Feds on Animal Rights

Unbelieveable. These are the types of people that our administration want to put into power? Seriously? Ridiculous. ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

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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.

In his published writings and speeches, Sunstein has advocated:

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

· Very strict regulations about animal ownership, farming and hunting.

· The elimination of hunting.

· The elimination of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

· Moving toward a vegan vegetarian society.

· Rewriting the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

· And restrictions on free speech.

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 Wall Street Journal called the OIRA "obscure but powerful."

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.

Here are some direct quotes from Sunstein to illustrate our concern:

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.

Thank you for helping.

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@... .