Senator Puts Hold On Animal Rights Fanatic's Nomination

Dog Owners, Hunters, Farmers Urged To Ask Their Senators To Stop Sunstein Nomination

by JOHN YATES American Sporting Dog Alliance http://www.americansportingdogalliance.org asda@csonline.net

This report is archived at http://eaglerock814.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=general&thread=52

UPDATE July 22, 2009: WASHINGTON (Fox News) -- President Obama's nominee for "regulatory czar" has hit a new snag in his Senate confirmation process -- a "hold" by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who's says he's not convinced that Harvard professor Cass Sunstein won't push a radical animal rights agenda, including new restrictions on agriculture and even hunting.

Senators are permitted "holds" to prevent a vote on a nominee from coming to the floor. They are often secretive and for very specific reasons.

"Sen. Cornyn finds numerous aspects of Mr. Sunstein's record troubling, specifically the fact that he wants to establish legal 'rights' for livestock, wildlife and pets, which would enable animals to file lawsuits in American courts," the Republican's spokesman, Kevin McLaughlin, said in a statement to FOXNews.com.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance contacted Sen. Cornyn earlier this week. Please write to Sen. Cornyn and thank him for his support: http://cornyn.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.ContactForm . Also, please contact your own two U.S., Senators (see below for information and links). Sen. Cornyn’s hold makes it vital to convince the other senators to block Sunstein’s nomination.

WASHINGTON (July 21, 2009) – Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) has lifted his “hold” blocking the nomination of Harvard Law School scholar and animal rights legal strategist Cass Sunstein for the post of regulatory czar in the Administration of his close personal friend, President Barack Obama.

Sen. Chambliss had blocked the nomination based on concerns of farm groups because of Sunstein’s strong animal rights beliefs, including support of stringent regulation of people who raise animals and a ban on hunting. Last week, however, Chambliss met with Sunstein and announced on the Senate floor that he had lifted the hold on the nomination. The Senator added that the way is now clear for the U.S. Senate to confirm Sunstein before its August recess.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance is urging all dog owners, hunters, firearms rights advocates, farmers and civil libertarians to take immediate action by urging the U.S. Senate to reject the Sunstein nomination to head the powerful Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the White House. Taking action now is of the utmost urgency.

Sunstein has the strong support of the Humane Society of the United States, which is the political arm of the radical animal rights movement, according to a July 15 statement by HSUS Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Markarian in The Huffington Post. Referring to the regulations to implement the federal Animal Welfare Act, and new rules about animal fighting and importing dogs, Markarian wrote: “These kinds of legal changes are precisely why Americans need a regulatory czar like Cass Sunstein in charge of OIRA -- to make sure the federal agencies properly implement regulations to enforce these new laws.”

The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) “reviews and alters regulations created by federal agencies,” according to Congress Daily.

Sunstein, who has published 15 books, would have broad powers to review, recommend changes and possibly engineer changes in all federal regulations, including those about dog ownership, farming, hunting on federal lands, and enforcement of gun control laws.

· Giving animal rights groups the power to file lawsuits on the behalf of animals against their owners.

Each of those assertions will be documented later in this report by direct quotations from Sunstein’s published books and speeches.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance believes Sunstein would have a severely negative impact on dog owners, farmers, hunters, gun owners and civil libertarians – Indeed, to all Americans!

This is underscored by Sunstein’s status as a close personal friend and advisor to President Obama since they met in 1992, when Sunstein taught law at the University of Chicago. This will give Sunstein unprecedented influence and access to the President.

It is further underscored by numerous mainstream reports that Sunstein is slated to be President Obama’s next nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. This adds to the urgency of convincing the Senate that Sunstein’s beliefs are un-American and in direct contradiction to the basic principles outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Although Sunstein’s nomination had been blocked by Sen. Chambliss until last week, Government Executive reported that he actually has been working at the job in the White House on a daily basis. Sunstein’s potential use of power – and potential abuse of power – has been increased because President Obama redefined the role of OIRA shortly after taking office. The Wall Street Journal reported July 6: “In a significant, but little noticed, memo written 10 days after taking office, Mr. Obama ordered up a rewrite of how OIRA goes about its work, the first such revision since 1993. ‘Far more is now known about regulation -- not only when it is justified, but also what works and what does not,’ the president wrote. A regulatory review would make use of new tools and would ‘clarify the role of the behavioral sciences in formulating regulatory policy.’ "

The American Sporting Dog Alliance believes that Sunstein will use this position to influence President Obama’s directives to all federal agencies on how to write, interpret and enforce all federal regulations. This includes regulations about agriculture, raising animals, hunting on public lands, and gun law enforcement and procedures. This is a dangerous power to be held by someone of Sunstein’s clearly radical and unconstitutional beliefs.

Thus, we are urging every American to immediately contact both of his or her U.S, senators, and as many other senators as possible, to urge them to vote against the Sunstein nomination.

This link will provide a search engine to locate each state’s senators, and an alphabetical list of the senators to link to contact information: http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm. Each state has two U.S. Senators who represent all of the citizens of that state.

We recommend at least two forms of contact: Send an email as a first step, plus also send a letter or fax, and/or make a phone call. Please do this immediately, as a Senate confirmation vote could come at any moment.

In addition, please send this report to all of your friends and contacts and ask them to help, and post it on any message boards that you use. Also, please write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper and any other papers you read.

1. "We ought to ban hunting" - Cass Sunstein, in a 2007 speech at Harvard University

2. “We should focus attention not only on the enforcement gap, but on the areas where current law offers little or no protection. In short, the law should impose further regulation on hunting, scientific experiments, entertainment, and (above all) farming to ensure against unnecessary animal suffering. It is easy to imagine a set of initiatives that would do a great deal here, and indeed European nations have moved in just this direction. There are many possibilities.” --Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago

3. “…(R)epresentatives of animals should be able to bring private suits to ensure that anticruelty and related laws are actually enforced. If, for example, a farm is treating horses cruelly and in violation of legal requirements, a suit could be brought, on behalf of those animals, to bring about compliance with the law.” --Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago

4. “But if, as a practical matter, animals used for food are almost inevitably going to endure terrible suffering, then there is a good argument that people should not eat meat to the extent that a refusal to eat meat will reduce that suffering. Of course a legal ban on meat-eating would be extremely radical, and like prohibition, it would undoubtedly create black markets and have a set of bad, and huge, side-effects. But the principle seems clear: People should be much less inclined to eat meat if their refusal to do so would prevent significant suffering.” --Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago

5. “Less modestly, anticruelty laws should be extended to areas that are now exempt from them, including scientific experiments and farming. There is no good reason to permit the level of suffering that is now being experienced by millions, even billions of living creatures.” --Cass R. Sunstein, “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer,” John M. Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No. 157, The Law School, The University of Chicago

6. “Everything depends on whether and to what extent the animal in question is capable of suffering. If rats are able to suffer, then their interests are relevant to the question of how, and perhaps even whether, they can be expelled from houses.” --Cass R. Sunstein, Martha C. Nussbaum. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions. (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004). P. 12

7. “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 (Princeton University Press, 2007), p.137

8. “In what sense is the money in our pockets and bank accounts fully ‘ours’? Did we earn it by our own autonomous efforts? Could we have inherited it without the assistance of probate courts? Do we save it without the support of bank regulators? Could we spend it if there were no public officials to coordinate the efforts and pool the resources of the community in which we live?... Without taxes there would be no liberty. Without taxes there would be no property. Without taxes, few of us would have any assets worth defending. [It is] a dim fiction that some people enjoy and exercise their rights without placing any burden whatsoever on the public … There is no liberty without dependency. That is why we should celebrate tax day …” -- Cass R. Sunstein, “Why We Should Celebrate Paying Taxes,” The Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1999

9. “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government intervention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.” -- Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need it More Than Ever, Basic Books, New York, 2004, p. 3

10. “[A]lmost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine. And if the Court is right, then fundamentalism does not justify the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.” - Cass Sunstein, writing in his book, “Radicals in Robes”

11. “…[T]he Second Amendment seems to specify its own purpose, which is to protect the"well regulated Militia." If that is the purpose of the Second Amendment (as Burger believed), then we might speculate that it safeguards not individual rights but federalism.” -- Cass R. Sunstein, “The Most Mysterious Right,” National Review, November 12, 2007

12. In his 2004 book The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, Sunstein claims that “citizens’ rights exist only to the extent that they are granted by the government.” Those views are why the American Sporting Dog Alliance adamantly opposes the Sunstein nomination. His track record is frighteningly consistent.

The American Sporting Dog Alliance represents owners, breeders and professionals who work with breeds of dogs that are used for hunting. We also welcome people who work with other breeds, as legislative issues affect all of us. We are a grassroots movement working to protect the rights of dog owners, and to assure that the traditional relationships between dogs and humans maintains its rightful place in American society and life. The American Sporting Dog Alliance also needs your help so that we can continue to work to protect the rights of dog owners. Your membership, participation and support are truly essential to the success of our mission. We are funded solely by your donations in order to maintain strict independence. Please visit us on the web at http://www.americansportingdogalliance.org . Our email is asda@csonline.net .

The Humane Society of the United States is a radical group and has nothing to do with the United States government as their title implies. Their support of Sunstein should automatically disqualify him for the position.

7 Things You Didn’t Know About HSUS

1) The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is a “humane society” in name only, since it doesn’t operate a single pet shelter or pet adoption facility anywhere in the United States. During 2006, HSUS contributed only 4.2 percent of its budget to organizations that operate hands-on dog and cat shelters. In reality, HSUS is a wealthy animal-rights lobbying organization (the largest and richest on earth) that agitates for the same goals as PETA and other radical groups.

2) Beginning on the day of NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s 2007 dogfighting indictment, HSUS raised money online with the false promise that it would “care for the dogs seized in the Michael Vick case.” The New York Times later reported that HSUS wasn’t caring for Vick’s dogs at all. And HSUS president Wayne Pacelle told the Times that his group recommended that government officials “put down” (that is, kill) the dogs rather than adopt them out to suitable homes. HSUS later quietly altered its Internet fundraising pitch.

3) HSUS’s senior management includes a former spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a criminal group designated as “terrorists” by the FBI. HSUS president Wayne Pacelle hired John “J.P.” Goodwin in 1997, the same year Goodwin described himself as “spokesperson for the ALF” while he fielded media calls in the wake of an ALF arson attack at a California veal processing plant. In 1997, when asked by reporters for a reaction to an ALF arson fire at a farmer’s feed co-op in Utah (which nearly killed a family sleeping on the premises), Goodwin replied, “We’re ecstatic.” That same year, Goodwin was arrested at a UC Davis protest celebrating the 10-year anniversary of an ALF arson at the university that caused $5 million in damage. And in 1998, Goodwin described himself publicly as a “former member of ALF.”

4) According to a 2008 Los Angeles Times investigation, less than 12 percent of money raised for HSUS by California telemarketers actually ends up in HSUS’s bank account. The rest is kept by professional fundraisers. And if you exclude two campaigns run for HSUS by the “Build-a-Bear Workshop” retail chain, which consisted of the sale of surplus stuffed animals (not really “fundraising”), HSUS’s yield number shrinks to just 3 percent. Sadly, this appears typical. In 2004, HSUS ran a telemarketing campaign in Connecticut with fundraisers who promised to return a minimum of zero percent of the proceeds. The campaign raised over $1.4 million. Not only did absolutely none of that money go to HSUS, but the group paid $175,000 for the telemarketing work.

5) Research shows that HSUS’s heavily promoted U.S. “boycott” of Canadian seafood—announced in 2005 as a protest against Canada’s annual seal hunt—is a phony exercise in media manipulation. A 2006 investigation found that 78 percent of the restaurants and seafood distributors described by HSUS as “boycotters” weren’t participating at all. Nearly two-thirds of them told surveyors they were completely unaware HSUS was using their names in connection with an international boycott campaign. Canada’s federal government is on record about this deception, saying: “Some animal rights groups have been misleading the public for years … it’s no surprise at all that the richest of them would mislead the public with a phony seafood boycott.”

6) HSUS raised a reported $34 million in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, supposedly to help reunite lost pets with their owners. But comparatively little of that money was spent for its intended purpose. Louisiana’s Attorney General shuttered his 18-month-long investigation into where most of these millions went, shortly after HSUS announced its plan to contribute $600,000 toward the construction of an animal shelter on the grounds of a state prison. Public disclosures of the disposition of the $34 million in Katrina-related donations add up to less than $7 million.

7) After gathering undercover video footage of improper animal handling at a Chino, CA slaughterhouse during November of 2007, HSUS sat on its video evidence for three months, even refusing to share it with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. HSUS’s Dr. Michael Greger testified before Congress that the San Bernardino County (CA) District Attorney’s office asked the group “to hold on to the information while they completed their investigation.” But the District Attorney’s office quickly denied that account, even declaring that HSUS refused to make its undercover spy available to investigators if the USDA were present at those meetings. Ultimately, HSUS chose to release its video footage at a more politically opportune time, as it prepared to launch a livestock-related ballot campaign in California. Meanwhile, meat from the slaughterhouse continued to flow into the U.S. food supply for months.

http://www.consumerfreedom.com/article_detail.cfm/article/184

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.