During the presidential campaign, Candidate Obama said to “Judge me by the people I surround myself with.” That made good sense to me since I have often heard that “you measure a man’s worth by the quality of his friends.” If that is true, that may be one of the reasons for the President’s plummeting poll numbers. At this stage of his presidency, his numbers have dropped faster and farther than any president in history, with the exception of Jimmy Carter. This is particularly astonishing given the incredible support continually given to him by the one-sided main stream media and the total lack of scrutiny given to the President’s increasing army of czars, the only jobs he seems to be creating.
Take the Ex-Environmental czar for starters. Vann Jones, the self-identified Communist, who called Republicans “a**holes”, President Bush a “crackhead”, and signed a petition asking Eliot Spitzer to investigate the Administration’s role in staging the September 11 catastrophe. He was of course appointed by President Obama with zero congressional review or scrutiny. Yet you heard nothing of substance about him from our national media, “the eyes and ears” of the public. Even his middle of the night resignation over the Labor Day weekend received scant public notice.
Then there’s Cass Sunstein, appointed by President Obama as the Regulatory czar. He oversees the implementation of regulations in all governmental departments. As you know, the devil is always in the details and his office will be implementing regulations for every vague and not-so-vague section in any legislation. It is that “interpretation” that gives bureaucrats ever increasing power. Mr. Sunstein believes that all forms of hunting should be outlawed and that animals should have the right to legal representation and the right to sue humans! This of course includes farm animals.
As for his attitude towards humans, Victor Morawski, a professor at Coppin State, noted in his article that Mr. Sunstein “…has proposed that, wherever the effectiveness of a policy is examined using a Cost/Benefit Analysis, government agencies should adopt a standard that takes into account a person's age. This standard he readily admits ‘would likely result in significantly lower benefits calculations for elderly people, and significantly higher benefits calculations for children.’
For Sunstein, ‘A program that saves younger people is better ... than an otherwise identical program that saves older people.’ So he suggests that, ‘in producing regulatory impact analyses, agencies should ... [use] life-years as well as lives ... in deciding what to do.’” Sunstein’s wife, Samantha Power is another teacher at Harvard and was the President’s foreign policy advisor until she had to resign after calling Hillary Clinton “a monster.” I’ll bet they have fascinating pillow talk!
It’s a good thing Professor Sunstein has no close allies or I might have to worry about those pesky “death panels” that don’t really exist! Oh, no…there’s Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the Health Care czar and Rahm’s brother, who has always been a proponent of using cost benefit and comparative benefit analysis in the allocation of health care resources. The President has already appointed him to the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Research under the stimulus bill and given him $1.5 million for a report on comparative effectiveness research. We know where Dr. Emanuel and Tom Daschle (who says he sees the President every day) stand on Complete Lives Systems so just how should we judge you Mr. President?
Now, how about Dr. John Holdren, the President’s Science czar, who wrote a book along with the Ehrlich’s of “zero population growth” fame, in which they advocated compulsory abortion and limiting the number of children a family could have. He is infamous for the following quote: “The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will ultimately develop into a human being.” So what happens if we don’t develop “properly” or subsequently become infirm in our later years? Are we seeing a pattern here?
While not a czar, another top White House health policy advisor is Dr. David Blumenthal. He is the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and has said he wrote much of the health care bill. Not only is he a strong advocate of Oregon’s “physician assisted suicide” but he also recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending. Blumenthal has long advocated government health spending controls, though he concedes they're “associated with longer waits” and “reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices.'” (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001) He calls it 'debatable' whether the timely care Americans get is really worth the cost. Maybe that’s why Oregon will tell cancer patients they CANNOT AFFORD those expensive cancer treatments but will tell those same patients that the State CAN AFFORD to pay for their suicide pills. Obviously, Dr. Blumenthal does not understand the difference between cost and value. How would you value an extra two or three years of life here on earth?
I’d better start finishing my thoughts now because of one final czar, Mark Lloyd, who is the Chief Diversity Officer for the Federal Communications Commission. If you Google Mr. Lloyd, you will find that he has written extensively on the subject of conservative talk radio and his plans for dealing with a medium that he obviously dislikes. He advocates excessive fines (up to 100%) that will then go to more liberal public radio and make it impossible for conservative radio to operate. He also advocates filing excessive complaints against those stations thereby causing them to incur increasingly high expenses defending themselves. Shades of the same strategy that the far left used against Sarah Palin with the unending filing of unfounded ethics complaints.
Mr. Lloyd may believe that the only freedom of speech (which he has stated is an “exaggeration”) is that which agrees with him. He has spoken of his admiration of Hugo Chavez’s “democratic revolution”. Maybe he should have taken note of the fact that Chavez basically seized and nationalized any radio or television that was not spouting the party line. Then again, maybe he did and that is a harbinger of things to come!
So, Mr. President, you asked me to judge you by the people who are surrounding you. I have and I find your choices troubling and contrary to the core values that have made this country so great for so long. Because of these people and their views, I can no longer trust the motives of your Attorney General in seeking to prosecute members of the CIA. I can no longer trust in any extension of presidential or governmental power. I can no longer chalk it up as coincidence that the George Soros hedge fund purchased $811 million in Petrobras stock in the second quarter of this year to make it the fund’s largest holding. Then, in the very next quarter, the U.S. Export-Import Bank loans $2 billion (and may loan $5 billion) to Petrobras (a very rich oil company) to drill for oil off the coast of Brazil. It is of course, George Soros and Move-On.org who boasted that he “owned” the Democratic party! I can no longer trust your unemployment estimates which have been consistently wrong. I can no longer trust your deficit and debt projections which have been consistently wrong. I can no longer trust your stimulus projections which have been consistently wrong. I can no longer trust your health care cost projections which are illogical and not supported by any independent group.
In summary, I do not trust the people you have chosen who surround you. Using that criteria alone which you have proposed, I can no longer trust your judgment; therefore, I cannot trust you. That’s a sad state of affairs.
WLG
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