Since Glenn Beck’s revelation that Anita Dunn considers Chairman Mao to be one of her two “favorite political philosophers”, I of course, had to take a peek at Anita and found something very interesting; she’s married to Robert Bauer of Perkins Coie who is also Barack Obama’s personal lawyer and general counsel to the Democratic National Committee.   Newsweek did an expose on power couples, here, image 6.  My question would be, why is Robert Bauer listed as part of JohnMcCain2008?  Anybody have some free time to dig and find out why?  Let’s get back to Anita, and then on to another power couple you may not know about.

Anita Dunn from Wiki:

Dunn, began her career in the Carter White House, first as an intern for White House Communications Director Gerald Rafshoon and then worked for chief of staff Hamilton Jordan. She worked on the campaign of Senator John Glenn (D-OH), and on Capitol Hill before joining the firm founded by Bob Squier and Bill Knapp in 1993. She has been the top adviser to Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ), including serving as the chief strategist for his presidential campaign, Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN), and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). She was hired by then Senator Barack Obama in 2006 to direct communications and strategy for his political action committee, The Hopefund. This move signaled to many that Obama was nearing a run for the presidency. While advising Hopefund and Obama in 2006, she was instrumental in the preparations for the launch of Obama for America, and brought many key staffers to the Obama campaign with whom she had worked in Bayh’s and Daschle’s offices.

Obama campaign

In April 2008, it was announced that Dunn, who had joined the Obama campaign in February, would be the director of communications, policy and research operations for Obama for America, where she held the title Senior Adviser and was one of the major decision makers of the Obama campaign. She was featured as one of four top advisers (along with David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs) in a 60 Minutes interview held after then President-elect Obama’s November 4, 2008 victory speech at Grant Park, Chicago, Illinois. She was described, in the 60 Minutes interview, as, “a relative newcomer who handled communications, research and policy.”^[5] During the presidential transition of 2008-09, Dunn trained White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.^{[citation needed]}

White House Communications Director

A veteran political operative, Dunn, as interim White House Communications Director, took the lead in the Obama administration’s struggle with the Fox News Channel^[6] On Sunday, October 11, 2009, she appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources and was asked to clarify a statement she made to Time Magazine regarding Fox News, “it’s opinion journalism masquerading as news.”^[7] She responded by saying, “if you were a Fox News viewer in the fall election, what you would have seen would have been that the biggest stories and biggest threats facing America were a guy named Bill Ayers and something called ACORN. The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”^[8] Continuing to discuss Fox News, she later acknowledged. “It’s not ideological. I mean, obviously, there are many commentators who are conservative, liberal, centrist — and everybody understands that.”^[8]

On June 5, 2009, Dunn delivered a speech^[9] to students at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School^[10] of Potomac, Maryland, in which she stated “The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Theresa — not often coupled with each other, but the two people I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point which is ‘you’re going to make choices; you’re going to challenge; you’re going to say why not; you’re going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.” ^[11] On October 15, 2009, Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck aired a clip of the speech and criticized her on his show. In response to the criticism, Dunn said “”The use of the phrase ‘favorite political philosophers’ was intended as irony, but clearly the effort fell flat — at least with a certain Fox commentator whose sense of irony may be missing.” She also stated that “the Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater.”^[12]

Personal life

Dunn is married to President Obama’s personal attorney, Robert Bauer, a partner at Perkins Coie who has been the general counsel of Obama for America since January 2007.^[1][13] In 2008, Newsweek named Dunn and Bauer the new “power couple” in Washington, D.C.^[14]

While I was looking through the Newsweek expose about power couples, I ran across another that I did not know about, and one that you might find interesting considering the points of view involved.

Remember Samantha Power of the “let’s get fired resign from the Obama Campaign for calling Hillary a ‘Monster‘” fame; who then subsequently went to work for the Obama administration as the senior director for multilateral affairs in January of this year?  I wonder what she does exactly?

Samantha Power Returns: Professor Who Slammed Clinton Will Be Obama Aide

WASHINGTON — Samantha Power, the Harvard University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who earned notoriety for calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a “monster” while working to elect Barack Obama president, will take a senior foreign policy job at the White House, The Associated Press has learned.

Officials familiar with the decision say Obama has tapped Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a job that will require close contact and potential travel with Clinton, who is now secretary of state. NSC staffers often accompany the secretary of state on foreign trips.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Power’s position, as well as that of other senior NSC positions, have not yet been announced. One official said the announcements would be made in the near future.

White House officials would not provide details of Power’s new role.

Sam’s mate?  None other than Cass Sunstein, the new regulatory czar of the Obama administration.

“the internet fairness doctrine”

Barack Obama’s nominee for “regulatory czar” has advocated a “Fairness Doctrine” for the Internet that would require opposing opinions be linked and also has suggested angry e-mails should be prevented from being sent by technology that would require a 24-hour cooling off period.

The revelations about Cass Sunstein, Obama’s friend from the University of Chicago Law School and nominee to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, come in a new book by Brad O’Leary, “Shut Up, America! The End of Free Speech.” OIRA will oversee regulation throughout the U.S. government.

Sunstein also has argued in his prolific literary works that the Internet is anti-democratic because of the way users can filter out information of their own choosing.

climate change justice

It is “desirable” to redistribute America’s wealth to poorer nations, argued President Obama’s newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.

A prominent theme throughout Sunstein’s 39-page paper, entitled “Climate Change Justice,” maintains U.S. wealth should be redistributed to poorer nations. He uses terms such as “distributive justice” several times. The paper was written with fellow attorney Eric A. Posner

“It is even possible that desirable redistribution is more likely to occur through climate change policy than otherwise, or to be accomplished more effectively through climate policy than through direct foreign aid,” wrote Sunstein.

Isn’t there a Global Climate Treaty being signed in Copenhagen in December?

Sunstein: Obama, not courts, should interpret law

The interpretation of federal law should be made not by judges but by the beliefs and commitments of the U.S. president and those around him, according to President Obama’s newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.

“There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him,” argued Sunstein.

This statement was the central thesis of Sunstein’s 2006 Yale Law School paper, “Beyond Marbury: The Executive’s Power to Say What the Law Is.” The paper, in which he argues the president and his advisers should be the ones to interpret federal laws, was obtained and reviewed by WND.

Sunstein: Economic crises could usher in socialism

Economic crises can be used to usher socialism into the U.S., argued President Obama’s newly confirmed regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein.

In his 2004 book “The Second Bill of Rights,” Sunstein used the precedent of the Great Depression to point out that historic economic crises “provided the most promising conditions for the emergence of socialism in the U.S.”

“With a little nudge or a slight change in emphasis, our culture could have gone, and could still go, in many different directions,” wrote Sunstein in his book, which was reviewed by WND.

Last week, WND reported Sunstein wrote in the same book the U.S. should move in the direction of socialism but the country’s “white majority” opposes welfare, since such programs largely would benefit minorities, especially blacks and Hispanics.

Remember what I said a few weeks back about the true battle being between socialism and capitalism?

Here is my personal favorite insanity from Cass.

Sunstein: Take organs from ‘helpless patients’

President Obama’s newly confirmed regulatory czar defended the possibility of removing organs from terminally ill patients without their permission.

Cass Sunstein also has strongly pushed for the removal of organs from deceased individuals who did not explicitly consent to becoming organ donors.

In his 2008 book, “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard Thaler discussed multiple legal scenarios regarding organ donation

. One possibility presented in the book, termed by Sunstein as “routine removal,” posits that “the state owns the rights to body parts of people who are dead or in certain hopeless conditions, and it can remove their organs without asking anyone’s permission.”

“Though it may sound grotesque, routine removal is not impossible to defend,” wrote Sunstein. “In theory, it would save lives, and it would do so without intruding on anyone who has any prospect for life.”

So, do you have a right to be secure in your person (Amendment IV) or does the state own you and your organs?

Samantha Power

Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, in Ireland) is an Irish American journalist, writer, academic, and government official. She is currently affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University‘s Kennedy School of Government. Power has been a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a senior adviser to U.S. Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama until March 2008 when she resigned from the campaign under controversy. After rejoining the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008, she has been named to a position on the National Security Council.

Power was born and raised in Ireland before emigrating to the United States in 1979. She attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a member of the cross country team and the basketball team. She later graduated from Yale University.

From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a journalist, covering the Yugoslav wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic.

When she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1999. Her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, grew out of a paper she wrote in law school. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003. It offers a survey of the origin of the word genocide, the major genocides of the 20th century, as well as an analysis of some of the underlying reasons for the persistent failure of governments and the international community to collectively identify, recognize and then respond effectively to genocides ranging from the Armenian Genocide to the Rwandan Genocide. This work and related writings have been criticized by the historian Howard Zinn for downplaying the importance of “unintended” and “collateral” civilian deaths that could be classified as genocidal^[1]; and by Edward S. Herman for systematically ignoring genocidal projects sponsored by the United States in Guatemala, in East Timor, and Southeast Asia. ^[2]

A scholar of foreign policy especially as it relates to human rights, genocide, and AIDS, she is currently the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

In 2004, Power was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 top scientists and thinkers of that year.^[3] In fall 2007, she began writing a regular column for Time. Power appears in Charles Ferguson‘s 2007 documentary, No End in Sight, which alleges numerous missteps by the Bush administration in the U.S. war in Iraq.

The character of Nadia Blye in The Vertical Hour, a play by David Hare, shares key surface similarities with Ms. Power.

Power spent 2005–06 working in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow, where she was credited with sparking and directing Obama’s interest in the Darfur conflict^[4]. She served as a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign until she was forced to resign for referring to Hillary Clinton as “a monster”.^{[5] [5]} Power apologized for the remarks made in an interview with The Scotsman in London, and resigned from the campaign shortly thereafter.

Her second book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World was released on February 14, 2008. It concerns Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Nations Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad along with Jean-Sélim Kanaan, Nadia Younes, Fiona Watson, and other members of his staff, on the afternoon of August 19, 2003.

Samantha Power speaking to Charlie Rose about Obama’s policy of speaking to dictators without preconditions (from 10.17.2007). We all know how well that worked out…

And my personal favorite interview from Samantha Power in 2002.  Many thanks to Yid With Lid for the following piece.

Israel Hating Samantha Power Named Key Obama Advisor

Friends of Israel may remember Power for a different reason. She is a strong believer in the anti-Semitic notion that Jews Control foreign policy. She has also said that she would recommend that the US SHOULD SEND IN TROOPS TO IMPOSE A SOLUTION ON ISRAEL.

Take a look at the video below from 2002 when she sat for an interview with Harry Kreisler, the director of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley. Kreisler asked her the following question:

Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine – Israel problem, let’s say you were an adviser to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?

Power response is her advice to the President would be to 1) “Alienate” the American Jewish community, and indeed all Americans, such as evangelical Christians, who support the state of Israel, because 2) Israeli leaders are “destroying the lives of their own people.” 3) Pour billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money into “the new state of Palestine”; 4) Stage an American ground invasion of Israel and the Palestinian territories — what else can she mean by a “mammoth protection force” and a “military presence” that will be “imposed” by “external intervention”? — in order to do the exact same thing that she considers the height of arrogance and foolishness in Iraq: an American campaign to remake an Arab society; 5) and Ariel Sharon and Yassir Arafat were on the same moral level:

What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Freidman has called “Sharafat.” [Sharon-Arafat; this is actually an Amos Oz construction — NP] I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention.

But it gets better Power is an advocate of the anti-Semitic view of forign policy made famous by professors Walt and Mearsheimer

Power is an advocate of the Walt-Mearsheimer view of the American relationship with Israel. In a recent interview published on the Harvard Kennedy School’s website, Power was asked to explain “long-standing structural and conceptual problems in U.S. foreign policy.” She gave a two-part answer: the first problem, she said, is “the US historic predisposition to go it alone.” A standard reply, of course. The second problem, though, should give us pause:

Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the “national interest” as a whole is defined and pursued . . . America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.

Power is not just assenting to the Israel Lobby view of American foreign policy, but is also arguing that Israel had something to do with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003–an appalling slander, and a telling one.

Also of note is a recent opinion piece Power wrote for TIME magazine, titled “Rethinking Iran,” the thrust of which rethinking involves the need to engage diplomatically the mullahs and pretend that the Iranian nuclear program is a figment of the paranoid imagination of the Bush administration. She writes:

The war scare that wasn’t [the recent incident between Iranian speedboats and the U.S. Navy in the Straight of Hormuz] stands as a metaphor for the incoherence of our policy toward Iran: the Bush Administration attempts to gin up international outrage by making a claim of imminent danger, only to be met with international eye rolling when the claim is disproved. Sound familiar? The speedboat episode bore an uncanny resemblance to the Administration’s allegations about the advanced state of Iran’s weapons program–allegations refuted in December by the National Intelligence Estimate.

Does anyone think that if the time comes that Power has President Obama’s ear, she will advise him to do anything other than repudiate America’s greatest ally in the Middle East in favor of appeasing its greatest enemy?

One day later Pollak followed up with more information:

Note that this wasn’t her response to a question about her personal views of the conflict, or about what she envisions might be a utopian solution to the conflict; it was a response to a question about what she would tell the President of the United States if she was his adviser. Yesterday Barak Obama took a large stride toward the presidency–helped in some small measure by the speeches on behalf of the Obama campaign that Power has delivered–and it is time that someone asked him, while he is still a candidate, what he thinks of the perverse things his many foreign policy advisers have said about Israel and the Middle East.

So back to the questions at hand:

1. Did Robert Bauer work for the McCain campaign, and if so, what was his role?
2. What is Samantha Power’s actual job description and what is she doing on our dime?