talking and bullsh**," said Jones.

After the demise of his anti-Prop 21 movement, Jones decided to change his political tactics. Specifically, he toned down the overt hostility and defiant rage that he previously had worn as badges of honor. "Before, we would fight anybody, any time," he said in 2005. "No concession was good enough; we never said 'Thank you.' Now, I put the issues and constituencies first. I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward.... I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."'

Added Jones: "I realized that there are a lot of people who are capitalists -- shudder, shudder -- who are really committed to fairly significant change in the economy, and were having bigger impacts than me and a lot of my friends with our protest signs."

Jones' new approach was modeled on the tactics outlined by the famed radical organizer Saul Alinsky, who stressed the need for revolutionaries to mask the extremism of their objectives and to present themselves as moderates until they could gain some control over the machinery of political power. In a 2005 interview, Jones stated that he still considered himself a revolutionary, but a more effective one thanks to his revised tactics.

Just hours after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Jones stood in the streets of Oakland, California with his fellow STORM members to denounce the United States for having brought the disaster on itself. In October 2004 he joined a host of notable leftists in signing the 9/11 Truth Statement (signature #46), which called for a federal investigation into whether President Bush had been privy to advance knowledge of - or perhaps had colluded in - the destruction of the World Trade Center.

In the early 2000s, Jones and STORM were active in the anti-Iraq War demonstrations organized by International ANSWER, a front group for the Marxist-Leninist Workers World Party. STORM also had ties to the South African Communist Party and it revered Amilcar Cabral, the late Marxist revolutionary leader (of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands) who lauded Lenin as "the greatest champion of the national liberation of the peoples." (In 2006 Van Jones would name his own newborn son "Cabral" -- in Amilcar Cabral's honor.)

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Take it from Obama’s own political godmother Michelle and Barack’s consigliere and Chicago powerbroker Valerie Jarrett took full credit at the nuttroots dKos blogger conference last month (August 15, 2009) for recruiting him and closely following his career:

JARRETT:. You guys know Van Jones? [Applause. Moderator injects: "This is his house apparently."]

JARRETT: Oooh. Van Jones, alright! So, Van Jones. We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he’s not that old, for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that. And we have all that energy in the White House."

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Van Jones Joins the Global Struggle Against America

"Who's the real terrorists? Uncle Sam." That according to a record put out by Freedom Fighter Music, a label created by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which Van Jones founded. There are a number of different voices on the record, including that of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal and Van Jones himself. One of the voices accuses the United States government of "Fighting terror with terror, bombing babies in the night." And then Van Jones appears for his cameo (at the 3:50 mark). Jones rants against the "Israeli occupation," calls for the right of return of the Palestinian people and then puts himself squarely on the side of America's enemies: "This is now a global struggle against a U.S.-led security apparatus and military agenda that impacts people here, it impacts people around the world, and I think that we need to see our problems as linked."

Is Van Jones part of a "global struggle against a U.S.-led security apparatus"? Maybe, or maybe like the 9/11 Truth petition he signed, he simply didn't read the lyrics too closely before he read them into the microphone, produced, and then distributed the record below. It must be a great comfort to the uniformed personnel serving in the White House that they are serving alongside a man who, before he arrived in the White House six months ago, was accusing them of murdering babies, calling them terrorists, and fancied himself part of the global struggle against them and their comrades.

Listen to the whole thing (via the indispensable Gateway Pundit):

youtube video

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To this author’s knowledge, it has not yet been reported that Van Jones also popularized the belief that Hurricane Katrina was a conspiracy. The organization Color of Change, which he co-founded after Katrina, waged a campaign to censure President George W. Bush, claiming: “He knew about the levees, and he knew about the Superdome. But he did nothing.”(Emphasis in original.) In 2006, Color of Change worked with MoveOn.org Civic Action to screen Spike Lee’s film When the Levees Broke, which features allegations the federal government dynamited the levees. As one report puts it, “Lee took no side on the issue” – originally popularized by Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan – but Lee made it clear in other media that he believes in the theory.

The conspiracy would be consistent with Jones’ statement last January, that “white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities, because they don't have a racial justice frame.”

In a 2005 blog on the Huffington Post, Jones wrote the hurricane had been exacerbated by Bush’s environmental policies and “deep contempt for poor African-Americans.”

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Jones has not repudiated his Hate America views, has shown no remorse, nor even registered comprehension that the agenda Maoists and other revolutionaries advanced was insidious. As recently as two years ago, he hoped his own youthful rage would inspire other “racial justice activists.” In response to Hurricane Katrina, he posted an essay he wrote following the Rodney King riots in the hope “that somehow the observations from my own generation's struggles – 15 years ago – will be of some aid and comfort to the newer generation of racial justice activists who are now mounting history's stage.”

On the contrary, Jones has made clear he is switching tactics, not goals. “I’m willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends,” he said.

Further, Jones has made clear he intends to use his position in a Fabian manner, to incrementally socialize the U.S. economy:

Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether. But, that's a process and I think that's what's great about the movement that is beginning to emerge is that the crisis is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both pragmatic and visionary. So the green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.

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At the time of his appointment as the President’s “Green Jobs” czar – and despite a very recent 10-year history of “revolutionary” activity – Jones was a member of two key organizations at the very heart of what might be called the executive branch of the Democratic Party. The first is the Center for American Progress which was funded by Soros and is headed by Podesta. The second is the Apollo Alliance, on whose board Jones sits with Podesta, Carol Browner and Al Gore. This is a coalition of radicals, leftwing union leaders and corporate recruits, which had a major role in designing Obama’s green economy plans, including the “cash for clunkers” program. The New York director of the Alliance, who will be writing its applications for tens of millions of dollars in “stimulus” funds, is Jeff Jones (no relation) who was a co-leader of the terrorist Weather Underground along with Obama’s close friend and political ally William Ayers.

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At a February 11, 2009 speaking engagement, Jones was asked by an audience member to theorize as to why the Bush administration had been so effective at passing legislation even though Republicans (under Bush) had not held anything even remotely resembling the types of majorities that Democrats eventually (in 2006 and 2008) would establish in both Houses of Congress. "How were the Republicans able to push things through when they had less than 60 senators," asked the questioner, "but [now] somehow [President Obama] can't?" To loud applause, Jones replied:

"Well, the answer to that is, they're a##holes. That's a technical political [inaudible] term. And [President] Barack Obama's not an a##hole. Um, now, I will say this: I can be an a##hole. And some of us who are not Barack Hussein Obama are going to have to start getting a little bit uppity."

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*** Perfect: Van Jones also a Mumia supporter; Update: Michelle and Beck discuss Mumia connection

*** A Truther Czar?... Obama's Green Czar Van Jones Believes Bush Government was Behind 9-11

*** Busted. Van Jones Linked to 9-11 Truther Movement Back in **January 2002**

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some fun Van Jones quotes:

"I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."
***
"I met all these young radical people of color – I mean really radical: communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.' I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary,"
***
"This movement is deeper than a solar panel. Deeper than a solar panel. Don't stop there. Don't stop there. No, we're going to change the whole system. We're going to change the whole thing. We're not going to put a new battery in a broken system. We want a new system. We want a new system."
***
"The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities because they don't have a racial justice framework."
***
"I'll work with anybody, I'll fight anybody if it will push our issues forward," he told the left-leaning East Bay Express in a 2005 interview. "I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends."
***
"Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we're not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won't be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether. But, that's a process and I think that's what's great about the movement that is beginning to emerge is that the crisis is so severe in terms of joblessness, violence and now ecological threats that people are willing to be both pragmatic and visionary. So the green economy will start off as a small subset and we are going to push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society."
***
[In a July 2009 interview with Newsweek magazine, Jones said he could not explain exactly what a "green job" is:]

"Well, we still don't have a unified definition, and that's not unusual in a democracy. It takes a while for all the states and the federal government to come to some agreement. But the Department of Labor is working on it very diligently. Fundamentally, it's getting there, but we haven't crossed the finish line yet."
***
"Now I'm gonna tell you this: All that clean coal stuff ... We could have clean coal. I'm for clean coal. But I'll tell you what. If we're gonna have clean coal, let's have a couple other things.... We could power the country with clean coal, or we could have unicorns pull our cars for us ... Equally fictitious, equally fantastical, equally ludicrous. You know, so, we could have the tooth fairy bring us our energy at night. I mean, equally ludicrous. There is no such thing as a tooth fairy. There is no such thing as unicorns. And there is no such thing as clean coal, so let's be clear about that."
***
"We began to drill more, to drill off shore, to drill here, to drill there, to liquify coal ... to do whatever you can to get more petroleum into the system. And we heard our president saying just that. That's what he wants to do. And I hate to say this and I hope I don't offend anybody, but the president of the United States sounded like a crackhead when he said that. [Mimicking a crack addict:] Just, a little bit mo,' just a litlle bit mo,' a little mo', a little mo', a little mo' … Like a crackhead trying to lick the crack pipe for a fix.... I'm sorry, I'm gonna speak some ebonics up here. Good luck with the translation."

Obama's Czar: Scott Gration

Obama's Sudan Czar: Scott Gration

Our Creepy Envoy to Sudan

"Susan Rice is one of my dear friends. There are few women in the world that I would say, 'I love you' to, and Susan is one of them. I love Susan Rice," he added.

That was Scott Gration, the Obama administration's envoy to Sudan, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The response came after one of the committee members questioned the discrepancy between Gration's assessment last month of the situation in Darfur ("What we see is the remnants of genocide") and the assessment of Susan Rice just 48 hours earlier in which the U.N. ambassador accused the Sudanese regime of "ongoing genocide." According to Gration, we shouldn't get too hung up on definitions:

"I am not saying that the genocide is over," he said. "I am focused on what we are doing to help. It doesn't matter what we call it in my view. What matters is that we have people living in desperate conditions. To get involved in a debate that is not required is not as important as fixing the situation, which is required."

Indeed, one shouldn't get bogged down in word choice, as Susan Rice once did. "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?" she famously asked at an NSC meeting as the Clinton administration struggled to respond to events in Rwanda.

If Rice was only being ruthless, Gration has all the marks of a complete sucker. He's declared the genocide over on nothing but his own authority. He told the committee that it's time to drop sanctions against Sudan ("we are going to have to unwind some of these sanctions"), and he wants Sudan taken off the state sponsors of terror list maintained by the State Department ("There is no evidence in our intelligence community that supports [Sudan] being on the state sponsors of terrorism list. It's a political decision"). But Sudan is still supporting terror to the point that earlier this year Israel bombed a convoy bringing weapons from Iran to the Gaza strip via Southern Sudan. The Sudanese alleged at the time that it was U.S. jets that carried out the raid. When pressed on the point, a government spokesman responded:

"We don’t differentiate between the U.S. and Israel. They are all one."

Which is exactly what one would expect a state sponsor of terror to say. How Gration can come back to Washington and defend this regime -- even lobby on its behalf -- seems a testament only to his lack of qualification for the task he was given. And that he would profess his love for Susan Rice before a Senate committee further suggests that he might even be a little unbalanced. Not that we needed any more proof of that.

Obama Czar: Carol Browner

Obama's Energy/Climate Czar, Carol Browner...

Yet another Clintonite has been wheeled out of the political morgue to serve in the Obama administration. Carol Browner, a neon green radical who headed the Environmental Protection Agency from 1993-2000, is widely rumored to be the president-elect’s choice for “energy czar.” But an ethical cloud still hangs over Browner’s EPA legacy. It doesn’t take a team of Ivy League-degreed lawyers to figure out that this is one more headache the Hope and Change crew doesn’t need.

In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, let me dust off the cobwebs and help out all the smarty-pants vetters on the Obama team with a little background on Browner’s stained past:

On her last day in office, nearly eight years ago, Browner oversaw the destruction of agency computer files in brazen violation of a federal judge’s order requiring the agency to preserve its records. This from a public official who bragged about her tenure: “One of the things I’m the proudest of at EPA is the work we’ve done to expand the public’s right to know.”

Asked to explain her track-covering actions, the savvy career lawyer Browner played dumb. Figuratively batting her eyelashes, she claimed she had no clue about a court injunction signed by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth on the same day she commanded an underling to wipe her hard drives clean. Golly gee willikers, how could that have slipped by her?

According to testimony in a freedom of information lawsuit filed against EPA by the Landmark Legal Foundation, a Virginia-based conservative legal watchdog group, Browner commanded a computer technician on Jan. 19, 2001: “‘I would like my files deleted. I want you to delete my files.” Not coincidentally, the Landmark Legal Foundation had been pressing Browner to fully and publicly disclose the names of any special interest groups that may have influenced her wave of last-minute regulatory actions. Two days before she told her technician to purge all her records, EPA had gone to court to file a motion opposing the federal court injunction protecting those government documents.

Plausible deniability? Not bloody likely.

Incredibly, Browner asserted that there was no work-related material on her work computer. She explained she was merely cleaning the hard drive of computer games she had downloaded for her son, and that she wanted to expunge the hard drive as a “courtesy” to the incoming Bush administration. How thoughtful. Later, her agency admitted that three other top EPA officials had their computers erased despite the federal court order and ongoing FOIA case (the record is silent on whether Browner’s son was playing games on their desktops, too). A further belated admission revealed that the agency had failed to search Browner’s office for public documents as required by Landmark’s public disclosure lawsuit.

Not only were all the top officials’ hard drives cleared and reformatted, but e-mail backup tapes were erased and reused in violation of records preservation practices.

After a two-year legal battle, Judge Lamberth finally held the EPA in contempt of court for the systemic file destruction – actions Lambert lambasted as “contumacious conduct” (obstinate resistance to authority). As is typical in Washington, Browner weaseled out of any serious repercussions. Lamberth inexplicably decided that slapping the agency as a whole with contempt – rather than any individual – would deter future cover-ups.

Is this a gamble the Obama administration wants to take? Browner has crossed the line and violated public trust before in her capacity as eco-chief. Early in her first term as EPA head, Browner got caught by a congressional subcommittee using taxpayer funds to create and send out illegal lobbying material to over 100 grassroots environmental lobbying organizations. Browner exploited her office to orchestrate a political campaign by left-wing groups, who turned around and attacked Republican lawmakers for supporting regulatory reform. These are the very same groups – anti-business, anti-sound science, pro-eco-hysteria – that Browner would be working arm in arm with as Obama’s “energy czar.”

This is regression we can’t afford.

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Browner is an environmental radical – and a socialist (seriously)

No, it’s not the President-elect, at least not explicitly. Conservatives are often accused of scaremongering when they claim left-wing environmentalists are actually socialists hiding behind green disguises. But with Carol Browner, incoming President Barack Obama’s freshly appointed Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change – the so-called White House “Climate Czar” - there is no question about the socialism. Browner is a member of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society (CSWS), which is a formal organ of the Socialist International. Oddly enough, the group’s web site was recently scrubbed to remove Browner’s picture and biography, but her name is still listed next to the photo-biographies of her 14 colleagues on the commission. The Socialist International is no group of woolly-headed idealists. It is an influential assembly of officials from across the international community whose official Statement of Principles describes an agenda of gaining and exercising government power based on socialist concepts.

Browner’s CSWS is similarly open about the economic costs it is willing to impose, across national borders to achieve its environmental utopia. On Sept. 5-6, 2008, the commission noted that the costs of its proposals would “rang[e] in the hundreds of billions of dollars over the next two decades,” and it called for a “redesign of the international rules on intellectual property.” That is international bureaucratese for compelling an inventor to surrender property rights in order to “share” technologies with less-developed countries.

At the Congress of the Socialist International held last June 30-July2, the CSWS officially resolved that “market solutions alone are insufficient and will not provide the financial support and resources necessary to achieve the required combination of deep emission reduction, adaptation to already changing climate conditions, energy security and equitable and environmentally sound economic development.” Again, that’s bureaucratese. It means that international taxes should be imposed to provide the “resources necessary” to impose what the CSWS repeatedly refers to as a ‘regime” against “global warming.” By appointing Browner to a White House post, Obama has at the least implicitly endorsed an utterly radical socialist agenda for his administration’s environmental policy. The incoming chief executive thus strengthens critics who contend environmental policies aren’t really about protecting endangered species or preserving virgin lands, but rather expanding government power and limiting individual freedom.

==========================================

Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs "to put nothing in writing, ever" regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner’s conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner "intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards."

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Obama Czar: Cass Sunstein

Obama's regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein:

"Cass Sunstein supports outlawing hunting, phasing out meat eating, giving animals the right to file lawsuits"

"We ought to ban hunting"

- Cass Sunstein, in a 2007 speech at Harvard University

"Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives …"

- 2004 book Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions

"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily
in the interest of citizenship and
self-government."

-Cass Sunstein, arguing for a Fairness Doctrine for the
Internet in his book, Republic.com 2.0 (page 137).

http://stopsunstein.com/

==============================

Everyone knew that Cass R. Sunstein was an extreme “progressive,” a socialist, and an adversary of the US Constitution as actually written, but one particularly dangerous aspect of Sunstein’s personal political philosophy is not particularly well known.

The Center for Consumer Freedom has issued a press release reminding Americans that Cass Sunstein is additionally an Animal Rights activist and extremist.

How extreme?

Well, in The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer, 2002, later recycled into the introduction to Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, an anthology he co-edited in 2004, he argues:

"Animals should be permitted to bring suit, with human beings as their representatives, to prevent violations of current law … Any animals that are entitled to bring suit would be represented by (human) counsel, who would owe guardian like obligations and make decisions, subject to those obligations, on their clients’ behalf."

Sunstein, who is soon likely to be gifted with extensive powers as “regulatory Czar,” has argued in favor of bans on animal cosmetics testing, hunting, greyhound racing, and… meat eating!

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======================

"...Sunstein's other writings are equally alarming. Big Brother government is not good enough for Sunstein. He prefers authoritarian father figures. Written with Richard H. Thaler, "Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron," holds that, "Often people's preferences are ill-formed" and "paternalism cannot be avoided," and "libertarian paternalists should attempt to steer people's choices."

Their libertarian paternalism example involves a "cafeteria at some organization," where the director has noticed customers choosing more of the items presented earlier in the line. How to order the lineup?

The paper posits four possibilities, with #4 being the cafeteria director putting items earlier in the line she thinks consumers would choose on their own. The authors' dislike that. Option #1 is Sunstein and Thaler's choice.

The director should "make the choices that she thinks would make the customers best off ... to promote their welfare, all things considered." Even under market pressures, they maintain the director would have "a great deal of room to maneuver." In other words, they believe it is the director's job to change customers' tastes and preferences! Lovely philosophy for a federal regulator, that!

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Barack Obama's nominee for "regulatory czar" has advocated a "Fairness Doctrine" for the Internet that would require opposing opinions be linked and also has suggested angry e-mails should be prevented from being sent by technology that would require a 24-hour cooling off period.

[...]

Sunstein also has argued in his prolific literary works that the Internet is anti-democratic because of the way users can filter out information of their own choosing.

"A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government," he wrote. "Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom's name."

Sunstein first proposed the notion of imposing mandatory "electronic sidewalks" for the Net. These "sidewalks" would display links to opposing viewpoints. Adam Thierer, senior fellow and director of the Center for Digital Media Freedom at the Progress and Freedom Center, has characterized the proposal as "The Fairness Doctrine for the Internet."

"Apparently in Sunstein's world, people have many rights, but one of them, it seems, is not the right to be left alone or seek out the opinions one desires," Thierer wrote.

Later, Sunstein rethought his proposal, explaining that it would be "too difficult to regulate [the Internet] in a way that would respond to those concerns." He also acknowledged that it was "almost certainly unconstitutional."

Perhaps Sunstein's most novel idea regarding the Internet was his proposal, in his book "Nudge," written with Richard Thaler, for a "Civility Check" for e-mails and other online communications.

"The modern world suffers from insufficient civility," they wrote. "Every hour of every day, people send angry e-mails they soon regret, cursing people they barely know (or even worse, their friends and loved ones). A few of us have learned a simple rule: don't send an angry e-mail in the heat of the moment. File it, and wait a day before you send it. (In fact, the next day you may have calmed down so much that you forget even to look at it. So much the better.) But many people either haven't learned the rule or don’t always follow it. Technology could easily help. In fact, we have no doubt that technologically savvy types could design a helpful program by next month."

That's where the "Civility Check" comes in.

"We propose a Civility Check that can accurately tell whether the e-mail you're about to send is angry and caution you, 'warning: this appears to be an uncivil e-mail. do you really and truly want to send it?'" they wrote. "(Software already exists to detect foul language. What we are proposing is more subtle, because it is easy to send a really awful e-mail message that does not contain any four-letter words.) A stronger version, which people could choose or which might be the default, would say, 'warning: this appears to be an uncivil e-mail. this will not be sent unless you ask to resend in 24 hours.' With the stronger version, you might be able to bypass the delay with some work (by inputting, say, your Social Security number and your grandfather’s birth date, or maybe by solving some irritating math problem!)."

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GAG THE INTERNET!
AN OBAMA OFFICIAL'S FRIGHTENING BOOK ABOUT CURBING FREE SPEECH ONLINE
===================================
ON END OF LIFE ISSUES and RATIONING HEALTH CARE:

"I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people."

****

President Obama’s New "Regulatory Czar" a Believer in "Quality of Life" Health Care

This could be bad. Cass R. Sunstein, just appointed by President Obama to be “regulatory czar,” is a big “quality of life” guy in determining the cost/benefit ratio of government regulations. This is the executive summary of a paper he wrote back in 2003 for the Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, entitled “Lives, Life-Years, and Willingness to Pay.” From the paper:

In protecting safety, health, and the environment, government has increasingly relied on cost-benefit analysis. In undertaking cost-benefit analysis, the government has monetized risks of death through the idea of “value of a statistical life” (VSL), currently assessed at about $6.1 million. Many analysts, however, have suggested that the government should rely instead on the “value of a statistical life year” (VSLY), in a way that would likely result in significantly lower benefits calculations for elderly people, and significantly higher benefits calculations for children. I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people. The hard question involves not whether to undertake this shift, but how to monetize life-years, and here willingness to pay (WTP) [what one would pay to obtain a good] is generally the place to begin…In fact, a focus on statistical lives is more plausibly a form of illicit discrimination than a focus on life years, because the idea of statistical lives treats the years of older people as worth far more than the years of younger people.

The paper dealt broadly with how to measure the cost/benefit aspect of government regulations generally, and illustrates how bureaucrats and their enablers are the real kings now. But that aside, its applicability to regulations in a regime of national health care law are obvious and frightening: If regulatory policy is to be based on granting the lives of elderly people a lesser value, it begs for health care rationing that would be supported by terms such as “value of statistical life year,” “willingness to pay”–and other such euphemisms that will no doubt be coined–as bureaucrateze cover for blatant medical discrimination.

===============================

“Sunstein is an advocate of something called libertarian paternalism, which means give people the choice to make their own decisions, but instead of just laying out the facts, control the number of choices, then use knowledge of behavioral sciences (like psychology) to guide them to do what you want.”

*****

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (released in paperback last month), Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler explain how enlightened “choice architecture” can close the gap between hedonism and wisdom though “libertarian paternalism”: a kind of minimalist interventionism designed to remedy some of the America’s greatest collective action problems.
===========================

** Obama Regulation Czar Advocated Removing People’s Organs Without Explicit Consent

** Nudging toward Bethlehem: Organ donation without consent

** "Nudging" America to Give Up Meat

** Nudging Us to Better Food Choices?

** Libertarian Paternalism

** Obama chief: Embryos are 'just a handful of cells'
Argues cloning ban 'silly,' scoffed as those who find it morally repugnant

**Sunstein: Obama, not courts, should interpret law
'Beliefs and commitments' of nation's leader should supersede judges

==============================
From the December 13, 2004, issue of National Review

You owe your life — and everything else — to the sovereign. The rights of subjects are not natural rights, but merely grants from the sovereign. There is no right even to complain about the actions of the sovereign, except insofar as the sovereign allows the subject to complain. These are the principles of unlimited, arbitrary, and absolute power, the principles of such rulers as Louis XIV. Intellectuals have assiduously promoted them; think of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.

A new intellectual champion of absolutism has now emerged. Mild-mannered University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has been advancing the radical notion that all rights — including rights usually held to be "against" the state, such as the right to freedom of speech and the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned or tortured — are grants from the state. In a book co-authored with Stephen Holmes, The Cost of Rights, he argued that "all legal rights are, or aspire to be, welfare rights," that is, positive grants from the state. There is no difference in kind between the right not to be tortured and the right to taxpayer-subsidized dental care.

In his new book, The Second Bill of Rights, Sunstein seeks to give constitutional status to welfare rights. The title comes from Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address, in which he proclaimed that "necessitous men are not free men" and proposed a "second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all." Among the rights FDR proposed were the rights to "a useful and remunerative job," "a decent home," "adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," "adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment," and "a good education."

The mere assertion of those rights isn't enough for Sunstein; he wants to endow them with constitutional status, like the rights that are actually mentioned in the Constitution. He admits that "the founding document does not refer to them, and it is not seriously argued that they are encompassed by anything in the Constitution" — yet on the next page he states that "if the nation becomes committed to certain rights, they may migrate into the Constitution itself" (emphasis added). Later on, he asserts that "at a minimum, the second bill should be seen as part and parcel of America's constitutive commitments. Roosevelt's speech proposing the second bill deserves a place among the great documents in the nation's history. Indeed, it can be seen as occupying a place akin to the Declaration of Independence, or perhaps somewhere between the Declaration and the Constitution."

Article V of the Constitution, which specifies how it may be amended, doesn't include "migration," but perhaps "migration of amendments" has itself migrated into the Constitution. As a theory of constitutional law, that is remarkably thin. But let's pass on to other problems with Sunstein's approach.

First, Sunstein's fundamental insistence — that all rights are grants from power — is incoherent. In The Cost of Rights, Sunstein and Holmes argued against the idea of "moral rights," or rights that are valid by virtue of something other than force: "When they are not backed by legal force . . . moral rights are toothless by definition. Unenforced moral rights are aspirations binding on conscience, not powers binding on officials." Thus, "the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards" is simply another welfare right, a right that the state hire monitors to monitor the police and guards, for "duties are taken seriously only when dereliction is punished by the public power drawing on the public purse." This theory generates an absurdity, for it rests on an infinite regress. For me to have a right not to be tortured, the police would have to fear punishment by monitors above them. But for me to have a right not to be tortured, I would have to have a right that the monitors punish the police if they torture me. Do I have that right? I would have it only if the state hired monitors above the monitors, to punish the monitors if they failed to punish the police if the police tortured me. Do I have a right that the monitors of the monitors punish the monitors? Only if there were monitors to monitor the monitors who monitor the monitors who monitor the police, and so on, ad infinitum. The flaw is entirely internal and completely fatal to the theory: If we were to accept the theory, all it would show is that no one has any rights, for the demands of the theory could never be satisfied.

Second, Sunstein insists that without government protection no one would enjoy anything of value, and therefore that all value must be attributed to the action of the state: "Government is 'implicated' in everything people own. . . . If rich people have a great deal of money, it is because the government furnishes a system in which they are entitled to have and keep that money."
The problem here is that Sunstein's economic theory of value is stuck in the period of the classical economists, who tried to attribute all value to one necessary factor of production; for them, that was labor. Sunstein merely substitutes what he has decided is the one necessary factor: the state. But after the "marginal revolution" in economics (circa 1871), no serious thinker should make such a mistake. It is now recognized that we make choices across a great many margins, and that value is not created by a single necessary factor. If that were not so, we could say that farmers produce all value, since without food none of the rest of us would produce anything else; likewise, for other groups and factors of production. The theory of value on which Sunstein rests his case for the welfare state is remarkably naive and primitive.

Third, the ethical implications Sunstein draws from his theory of value do not withstand scrutiny. He says that "to believe that people have a right to their current holdings, so that any diminution of those holdings amounts to a violation of their rights . . . is an utterly implausible position. Those who possess a great deal do so because laws and institutions, including public institutions, make their holdings possible. . . . In the state of nature — freed from the protection of law and government — how well would wealthy people fare?" Let's see what else this theory would entail: If a doctor were to save my life, then, since the doctor would be responsible for my existence, and therefore for all of the liberty and wealth that I might enjoy or create henceforth, the doctor would have the right to decide what should happen with that liberty and that wealth, since without the doctor neither I, nor the liberty, nor the wealth would exist. In short, Sunstein's ethical theory is just silly.

The Second Bill of Rights may rest on a logical fallacy, a primitive economic theory, and a silly ethical claim, but it is instructive nonetheless. Sunstein's treatment of the problem of how to use the judiciary to enforce welfare rights shows what a radical departure they are from the rule of law, how they introduce arbitrariness into government policy, and how, ultimately, the contradictions and incompatibilities generated by welfare rights undermine the very idea of rights itself — for when "rights" conflict, the state must decide whose "rights" are to be respected, but, since it has been stipulated that both of the conflicting parties are in the right, the state's decisions must be on the basis of something other than right.

Sunstein's work represents a return to the governmental theories of absolutism — of power, rather than of right. Welfare rights are incompatible, not only with property rights, but with law and with the very concept of rights. Professor Sunstein, meet Louis XIV.

==============================
'Death panel' is not in the bill... it already exists

"...The AP is technically correct in stating that end-of-life counseling is not the same as a death panel. The New York Times is also correct to point out that the health care bill contains no provision setting up such a panel.

What both outlets fail to point out is that the panel already exists.

H.R. 1 (more commonly known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, even more commonly known as the Stimulus Bill and aptly dubbed the Porkulus Bill) contains a whopping $1.1 billion to fund the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The Council is the brain child of former Health and Human Services Secretary Nominee Tom Daschle. Before the Porkulus Bill passed, Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant governor of New York, wrote in detail about the Council's purpose.

Daschle's stated purpose (and therefore President Obama's purpose) for creating the Council is to empower an unelected bureaucracy to make the hard decisions about health care rationing that elected politicians are politically unable to make. The end result is to slow costly medical advancement and consumption. Daschle argues that Americans ought to be more like Europeans who passively accept "hopeless diagnoses."

McCaughey goes on to explain:

"Daschle says health-care reform "will not be pain free." Seniors should be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them."

Who is on the Council? One of its most prominent members is none other than Dr. Death himself Ezekiel Emanuel. Dr. Emanuel's views on care of the elderly should frighten anyone who is or ever plans on being old. He explains the logic behind his discriminatory views on elderly care as follows:

"Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years."

On average 25-year-olds require very few medical services. If they are to get the lion's share of the treatment, then those 65 and over can expect very little care. Dr. Emanuel's views on saving money on medical care are simple: don't provide any medical care. The loosely worded provisions in H.R 1 give him and his Council increasing power to push such recommendations.

Similarly hazy language will no doubt be used in the health care bill. What may pass as a 1,000 page health care law will explode into perhaps many thousands of pages of regulatory codes. The deliberate vagueness will give regulators tremendous leverage to interpret its provisions. Thus Obama's Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein will play a major role in defining the government's role in controlling medical care.

How does Sunstein approach end of life care? In 2003 he wrote a paper for the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies arguing that human life varies in value. Specifically he champions statistical methods that give preference to what the government rates as "quality-adjusted life years." Meaning, the government decides whether a person's life is worth living. If the government decides the life is not worth living, it is the individual's duty to die to free up welfare payments for the young and productive.

Ultimately it was Obama himself, in answer to a question on his ABC News infomercial, who said that payment determination cannot be influenced by a person's spirit and "that at least we (the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research) can let doctors know and your mom know that...this isn't going to help. Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

Maybe we should ask the Associated Press and New York Times if they still think we shouldn't be concerned about a federal "death panel."

Obama Czar: Mark Lloyd

Obama's FCC Diversity Czar, Mark Lloyd, Loves Hugo Chavez's Revolution
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Who Is Mark Lloyd?
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"State radio in Rwanda was taken over by one tribe, one group. And they began to put out propaganda, so that the Tutsis were targeted. And what resulted from the fact that State Radio was able to do that was essentially mass genocide in Rwanda. But the state for this particular tribe controlled the radio very purposefully to make sure there was media and social change. In Venezuela, with Chavez, really an incredible revolution, a dramatic revolution, to begin to put in place saying that we're going to have impact on the people of Venezuela. [But] the property owners and the folks who were then controlling the media in Venezuela rebelled- [they] worked, frankly, with the folks here in the U.S. government- worked to oust him and he [Chavez] came back and he had another revolution. And Chavez then started to take the media very seriously in this country."
youtube clip

==============================

Meet the FCC Diversity Czar

The far Left Center for American Progress has its tentacles everywhere.

I noted in my column on the Internet Snitch Brigade this morning that former CAP operatives have been installed at HHS and work closely with the health care czar.

At Newsbusters, Seton Motley reports on the new FCC “Diversity Officer” — a racial engineering czar who has been targeting conservative talk radio since his days working for CAP.

Know your enemy:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced a new “Chief Diversity Officer,” communications attorney Mark Lloyd.

But Doctor of Jurisprudence Lloyd is far more than merely a communications attorney. He was at one time a Senior Fellow at the uber-liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), for whom he co-wrote a June 2007 report entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”

Which rails against the fact that the American people overwhelmingly prefer to listen to conservative (and Christian) talk radio rather than the liberal alternative, and suggests ways the federal government can remedy this free-market created “problem.”

* Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.
* Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
* Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

These last two get perilously close to the use of “localism” to silence conservative (and Christian) radio stations, about which we have been warning for quite some time.

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Inspired by Saul Alinsky, FCC 'Diversity' Chief Calls for ‘Confrontational Movement’ to Give Public Broadcasting Dominant Role in Communications

Mark Lloyd, chief diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), called for a “confrontational movement” to combat what he claimed was control of the media by international corporations and to re-establish the regulatory power of government through robust public broadcasting and a more powerful FCC.

Lloyd expressed his regulatory call to arms in his 2006 book, “Prologue to a Farce: Communications and Democracy in America” (University of Illinois Press).

In the book, Lloyd also said that public broadcasting should be funded through new license fees charged to the nation’s private radio and television broadcasters, and that new regulatory fees should be used to fund eight new regional FCC offices.

These offices would be responsible for monitoring political advertising and commentary, children’s educational programs, number of commercials, and content ratings of the programs.

Frequently referencing one of his heroes, left-wing activist Saul Alinsky, Lloyd claims in his book that the history of American communications policy has been one of continued corporate control of every form of communication from the telegraph to the Internet.

“Citizen access to popular information has been undermined by bad political decisions,” Lloyd wrote. “These decisions date back to the Jacksonian Democrats’ refusal to allow the Post Office to continue to operate the telegraph service.”

Lloyd claimed that neither technology nor liberal reforms have been able to overcome the damage caused when government fails to give everyone an equal voice.

Throughout history, Lloyd said, radio or television] spectrum.”

2. “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) must be reformed along democratic lines and funded at a substantial level. The CPB board should be elected, [with] eight members representing eight regions of the country (New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Midwest, Plains States, Southwest, Mountain States, and the Pacific Coast) and a chairman appointed by the president, with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

“Federal and regional broadcast operations and local stations should be funded at levels commensurate with or above those spending levels at which commercial operations are funded,” said Lloyd.

“This funding should come from license fees charged to commercial broadcasters. … Local public broadcasters and regional and national communications operations should be required to encourage and broadcast diverse views and programs. … Spectrum allocations should be established that create clear preferences for public broadcasters ensuring that regional, local, and neighborhood communities are well served,” he added.

3. “The FCC should be fully funded with regulatory fees from broadcast, cable, satellite, and telecommunications companies. The FCC should be staffed at regional offices, matching those CPB regions, at levels sufficient to monitor and enforce communication regulation.

“Clear federal regulations over commercial broadcast and cable programs regarding political advertising and commentary, educational programming for children, the number of commercials, ratings information about programs before they are broadcast, and the accessibility of services to the disabled should be established and widely promoted.”

4. “Universal service support provided by all commercial telecommunications providers (whether they are classified as information services or not) to fund access to advanced telecommunications services should be expanded to all nonprofit organizations, including higher-level academic and vocational schools, community centers, and 501(c) (3) organizations unaffiliated with either business or government.”

5. “Postal subsidies should be fully restored to small independent nonprofits presses. Postal subsidies should be reduced for commercial and business operations. The postal service should be returned to congressional control with the central mission of ensuring that all Americans have access to the post.”

6. “Public secondary schools should be required to include civics and media literacy as part of their core curriculum. Testing on civic, media, and computer literacy should be required and national standards set.”

For those who think any or all of these recommendations might infringe on the free speech rights of broadcasters, Lloyd says his concern is not the “exaggerated” concerns over the First Amendment.

“It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press,” he said. “This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.”

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