You Can Judge Obama By the Company He Keeps and the Czars He Appoints
Obama is on the path to being one of the sickest presidents in history
8.4.2009
If Obama is to be judged by the company he keeps and the Czras he appoints, then he is on track to being one of the sickest presidents in American history.
Not since the reign of King George has America experienced such dispensation of power to unelected individuals whose sole allegiance and accountability is solely to a president. Cabinet members must be vetted by Congress - even a liberal progressive Congress - but not the Czars and Czarinas.
Take a minute or so to watch this YouTube video before reading on.
Czarist Amerika
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ClRQvu9ndg
The company you keep issue has been raised before with Obama with regard to Rev. Wright, Acorn, Bill Ayers and others, and yet the American sheep continue to give Obama a bleating pass. The world has been witness to this kind of political power building before with resulting dire consequences.
 There are now over 30 Czars/Czarinas and probably the sickest pick of the bunch is a man named John Holdren, who has been appointed by the Liberal Messiah as the Director of the Office of Science and Technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._executive_branch_%27czars%27)
Holdren, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford and headed a science policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the past 13 years, won the unanimous approval of the Senate as the president's chief science adviser.
He was confirmed with little fanfare on March 19 as director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, a 50-person directorate that advises the president on scientific affairs, focusing on energy independence and global warming.
Obama now has over 30 czars. Each one of these czars is a violation of power granted to the president in Article II of the United States.
John Holdren Science Czar
Herb Allison TARP Czar
Alan Bersin Border Czar
Dennis Blair Intelligence Czar
John Brennan Terrorism Czar
Carol Browner Energy Czar
Adolfo Carrion, Jr Urban Affairs Czar
Ashton Carter Weapons Czar
Aneesh Chopra Technology Czar
Jeffrey Crowley AIDS Czar
Cameron Davis Great Lakes Czar
Nancy-Ann DeParle Health Czar
Earl Devaney Stimulus Accountability Czar
Joshua DuBois Faith-based Czar
Kenneth Feinberg Pay Czar
Danny Fried Guantanamo Closure Czar
J. Scott Gration Sudan Czar
Richard Holbrooke Afghanistan Czar
Van Jones Green Jobs Czar
Gil Kerlikowske Drug Czar
Vivek Kundra Information Czar
George Mitchell Mideast Peace Czar
Ed Montgomery Car Czar
Dennis Ross Mideast Policy Czar
Gary Samore WMD Czar
Todd Stern Climate Czar
Cass Sunstein Regulatory Czar
Paul Volcker Economic Czar
The following report was on FOXNews.com
Obama's Science Czar Considered Forced Abortions, Sterilization as Population Growth Solutions
John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, considered compulsory abortions and other Draconian measures to shrink the human population in a 1977 science textbook.
By Joseph Abrams
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
President Obama's "science czar," John Holdren, once floated the idea of forced abortions, "compulsory sterilization," and the creation of a "Planetary Regime" that would oversee human population levels and control all natural resources as a means of protecting the planet -- controversial ideas his critics say should have been brought up in his Senate confirmation hearings.
Holdren, who has degrees from MIT and Stanford and headed a science policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for the past 13 years, won the unanimous approval of the Senate as the president's chief science adviser.
He was confirmed with little fanfare on March 19 as director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, a 50-person directorate that advises the president on scientific affairs, focusing on energy independence and global warming.
But many of Holdren's radical ideas on population control were not brought up at his confirmation hearings; it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.
The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe.
The three authors summarize their guiding principle in a single sentence: "To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people."
As first reported by FrontPage Magazine, Holdren and his co-authors spend a portion of the book discussing possible government programs that could be used to lower birth rates.
Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.
To help achieve those goals, they formulate a "world government scheme" they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world's resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an "armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force" to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.
Holdren's office issued a statement to FOXNews.com denying that the ecologist has ever backed any of the measures discussed in his book, and suggested reading more recent works authored solely by Holdren for a view to his beliefs.
"Dr. Holdren has stated flatly that he does not now support and has never supported compulsory abortions, compulsory sterilization, or other coercive approaches to limiting population growth," the statement said.
"Straining to conclude otherwise from passages treating controversies of the day in a three-author, 30-year-old textbook is a mistake."
But the textbook itself appears to contradict that claim.
Holdren and the Ehrlichs offer ideas for "coercive," "involuntary fertility control," including "a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child," which doctors would be expected to do right after a woman gives birth.
"Unfortunately," they write, "such a program therefore is not practical for most less developed countries," where doctors are not often present when a woman is in labor.
While Holdren and his co-authors don't openly endorse such measures on other topics, in this case they announce their disappointment -- "unfortunately" -- that women in the third world cannot be sterilized against their will, a procedure the International Criminal Court considers a crime against humanity.
Click here to see the passage on sterilizing women
"It's very problematic that he said these things," said Ben Lieberman, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. Lieberman faulted Holdren for using government as a solution to every problem and advocating heavy-handed and invasive laws.
But other members of the scientific community said accusations against Holdren are wholly misplaced.
"John Holdren has been one of the well-respected and prominent scientific voices urging the federal government to address global warming," wrote Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement.
Holdren's co-authors, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, said in a statement that they were "shocked at the serious mischaracterization of our views and those of John Holdren," caused by what they called misreadings of the book.
"We were not then, never have been, and are not now 'advocates' of the Draconian measures for population limitation described -- but not recommended" in the book, they wrote.
Still, William Yeatman, an energy policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, faulted the Senate for not screening Holdren more strenuously during his hearings before confirming his nomination by unanimous consent both in committee and in the full Senate.
Despite "the litany of apocalyptic warnings that turned out to be incorrect, no one was willing to stick his neck out" and vote no, Yeatman said.
Some of Holdren's views on population came under fire during the otherwise quiet confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, where Sen. David Vitter, R-La., asked him to revisit his past statements about environmental catastrophes that have never come to pass.
"I was and continue to be very critical of Dr. Holdren's positions -- specifically his countless doomsday science publications and predictions that have been near universally wrong," Vitter told FOXNews.com.
"I wish that the Commerce Committee had taken more time to evaluate his record during his nomination hearing, but like with everything else in this new Washington environment, the Democratic majority and the White House were pushing to speed his nomination along," Vitter said.
Vitter grilled Holdren during the hearing, asking him to clear up his 1986 prediction that global warming was going to kill about 1 billion people by 2020.
"You would still say," Vitter asked, "that 1 billion people lost by 2020 is still a possibility?"
"It is a possibility, and one we should work energetically to avoid," Holdren replied.
Sen. John Kerry, a leading Democrat on the committee, said the renewed scrutiny was essentially a Republican smear on Holdren's good record. Kerry told FOXNews.com that senators already had "ample opportunity" to question Holdren, who "made clear that he does not and never has supported coercive approaches, end of story.
"The Commerce Committee and the Senate then unanimously concluded what I have long known -- that John Holdren is a leading voice in the scientific community and we are fortunate to have him lead the fight to restore the foundation of science to government and policymaking that has been lacking for almost a decade."
Holdren has confronted a number of challenges during his four-decade scientific career, including nuclear arms reduction, and was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics," as the Nobel Committee said.
Now his greatest focus is global warming, which he said in a recent interview poses a threat akin to being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."
Holdren told the Associated Press in April that the U.S. will consider all options to veer away from that cliff, including an experimental scheme to shoot pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays and cool the earth, a last resort he hoped could be averted.
"Dr. Holdren is working day and night for the Obama Administration and the American people, helping to develop science and technology policies to make the country stronger, more secure, and more energy independent, and to make Americans healthier and better educated," his office told FOXNews.com.
Four months after Holdren's confirmation, his critics are keeping a wary eye on his work in the White House, where they assert that he has the president's ear on scientific issues.
"It is interesting that this 30-year-old book is finally coming to light," said Lieberman, of the Heritage Foundation.
"The people who are concerned about Holdren, quite frankly we didn't do enough homework."
Below are a few quotations from Ecoscience, which Holdren coauthored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich.
ECOSCIENCE: POPULATION, RESOURCES, ENVIRONMENT
PAUL R. EHRLICH
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
ANNE H. EHRLICH
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
JOHN P. HOLDREN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
W. H. FREEMAN AND COMPANY
San Francisco
Publisher: W. H. Freeman
Place of Publication: San Francisco (where else)
Publication Year: 1977
What the book details.
On forced abortions:
Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
On government confiscation of babies:
One way to carry out this disapproval might be to 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.... It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
On targeted involuntary sterilization:
The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.
On mass involuntary sterilization:
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. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. 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.
On government dictating family size:
In today's world, however, the number of children in a family is a matter of profound public concern. The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?
Don't want to kill your baby? Then you're a racist:
Another related issue that seems to encourage a pronatalist attitude in many people is the question of the differential reproduction of social or ethnic groups. Many people seem to be possessed by fear that their group may be outbred by other groups....
On the ultimate liberal dream - a planetary totalitarian state:
Perhaps those agencies, combined with UNEP and the United Nations population agencies, might eventually be developed into a Planetary Regime - sort of an international superagency for population, resources, and environment. Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable...
On surrendering national sovereignty to the international Gestapo:
If this could be accomplished, security might be provided by an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force. Many people have recognized this as a goal, but the way to reach it remains obscure in a world where factionalism seems, if anything, to be increasing. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization.
AMAZON.com Reviews:
D. Williams
* The ideas in this book came from the practices of Nazi Eugenics doctors, Soviet political commissars, and most importantly, the pit of hell. Here are some of the things these nuts are suggesting governments do.
* Forcibly and unknowingly sterilizing the entire population by adding infertility drugs to the nation's water and food supply.
* Legalizing "compulsory abortions," i.e. forced abortions carried out against the will of the pregnant women, as is common place in Communist China where women who have already had one child and refuse to abort the second are kidnapped off the street by the authorities before a procedure is carried out to forcibly abort the baby.
* Babies who are born out of wedlock or to teenage mothers to be forcibly taken away from their mother by the government and put up for adoption. Another proposed measure would force single mothers to demonstrate to the government that they can care for the child, effectively introducing licensing to have children.
* Implementing a system of "involuntary birth control," where both men and women would be mandated to have an infertility device implanted into their body at puberty and only have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
* Permanently sterilizing people who the authorities deem have already had too many children or who have contributed to "general social deterioration".
* Formally passing a law that criminalizes having more than two children, similar to the one child policy in Communist China.
* This would all be overseen by a transnational and centralized "planetary regime" that would utilize a "global police force" to enforce the measures outlined above. The "planetary regime" would also have the power to determine population levels for every country in the world.
Avery Morrow "Namu Tenri-O-no-Mikoto"
The authors should be applauded for discussing all options to curb overpopulation, no matter how radical. When dealing with global crises all options should be on the table, and it's irresponsible to back down to ultra-right critics. But the fact of the matter is this book is not very well written. Most of the suggestions are in the manner of "I'm just throwing this out there..." and there is no serious consideration of the consequences involved. It was written by credentialed professors, one of whom now works for Obama, but it reads like the vanity press publication of some armchair philosopher. Blogger Zombietime has given some better and far less radical suggestions, complete with case studies that were not even included in this book. Also, with the benefit of hindsight we see that the science is completely ridiculous, and if this book had been taken seriously at the time of publication it would have caused unnecessary hysteria. I don't think it could reasonably be given more than two stars.
The American Catholic
Politics & Culture from a Catholic Perspective
http://the-american-catholic.com/2009/07/13/more-on-ecoscience/
I wasn't sure whether or not to post this as an update to my earlier post on John Holdren, but I thought it was interesting enough to warrant its own posting.
I've read some of the scanned pages of Ecoscience, the 1977 book co-authored by Holdren that calls for horrifying coercive measures for population control. Interestingly, Holdren & Co. felt the need to address pro-life arguments in their book. Their moral reasoning only proves, yet again, how dangerous (not to mention illogical) some 'scientists' can become when they venture into moral philosophy. This provides us an opportunity to take a tour through the inhuman humanism condemned by Pope Benedict in Caritas in Veritate.
In one particular section of the book, the authors are attempting to justify their arguments within the framework of the US Constitution (I invite all readers to go to zombietime's website and read these scanned pages). They believe, simply put, that the Constitution does not actually prohibit limits on population size and measures that would be needed in order to sustain those limits. For instance, they argue on page 838:
The law regulates other highly personal matters. For example, no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children? The legal argument has been made that the First Amendment provision for the separation of church and state prevents the United States government from regulating family size. The notion is that family size is God's affair and no business of the state [how quaint! -- J.H.]. But the same argument has been made against the taxation of church property, prohibition on polygamy, compulsory education and medical treatment for children, and many similar measures that have been enacted.
Unfortunately, the answer to the question makes no sense if you don't believe that life has any inherent value to begin with. Why shouldn't the law be able to regulate children? Because that ultimately means compulsory abortion, the deliberate destruction of an innocent human being and a grave violation of the rights of both mother and father. From the premise that life is not valuable or sacred, it makes perfect sense to resort to coercion to regulate family size.
This is from page 839:
Those who argue that a fetus has a right to life usually proceed from the assumption that life begins at or soon after conception ['soon after'? Who argues this? -- J.H.]. As stated elsewhere, the question When does life begin? is misleading. Life does not begin; it began . (emphasis added by me)
Like other more sophisticated advocates of abortion, Holdren & Co. do not believe that the question of life itself is in dispute at all. They go on to argue:
The real question from a legal, as well as from religious, moral, and ethical points of view, is as follows: in what forms, at what stages, and for what purposes should society protect human life? Obviously overweight people regard their fat cells different from their brain cells. A wandering sperm cell is not the same thing as a fertilized egg; nor is a fetus a child. Yet a fat cell, a sperm cell, a fetus, an adult, and even a group of people are all human life.
How could someone make the drastic - and in my view, manifestly absurd - leap from a 'fat cell' to a fetus? Anyone who has seen a picture of an unborn child that is actually developed enough to be surgically aborted in the first place can tell you the difference between that being, and an individual cell.
An individual fat cell - or even a whole group of fat cells - is not a human being. A sperm is alive, yes - but it is not a human being. How desperate to make the case for abortion must one be to fail to understand the distinction between fat cells or genetic material on the one hand, and a unique human being on the other?
The materialists have no conception of what it means to exist, to "be". They do not see a "human being", they see a more complicated arrangement of cells that eventually acquires the ability to think and speak, but nothing greater than the sum of its mechanical parts. It is therefore not surprising that they can so easily advocate a totalitarian regime of population control. If all we are is matter, then only pleasure and pain can possibly serve as the parameters on what is just or unjust. A more pleasurable world for the enlightened few who have the privilege of belonging to the upper classes and the protection of the state is only made possible by eliminating the vast majority of undesirables, who from their point of view, are nothing but extra consumers of resources.
It is hard to understand when or where or if ever a human being actually comes into existence in the materialist worldview. The authors do go on to acknowledge that infanticide is illegal in the US and do not attempt to argue for it - but why not? There is no logical reason for them to reject infanticide. It would serve the exact same purpose they want to attain - population control. It would be done to a living organism not much more developed than a fetus. Peter Singer had no trouble seeing this, but then, he wasn't trying to dance with the US Constitution either.
In the end the problem is that the authors, and all those who share their views, have no answer to their own question. I'll present it again:
"The real question from a legal, as well as from religious, moral, and ethical points of view, is as follows: in what forms, at what stages, and for what purposes should society protect human life?"
They don't know. They don't answer it. They go on to state what they think the Constitution has to say about it. "The common law and the drafters of the U.S. Constitution", they argue, "did not consider a fetus a human being". This is not quite accurate - prior to "quickening", the first stirrings of the unborn child in the womb, they did not consider whatever was in there to even be alive. They did not have the same understanding of pre-natal development that we have today. Their views cannot be considered authoritative in that case.
But why should it matter? If we look back again on page 838, the authors argue that if there is a "compelling, subordinating interest" the government can do whatever it damned well pleases. So why not extermination camps for adults - you know, those highly complex arrangements of cells without an inherent nature differentiating them from fat or sperm - who refuse to comply too?
I believe there is a reason why Hitler dubbed his plan for eliminating the Jews of Europe, "The Final Solution". It is "final" because it is the final implication of a belief that a certain group poses a threat to the existence of humanity. You can begin, as Hitler did, with laws preventing intermarriage. You can move on to compulsory sterilization, as the Third Reich did. You can proceed to place the dangerous people in ghettos to quarantine them from the rest of the population.
But all of that, in the end, is not going to be enough. They might get out. They might find ways to get around sterilization. The only way to be sure they no longer pose a threat is to get rid of them once and for all. If the problem is bad enough, if the crisis is severe enough, why not?
Whether or not Holdren and his colleagues are conscious of that eventuality and are simply coddling us with Constitutional considerations, or whether they sincerely and stupidly believe it can be avoided, is besides the point. Moreover, I would oppose all of the measures they propose whether they lead to a "final solution" or not, because they are inherently disordered. Even so, this gives us all the more reason to do what we must to oppose the decayed, inhuman philosophy of materialism and its partner, hedonism.
As a closer, let me present what I believe to be the real question, one which no materialist can ever provide a satisfactory answer to:
"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath?" -Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia
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