Monday, July 20, 2009

Lies, Evasion, Obfuscation and Dereliction of Duty

There is no question that the saddest thing that I have witnessed in my 65 years on this earth is the situation that we are now facing  in the confirmation process for Sonia Sotomayor, the current nominee for the Supreme Court of the United States. 


My simple view is that the Founding Fathers established and constructed the Supreme Court branch for the purpose of constraining the potential for excesses and human weaknesses which would cause the other branches to stray from the Constitution.  No matter how many left-wing crazies or right-wing crazies or moderate do-nothings populate the legislative and administrative branches, the judicial branch should ultimately bring them back to a constitutionally correct path.

It is there to assure that every citizen is protected from violations of the Constitution, not only from other citizens but also from the Government itself.  Inherent in this is that there should be no consideration given to the ethnicity, gender or economic circumstances of the parties appearing before the court - all should be presumed as having equal protection by the Court.  To allow such things to affect or determine the Court's decision is to, ultimately, deny equal protection under the law and remove the law as the basis for conducting our lives.  To allow biased views to affect their decisions is tantamount to increasing the rights of one party and decreasing the rights of the other party.  It then becomes a fact that compliance with the law is determined on factors other than the written laws and fundamental fairness.

To populate the Court with Justices who may have agendas different  than assurance of full and complete compliance with the Constitution is to make a mockery of the Court.  There are those who argue that a sitting President has the right to have his nominees to the Court confirmed by the Senate, almost without any question.  While there is no arguing that he has a right to to nominate whomever he wishes, it is the Senate's duty to determine whether a nominee meets the moral and ethical standards for appointment to the Court.

The current confirmation process would be laughable were it not so deadly serious for the future of our country,  Lies, evasion, obfuscation of the truth, and dereliction of duty are being practiced by all involved.  Sonia Sotomayor is clearly lying and evading truthful answers on matters that relate directly to her fitness for serving on the Court.  In her carefully worded way, she is doing nothing more or less than invoking the Fifth Amendment.  Should that be allowed for nominees to our Federal Courts?  Many of the Democrats, as well as a sitting Supreme Court Justice, are aiding and abetting her in doing that, and the Republicans are, oh, so carefully trying to avoid hurting anyone's feelings.  Of course, they all are ignoring the violations of ordinary citizens' rights that will occur in the future because the Justices will have more "empathy" for the other litigant.

I guess Sotomayor, due to her rich heritage and her wisdom and her history of actually getting some decisions right on the bench, has earned the right to lie and cheat her way onto the Supreme Court.  I can not give the same leeway to the political hacks that we have in the Senate, both Democrat and Republican.  This is too monumental a decision to be left in the hands of small-minded people.

Had the Founding Fathers been able to even conceive of the American people electing "leaders" with such smallness of mind, they surely would have placed term limitations on the legislators and an impeachment or recall process on the members of the Court for treason against the Constitution.  I guess they just could not think at such petty levels as we see today.

I think it is time to pursue the process of placing limitations on the terms of the fat cats in Washington, and for establishing some level of accountability for Supreme Court Justices.

But, what do I know?  I'm just a citizen.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Don't Drink The Water?

The following is an excerpt from the July 15, 2009 Town Hall article by Michelle Malkin, entitled “Two Scientists, Two Standards.”
The rationality police in the newsroom have not, however, seen fit to print the rantings of a radical secular evangelist now serving as the White House "science czar." John Holdren, Obama's director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, co-authored the innocuously titled "Ecoscience" in the 1970s with population control extremists Paul and Anne Ehrlich.

Earlier this year, Ben Johnson at the online publication FrontPage Magazine provided quotes shedding light on Holdren's embrace of "compulsory abortion" for American women "if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society." In "Ecoscience," Holdren and the Ehrlichs also outlined their desire for "a comprehensive Planetary Regime (that) could control the development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources."

Johnson outlined the book's ugly eugenics plan and neo-Malthusian vision of enviro-crats engineering the population. Yet, there was scant mention of Holdren'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."
Now someone please explain to me that we shouldn’t be concerned that Obama is gathering around him all the scarier elements of Nazi-ism (as developed by Adolf and the Gang) and Communism (Soviet and Chinese style).

Lest you think I’m taking this out of context, you should go read the entire article at http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2009/07/15/two_scientists,_two_standards?page=full&comments=true.

There you will also find that he has selected as his choice to head the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis S. Collins, a geneticist! Now, why a geneticist? It may be a perfectly logical choice, but most can see why, in the light of historical perspective, there would be some concern about the reasons for the particular combination of talents that the Obama team is putting in place.

Or maybe I’m just another right-wing conspiracy theorist.

What do you think?