Chinese citizen Pan Chunyan's baby was born dead, "black and blue all over," after government thugs grabbed her from a grocery store and forced her to have an abortion. According to Monday's New York Times:

Pan Chunyan was grabbed from her grocery store when she was almost eight months pregnant with her third child. Men working for a local official locked her up with two other women, and four days later brought her to a hospital and forced her to put her thumbprint on a document saying she had agreed to an abortion. A nurse injected her with a drug.

China's "one-child policy" is something that our progressive vice president "fully understands" and won't second guess.

Addressing social and budgetary challenges faced by the U.S. and China in the wake of respective population booms, Biden told his audience, "Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I'm not second-guessing -- of one child per family."

He added that the problem he had with the policy is that it is unsustainable in that retirees are supported by fewer workers.  Not that it's pure evil, mind you, just that they shouldn't kill quite so many people that it impacts pensions.

Naturally, the Obama Administration issued a "clarification," saying that it "opposes all aspects of China's coercive birth limitation policies" and the vice president finds them "repugnant." A Biden spokeswoman said that he was arguing that the one-child policy is "unsustainable" and therefore was criticizing it. Even if she's right, that means he only thought to criticize it on public finance ground and not on moral grounds.

Clarifications notwithstanding, the attempt to aggressively limit population growth is a hallmark of the Left--not just with Communists and National Socialists, but with progressives.

Margaret Sanger, one of the early leaders of the Progressive Movement, wrote that we should "apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization, and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to the offspring." She also believed that "the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind."

Sanger's "no-child policy" didn't stop Hillary Clinton from saying she admired her "enormously" when receiving the Margaret Sanger award from the country's number one abortion provider. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Clinton said she is a progressive in the style of the "progressive era at the beginning of the 20^th century"--Sanger's era--one "that we need to bring back to American politics."

What is that number-one abortion provider? Sanger's Planned Parenthood, an organization so sacred to progressives that they declare war on any group that dares to challenge it. Please note at this point that the organization overseeing China's one-child policy is the "National Population and Family Planning Commission." If nothing else, progressives are great and giving bad things happy names.

Sometimes they're more blunt. President Obama's science czar, John Holdren, floated the idea of forced abortions, forced sterilizations and government oversight of human population levels.

In a 1977 book, he and two other environmentalists wrote, "To provide a high quality of life for all, there must be fewer people."

The trio discussed possible government programs to regulate the population.

Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.

That's not far off from Pan Chunyan's forced-abortion injection.

Holdren's book continues with advocating a two-child policy:

Holdren and the Ehrlichs offer ideas for "coercive," "involuntary fertility control," including "a program of sterilizing women after their second or third child," which doctors would be expected to do right after a woman gives birth.

Are modern Progressive Democrats calling for forced population control in this country? No, but as Biden says, maybe they wouldn't second-guess it.

So far we've seen that the number one progressive in the United States, President Obama, saw fit to add to his administration a scientist who one advocated forced sterilizations. The number two progressive, Hillary Clinton, greatly admired a woman who advocated forced sterilizations, and said her entire political ideology is rooted in bringing back the movement that first championed population control in this country. The woman that she and other progressives identify as one of their movement's founders, Margaret Sanger, laid the framework for the country's biggest abortion provider and it remains one of the most fiercely protected organizations on the Left.

While they are unlikely to call for forced birth control anytime soon, is it a stretch to imagine that one day they may attempt to control population growth with a penalizing tax? Many taxpayers already get a credit for having children--how long before progressives flip that around and impose an additional tax on, say, any child after the third. Or perhaps, they can merely provide insurance coverage for the first two children and it's a 100% out of pocket cost after that? On the surface, they could make a pretty convincing argument: Now that government is in charge of health care, we all share each other's burden. Is it fair to ask people with no children to help pay for couples that have six? Shouldn't people kick in a little more if they want to have an "excessive" number of children?

Now that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said that the government has the power to penalize any behavior with taxation, won't taxation as a form of birth control be the next logical step in the century-old progressive campaign to limit populations?

President Obama's Health Care Act and the subsequent Supreme Court stamp-of-approval clears any legal obstacles to the longstanding progressive vision of government control over "family planning". Forget about forced abortions or sterilizations--why go to all that trouble when it's legally possible now to just impose massive financial penalties on people that have "too many" children? 

President Obama just exercised his pardoning powers, absolving nine people of minor offenses. No news there--except strangely four of them had cocaine-related violations, a drug that Obama admitted using. But the pardons are a reminder of past pardons by President Clinton, who handed them out like candy to political supporters.

However, the AP noted that Clinton's pardons were simply "controversial." [continue reading]

Remember Joel Pollak, the Harvard Law student who questioned a feisty Barney Frank last year? He's now a human rights lawyer and running for Congress in Illinois, and conservative media powerhouse Andrew Breitbart is hosting a fundraiser for him Wednesday in Los Angeles (yes, the page contains a typo--it's 2010 not 2009).

Pollak moved from South Africa to Skokie when he was a boy, moving back briefly to work in South African politics. His unique story can be found on his website, along with this statement on why he's running:

After being encouraged for several months by friends in the district, Joel decided to run for Congress in September 2009, after attending a town hall meeting on health care held by incumbent representative Jan Schakowsky. Joel caught paid organizers on tape as they instructed their supporters to block opposing views from being heard. The experience convinced him that the 9th district needed a new voice.

Of course, all we heard from the elite media was that town halls were attended by Astroturf activists who were manipulated by the Republican Party, but as Pollak's footage shows, they got it backwards. Breitbart picked up the story and it went national. Pollak wrote:

The HCAN video became a YouTube sensation, the "smoking gun" in the controversy over which side of the debate was "Astroturfing"--i.e. creating a false image of grass roots support. I have since discovered that the video contains clues about how the entire nationwide health care campaign was planned and executed by congressional Democrats and the White House.

But that wasn't all. Pollak also noted that his Congressional opponent's husband, Robert Creamer, authored a progressive instructional manual--while serving a prison sentence for bank fraud and tax evasion--to convince Americans to support universal health care. His plan was put into action by the Obama Administration.

The book was endorsed by leading Democrats and their allies, including SEIU boss Andy Stern--the most frequent visitor thus far to the Obama White House--and chief Obama strategist David Axelrod, who noted that Creamer's tome "provides a blueprint for future victories."

In the book, Creamer draws lessons from decades of experience on the radical left, including the teachings of arch-radical Saul Alinsky, and several episodes from Rep. Schakowsky's political career. He also lays out a "Progressive Agenda for Structural Change," which includes a ten-point plan for foisting universal health care on the American people in 2009[.]

Ah, Saul Alinsky. Creamer learned from the master, writing, "To win we must not generate understanding, but emotion--fear, revulsion, anger, disgust."

Just as the Obama Administration has applied Creamer's manifesto, so it has adopted fellow Chicagoan Alinsky.  The "founder of modern community organizing,"  Alinksy was the author of Rules for Radicals, a Machiavellian the-ends-justify-the-means tactical manual for organizing 1960s revolutionaries.

Alinksy was quite the radical himself. He told Playboy in 1972:

I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did. I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.

In the famous campaign photo of Obama writing on a chalkboard in the classroom, he's writing an Alinsky theory. Alinksy's son thought that Obama successfully applied his father's theories when he said, "Barack Obama's training in Chicago by the great community organizers is showing its effectiveness. "

And Hillary Clinton even wrote a master's thesis on Alinksy.

What is it with Chicago? We haven't even mentioned Blagojevich or Rahm Emanuel's shower incident with Eric Massa, and I'm already horrified.

As if Chicago doesn't have a bad enough reputation for corruption, Pollak's father made things worse for the city's image when he blew the whistle on its organ allocation system, which was unfairly allocating livers in a way that prevented them from reaching the most deserving patients.

The younger Pollak apparently has a similar revulsion to corruption, having famously stood up to Barney Frank, whose scandals need not be mentioned in this post. Even if you don't agree with Pollak' politics, please read his biography to learn more about this truly interesting person.