John Holdren, Barack Obama's science czar, has more power than most people realize. Right now he's sending envoys to the Middle East.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy, headed up by Holdren, has been sending scientists to the Muslim world since Obama's suck-up speech in Cairo. Envoys so far have included a biochemistry professor and the head of the National Institutes of Health. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this. A global exchange of scientific ideas is always a good thing. But according to the press release, "[The envoys] will investigate opportunities in all areas of science and technology, including math, engineering, health, energy, climate change research, and green technologies."
We know Holdren is a crazed climate alarmist who predicted that the east coast might be flooded by 2020. We also know that Obama failed to work his magic and get a climate agreement in Copenhagen. What sort of back-door environmentalism is going on here?
It's been a rough couple of months for global warming zealots like Barack Obama. The Climategate scandal has rocked the entire climate change establishment. In the last week alone, it's been reported that climatologists at the East Anglia climate center broke the law by ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests, and that the chairman of the IPCC covered up fraudulent data about melting glaciers. Meanwhile, the winter is unseasonably cold.
You'd think this would give even radical liberals pause. Not Obama. In fact, his new budget pumps $2.6 billion into the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which puts out misleading "science" on global warming. This is an increase of 21 percent -- $439 million -- over 2010. The USGCRP ultimately answers to -- guess who? -- radical eugenicist science czar John Holdren.
During his State of the Union, Obama offered a flim-flam promise that the government would tighten its belt. Just not for hysterical discredited climate alarmists.
Paddy Power, an Irish on-line betting service, is offering odds on the length of Obama's speech, the color of his tie, and which political cliche he will utter first.
The favored cliche, at odds of 4-to-1, is "heath care reform." The longshot, 500-to-1, is "always bet on black." (Oddly, the phrase "I won't seek re-election" is a mere 250-to-1.)
In the same spirit as the good people at Paddy Power, here are some of the biggest longshots for tonight's address.
"I admit that my attempt at health care reform was a complete debacle and I take full responsibility."
"I believe the people at ACORN acted stupidly."
"Corruption and radicalism in our government cannot be tolerated. I'll be immediately firing Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, John Holdren, Cass Sunstein, Hillary Clinton, Ray LaHood, Lisa Jackson, Carol Browner, Kevin Jennings, Adolfo Carrion Jr., Ron Bloom, Patrick Gaspard, Ezekiel Emanuel, Mark Lloyd, Melanne Verveer, Farah Pandith, and Todd Stern."
"I believe special interest money and influence in Washington is a problem. And let me make it clear: That includes unions. Unions are part of the problem."
"This is in no way President Bush's fault."
"I have read and studied the Founding Fathers closely. I understand that our government is always to be a limited one. I know that our country was conceived in Lockean liberalism, which guarantees every man and woman personal liberty. I trust the American people enough to let them make their own decisions and not to intrude on them with government."
"So how about that special election up in Massachusetts last week, huh?"
"Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith. Thank you very much. God bless you, and God bless America."
The last line is from Ronald Reagan's 1984 State of the Union address. Don't hold your breath waiting for that one.
It’s fun to laugh at Barack Obama’s blunders on his one-year anniversary, but remember that the president is a radical Chicago pol. He’s inexperienced of course, but he’s also gotten away with some pretty egregious things during his first year. Here are 25 of the worst, in no particular order.
1)Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, says that Fox News isn’t a real news network. Days later, Fox is denied an interview with Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg, even though Feinberg is made available to the other networks. The White House ultimately retreats from this sinister and anti-American activity.
2)Obama appoints John Holdren to be his Science Czar. Holdren is a eugenicist who believes overpopulation will destroy the planet and who has written that forced abortions or sterilizations could be justified under the Constitution.
3)Obama appoints Kevin Jennings to be his Safe Schools Czar. Jennings once headed up GLSEN, a radical gay group that promoted pornographic sex books for children. When asked by a young student what to do about a sexual encounter with an older man in a bus station, Jennings dismissively said, “I hope you used a condom.”
4)Under the influence of Obama’s Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd, and following widespread attacks on the "The Fairness Doctrine", the FCC embraces “localism” and starts thinking of ways to take down large radio companies (most of which employ conservative personalities) and redistribute their money to smaller, minority-owned stations.
5)Obama appoints Ron Bloom to be his Car Czar, a union hack who once called the free market “nonsense.”
6)Obama tries to jam the Employee Free Choice Act through Congress, a union grab bag that would shift power to Big Labor and eliminate the secret ballot for workers voting on whether or not to unionize.
7)Obama gives the United Auto Workers labor union massive ownership stakes in General Motors and Chrysler after both businesses accepted government bailouts. Using the government to hand companies over to their workers? Classic Obama Marxism.
8)Obama’s Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office use Enron-style accounting tricks to disguise the negative consequences of their radical policies. Most recently, the OMB announced it would be counting jobs “funded” rather than actually “created” by its stimulus bill.
9)Obama’s Pay Czar, Kenneth Feinberg, is given truly tyrannical power. He can determine the salaries of corporate CEOs and mid-level employees, and “claw back” money already paid.
10)Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor has previously stated that empathy is a crucial factor in judging, and that her Hispanic upbringing somehow made her more qualified to sit on the highest court in the land.
11)Obama’s Justice Department sues the state of New Jersey because they administer an exam to aspiring police sergeants which more whites pass than minorities. The lawsuit is purely racial and resembles the Ricci case in Connecticut that got Sotomayor in so much trouble.
12)Hillary Clinton gives a speech celebrating the creation of the UN Population Fund, a group dedicated to providing women with “reproductive services” and that has been convincingly accused of working with China to enforce its one-child policy.
13)After Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona criticized Obama’s stimulus, the White House phones up Arizona’s governor and threatened to withhold stimulus funds to that state if Kyl kept up his criticisms.
14)Obama makes another sick deal with Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska. In exchange for Nelson abandoning his concerns about abortion in the health care bill, Obama offers to have the federal government pay all of Nebraska’s Medicare costs…at the expense of taxpayer money from the other 49 states.
15)Obama is caught at the center of a scheme to sell his former Senate seat in Illinois. Most of the blame appropriately falls on Governor Rod Blagojevich, but some of the president’s chief advisers are implicated on tape as well, including Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett. Neither is fired nor disciplined in any way.
16)Obama pays off the AARP. With A. Barry Rand, a longtime Obama crony, helming the AARP, Obama bought off the organization by giving them an astonishing $18 million in stimulus money. In return, the AARP strongly supported the health care bill, even though it included massive Medicare cuts, which the group had criticized in the past.
17)Obama brings in Van Jones as his Green Jobs Czar. Jones was entrusted to coordinate the president’s strategy on so-called green jobs, despite his former membership in a group called STORM that advocated the overthrow of the government, and despite a long history of radical and inappropriate comments. Jones later resigns after it’s revealed he signed a petition questioning whether the government destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11.
18)Obama brings in Jeff Jones. This Jones is a former Weather Underground terrorist (along with Bill Ayers) who later established a group called the Apollo Alliance. The Apollo Alliance wrote the cap and trade bill that Obama later tried to ram through Congress.
19)Obama appoints Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, (Rahm’s brother), to be one of his budget advisors. Emanuel has previously written at length about the need to ration health care.
20)Obama appoints Patrick Gaspard to be his political director. Gaspard is all tied up in the network of corrupt community organizations that produced Obama himself, including the SEIU, ACORN, and the Working Families Party. He has observed that his greatest achievement is "raising two children of color in the U.S." Instead of, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he was born?
21)Obama’s National Endowment of the Arts, under the leadership of Rocco Landesman, tries to coax artists into creating pieces that lionize Obama. In other words, taxpayer money is used to fund artistic propaganda.
22)Obama appoints Robert Bauer to be his White House counsel. Bauer is an ardent ACORN defender and wrote a memo to the Justice Department during the 2008 election asking them to investigate whether the McCain campaign broke the law by criticizing ACORN.
23)Obama gives a speech at the University of Cairo in which he constantly praises the Muslim world and attempts to whitewash its problems with terrorism. The speech is appeasing and useless, since a Muslim bomber would attempt to blow up a Detroit flight less than a year later.
24)Obama attempts to pass a health care bill that, among other egregious provisions, requires every American citizen to purchase health insurance. This tyranny is unprecedented in America’s history, as a requirement for citizenship has never before been in place.
25)Obama joins Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in failing to accept the election results in Honduras, where a peaceful coup overthrew brutal Marxist Manuel Zelaya, who had refused to leave after being voted out of office. Zelaya is now hiding out in the Brazilian Embassy.
Todd Stern is the climate czar. John Holdren is the science czar. Ron Bloom and Ed Montgomery are both car czars. The term "czar" is familiar to almost everyone thanks to Barack Obama. Most of these people have actual titles, and yet they're called czars.
Czars are Obama appointees, most of whom have not faced Senate confirmation. It is the Senate's constitutional responsibility to advise and consent on the president's nominees. But as has been previously reported on Obama Watch News, these nominees have often faced stiff resistance in the Senate because of their radicalism. For example, Obama's nominee to head up the TSA, Errol Southers, is stuck in limbo because he has previously said that climate change is a greater threat to the United States than terrorism, among other radical statements. Obama's nominee for the OLC, Dawn Johnsen, still faces resistance because she has equated pregnancy to bondage.
The solution? Give policymaking power to staff who haven't been confirmed by the Senate. Like the czars of old, these bureaucrats wield great power. Barack Obama's pay czar Kenneth Feinberg has the authority to determine the salaries of American executives -- and even "claw back" money that's already been paid. And like the czars of old, these bureaucrats are completely unaccountable.
While most of America was preparing for the New Year's celebrations, Barack Obama was unveiling a new executive order that retooled how the government classifies information. Thanks to Obama, the "Director [of the] Office of Science and Technology Policy" will now have the power to classify documents. That's John Holdren, the science czar, climate change alarmist (he is the president's senior advisor on climate change), and eugenics fan.
Not only can Holdren issue classification orders, he can assign them the status of "Top Secret". This is usually reserved for information which, if published, could do grave harm to America's national security. "Top Secret" is the highest level of classification in the United States government. It's a power usually reserved for the president, his chief of staff, and high-level cabinet secretaries. But in an unprecedented move, Obama handed this potent authority to his science czar.
Other czars, including Homeland Security Czar John Brennan and Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske, also have classification powers. But this makes sense, seeing as both regularly deal with security and crime policy. In contrast, Vice President Joe Biden doesn't have the ability to classify information. The Secretaries of Commerce, Agriculture, and Transportation can only classify at the "Secret" level, one step below the "Top Secret" category. Now Holdren is more powerful than all of them.
So what exactly is the Obama Administration preparing to hide? Could it be more sketchy data on the climate? Is this a cover-up to protect the draconian, business-killing aims of the Green religion's zealots?
Only in Barack Obama's world does a science czar deserve the unfettered ability to hide information from the public. We need to know why.
John Holdren, Barack Obama's science czar and go-to advisor on climate change, is knee-deep in the negotiations at Copenhagen. There, the president is seeking a treaty that would drastically limit greenhouse gas emissions and hamper the economy.
Holdren and others have said repeatedly that climate change theory is based on sound science. But as recently as 1986, Holdren was predicting that so-called "carbon-dioxide-induced famines" could kill up to a billion people. Why? Man's emission of CO2 was going to cause global cooling which would bring about another ice age and kill off much of the world's food supply. Holdren fashioned the crisis to argue for compulsory population control. But as the atmosphere's temperature continued to increase incrementally over the next decade, Holdren quickly flip-flopped and began predicting that the earth would melt rather than freeze.
Why is Holdren advising the president instead of writing second-rate Choose Your Adventure apocalyptic fiction?
