Glenn Beck’s Next Target: Cass Sunstein

Created: September 04, 2009 15:36 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

As he makes a real impact in pushing conservative fringe attacks on Obama administration officials into the mainstream, Glenn Beck’s Twitter feed has become a must-read. In a message from last night, Beck told his followers to “nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC, and the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. Browner was also administrator of the EPA for all eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Beck’s ostensible purpose here is to expose the “czars” who’ve been appointed by the president. Sunstein stands out like a sore thumb, as he’s been tied up by holds and filibusters for months, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) only filed for cloture on his nomination at the start of August.

How has Sunstein become so controversial? Basically, conservative Websites have read his iconoclastic, theoretical writing and pumped up the bits that sound really strange. A current example comes from CNSNews.com.

Outlined in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation. … This problem could be remedied if governments changed the laws for organ donation, they said. Currently, unless a patient has explicitly chosen to be an organ donor, either on his driver’s license or with a donor card, the doctors assume that the person did not want to donate and therefore do not harvest his organs. Thaler and Sunstein called this “explicit consent.”

The CNSNews headline:

–

*You can follow TWI on Twitter and Facebook. *