Obama's Shadow Government

By Alan Caruba

How many of these names do you recognize?

Adolfo Carrion, Aneesh Chopra, Ear; Devamey, Kenneth Feinberg, Carol Browner, Ed Montgomery, Todd Stern, Cass Sunstein, Ron Bloom, and John Brennan. If none of them ring a bell, it is because they and others are all part of a shadow government of some thirty “czars”; advisors to President Obama who did not submit to the Senate confirmation process and are exempt from Congressional oversight.

Article 2, Section 2, U.S. Constitution, an excerpt: He (the President) shall have power, by and with the advice and Consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not herein provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or the heads of departments.” (Emphasis added)

The Constitution creates two types of positions in the executive branch: principal officers and inferior officers. The first of these are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The latter are not subject to this process.

The Obama administration began with a series of nominations that were found to be tax cheats and forced to withdraw before Senate confirmation. One of them, Van Jones, put in charge of “green jobs” was forced to resign when it became known that he was a self-identified communist. Carol Browner, responsible for environmental and energy issues, was on the board of the Commission for a Sustainable Society, the action arm of the Socialist International.

In the case of “special envoys” George Mitchell, Richard Holbrooke, and Dennis Ross, they all engage in ambassadorial duties, representing the nation to foreign entities and are responsible only to the president. Key elements of the nation’s foreign policy, particularly as regards the Middle East, remain hidden from the public, except in terms of the president’s public pronouncements.

All of the president’s cabinet secretaries in charge of various departments and agencies of the government are vested with administrative powers and all must be confirmed by the Senate. By virtue of the Administrative Procedure Act, these offices must hold public hearings and maintain records when decisions are made, thus creating a paper trail. All of these offices must have separate lines in Congress’s annual appropriations bills.

The bulk of the president’s czars are exempt from such oversight. They advise and answer directly to the president and a number of them exercise control over the decisions made by cabinet secretaries and agency directors, most of whom have been reduced to a role of carrying out their decisions, their agenda.

The U.S. government is being run out of the White House by a cohort of czars/advisors who do not answer to the American people and operate in the dark. This is part of the warning issued in “The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency.” The authors, Ken Blackwell and Ken Klukowski, are both attorneys with extensive knowledge of the Constitution. Blackwell has been an ambassador.

These czars are essentially unconstitutional and illegal.

All presidents have had advisors, but none prior to Obama have had so many and none have been delegated vast powers. They represent a violation of the separation of powers essential to a democratic republic and all violate the need and expectation of transparency and accountability.

Some have demonstrated in their past publications and present statements that they are wholly incompetent to hold such power. The regulations czar, Cass Sunstein, has said that animals should have the same legal rights as humans. The science advisor, John Holdren, has advocated putting chemicals in the drinking water or requiring devices that would neutralize fertility, including compulsory abortion.

John Brennan, the terrorism czar, responsible for homeland security, downplayed the near disaster of the Christmas “underpants bomber” and claimed that all possible intelligence that could be secured from him had been in less than an hour after his arrest!

All these czars function in direct contradiction of the long history of such advisors to presidents and in contradiction to the framework of the U.S. Constitution designed to ensure that the executive branch is answerable to Congress.

The function (or lack of it) of elected senators and representatives is ugly enough as seen in the failure of Congress to exercise caution in the passage of bills that affect the economy and the lives of all Americans. The U.S. debt has increased to levels not seen since World War Two. Obamacare was an ugly process of bribery and closed-door deals that resulted in a straight party line vote that was a repudiation of the will of the people.

No one knows what these unelected and unsupervised czars are doing, but you can be sure they all are loyal advocates and agents of the socialist transformation of America.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Here Comes the President. Hide the Kids!

By Alan Caruba

So the President wants to get the school year off with a speech to all the kids from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Under normal circumstances, this would not arouse my comment although it must be said that I do not recall any previous president doing this.

I do not recall schools announcing they would not let the President’s speech be heard by the children in their care and, most certainly, I do not recall parents saying they would rather keep their children home than have them exposed to the President’s message.

I am not aware of what that message would be. There has been speculation that President Obama just wants to encourage children to stay in school, study hard, and listen to their teachers.

The real message, however, is more subtle than that and people don’t like it. They don’t like the way, in the midst of a major recession, the President began his term in office by flying off to foreign lands, apologizing for America in one fashion or another, and saying strange things like America was not a Christian nation.

Americans are not keen on the imposition of more than thirty “czars”, on top of the existing structure of the executive wing where, until now, the secretaries of various departments were understood to be in charge. And, worse, it turns out that one of those czars, Van Jones, is a communist and former community organizer.

No, Obama’s message is the same one that all wannabe dictators seek to inculcate into the youth of the nation. It is the message that Hugo Chavez is imposing on Venezuela’s school system, magnifying himself into a god-like status. It’s the message that two generations in Cuba grew up with after Fidel took over in 1959.

These days we call it a “cult of personality” and we know it when we see it. Americans have begun to conclude they have already see far too much of Barack Obama. He has held more primetime press conferences in the first months of his term than George W. Bush had in his eight years in office.

This constant exposure goes well beyond the normal attention paid the President which, in itself, is a daily exercise of tea-leaf reading. This constant exposure is deliberate and, while rarely revealing anything specific, is intended to remind everyone that Barack Obama is President.

Now he wants to reach into the nation’s schoolrooms with that message. He wants school children to know that they should turn to him because he occupies the highest office in the land.

This process began during the 2008 campaign when Obama was lightly mocked as “the One” or “the Messiah” for the way his handlers presented him to the world. No one is laughing any more.

He needs a youth corps that looks to him, not their parents or mentors for direction. Chairman Mao had his Red Guards and, of course, there were the famed Hitler Youth. None of this is the stuff of fiction. It was real.

That’s why some schools are saying no and some parents will keep their children home when he speaks.

This President is building a shadow government inside the White House, chosen appointees who will answer to him in “a crisis” and we all know “a crisis” is coming.

What Happens When There is NO Approval?

Don't Just Stand There. Panic!

By Alan Caruba

I am rather tired of having to panic every other day courtesy of the U.S. government. It started with seeing the former Secretary of the Treasury sweating profusely while demanding the Congress give him a blank check for $700 billion to bail out some financial institutions that probably should have been allowed to fail.

Many were given gobs of taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy. Others were merged with those that hadn’t been as profligate.

In October 1929, Variety, the show business newspaper, had a headline that said “Wall Street Lays an Egg.” What followed was some ten years of a Depression that would not go away because the government did everything possible to prolong it in the name of ending it.

The so-called “brain trust” around Franklin D. Roosevelt made every wrong decision available. The Supreme Court had to step in to limit some of the damage at one point. Constitution? What Constitution?

About the only thing we are being told is not a cause for panic is the “war on terror”, a phrase that is no longer allowed to be used in official Washington where, apparently, if you don’t call a duck a duck it is no longer a duck. Nonetheless, we are also told that Afghanistan is the “front line” of the war on you-know-what even though there are no “front lines” in insurgencies or guerrilla wars.

Aside from the economy and the former war on you-know-what we are being assured that there are still sufficient causes for panic. We were told that unless the Cap-and-Trade act was passed, the planet would be destroyed by global warming. Apparently this will happen well before any member of Congress actually reads the bill.

Al Gore has been telling us this for quite some time and recently the Secretary General of the United Nations said we only had four months to act before we were doomed. Americans have, however, concluded, based on empirical observations of cold temperatures, expanding glaciers, and other indicators, that the Earth is cooling. No need for panic after all.

Having failed to panic about global warming, the very same Congress told us that we had to “reform” Medicare or terrible consequences would occur. Some sacrifices will have to be made to save Medicare. These include sacrificing crippled veterans and most of the old people in America because they require too much care. After that, Medicare will be okay, unless you get ill, are over age 65, and actually need medical care. The bill has been renamed KennedyCare to avoid any connection to Barack Obama.

Perhaps the most genuine cause for panic involves the economists on the President’s staff who managed to miss the amount of the federal deficit by two trillion dollars the first time they made their calculation. After that, feel free to panic about a deficit that your great grandchildren will be working to pay off.

Another likely cause for panic is the growing list of “czars” being gathered around the President. They are in charge of all the big things in the nation as well as things such as the Great Lakes and something called Green Jobs.

Following an attack on the homeland which could easily be perpetrated by hired thugs, the President is likely to get on television, peer deeply into his TelePrompter, and announce that his “czars” are now in charge and Congress has been dismissed along with the members of the Supreme Court. Remember, it only took 19 real terrorists to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Lastly, the CDC is presently spending $16 million dollars to ensure that Americans panic over the H1N1 flu which will be arriving the same time as all previous flu seasons. We call them seasons because some form of flu arrives in the autumn. This one, however, is raising questions, not about its lethality, but about the shots that will be involuntarily administered to school children to prevent its spread. Word is circulating that the new vaccine is more lethal than the flu. Were I a parent I would not permit my child to be innoculated with the swine flu vaccine, but if an alternative exists. it's probably a good idea.

Simply said, if you have ever had the flu, your immune system has already built up antibodies against a new strain and the vast number of people who get the flu feel lousy for a week and then recover. There is at this writing, no indication of a massive die-off occurring.

If you get the impression I no longer trust anything the President says or that our government is doing, you’re right. That is why I am refusing to panic.

Instead, I will be attending tea parties and will try to make it to Washington, D.C. on September 12 to join a protest that I hope will cause the White House and Congress to panic.