Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is the prime mover in restricting the supply of water to the farms of California’s hitherto fertile Central Valley, so severely that the farmers are going out of business with  dire consequences. Food production is dropping, and local unemployment is 40% and rising.

She is doing this in order, ludicrously, to save the hypomesus transpacificus, a wee fish that she and her fellow environmentalists apparently believe the world cannot conceivably do without. [See our post below, Smelt fishy, 2 September, 2009]

You would think, wouldn’t you, that Nancy Pelosi is passionate about preserving endangered species?

Yet, according to the American Spectator, she herself ‘circumvented ESA [Endangered Species Act] requirements for two endangered species on one of her own investment properties‘.

While hypocrisy so characterizes the left that no new instance of it can be surprising, the wickedness of what Pelosi is doing is too outrageous to be passed over with a sigh.

This is an abuse of power that should be punishable by law. Is it? If not, why not?

Mike Adams, at Townhall, while telling the story of one farmer’s ruin, points out more consequences of this scandal:

For nearly 20 years, California’s water availability has been precariously tied to decisions made by bureaucrats and politicians using the power of the Endangered Species Act. The effects of the far-reaching ESA could ultimately lead to the destruction of one of the most fertile valleys in the world, the reduction of the nation’s food supply and greater dependence on foreign food sources that don’t meet high U.S. food standards. The use of this overriding legislation that mandates federal control of our nation’s land and water is representative of the overall trend in this country of increased government intrusion into the lives of its citizens. That a statutory decree exists that can override human suffering in the service of preserving animal habitats is a serious indictment of our government’s commitment to preserve liberty and the American way of life. …

In August, fifty mayors from the San Joaquin Valley asked President Obama to come see the devastation first-hand. He refused. Obama previously denied a request to designate California as a federal disaster area. To do so would have acknowledged the fact that Obama’s radical environmental policies are, quite literally, scorched earth policies. Just go to the San Joachim Valley and you’ll see plenty of scorched earth.

The person so strangely elected president of the United States ‘dreams’ – as the president of France says –  of a world without nuclear arms. Or at least of an America without  nuclear arms. Obviously the dreamer does not care if Iran and North Korea have them.

Paul Greenberg writes:

Since the United States now has joined Europe in endorsing the mullahs’ right to develop nuclear power for ever so peaceful purposes, does it really matter whether this site [near Qom] or the next oh-so-secret installation has started producing nuclear weapons yet? The switch from nuclear power to nuclear weapons is less a scientific than a political decision for the Iranians at this point. And it can be made — and carried out — quickly.

Does anybody …  believe that Iran’s little fuehrer isn’t bent on producing a nuke of his own, and that his rocket scientists aren’t working feverishly on a way to deliver it?

It’s also an open secret (much like Iran’s nuclear processing plants) that, whatever his forceful statements about how Iran won’t be allowed to develop nuclear weapons, Barack Obama isn’t really going to do anything to prevent it. Any more than the United Nations is. Any more than the Clinton and Bush administrations prevented North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il from acquiring a nuke of his own.

Just as he’s slipsliding when it comes to the war in Afghanistan despite all his tough talk about having to win it, it becomes clearer that this president is willing to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. You can tell because he’s been so emphatic about never accepting such an outcome. …

We’ve come to a not so pretty pass when Americans have to rely on the president of France — France! — to face the truth and tell it to the world. After the American president had delivered one of his sweetness-and-light nuclear-disarmament lectures at the United Nations, it was left to Nicolas Sarkozy to tell it with the bark off the next day at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh:

“President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries (North Korea and Iran) are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council resolutions. … I support America’s ‘extended hand.’ But what have these proposals for dialogue produced for the international community? Nothing but more enriched uranium and more centrifuges. And, last but not least, it has resulted in a statement by Iranian leaders calling for wiping off the map a member of the United Nations (Israel, of course). What are we to do? What conclusions are we to draw? At a certain moment hard facts will force us to make decisions.”

Not necessarily. Not as long as the president of the United States continues to consult, consult and consult. And then temporize, temporize and temporize. Until one day Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has his nuke. …

John Bolton … pretty much summed up the fine mess brewing in Iran:

“The more sophisticated Iran’s nuclear skills become, the more paths it has to manufacture nuclear weapons. The research-reactor bait-and-switch demonstrates convincingly why it cannot be trusted with fissile material under any peaceful guise. Proceeding otherwise would be winking at two decades of Iranian deception, which, unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems perfectly prepared to do.”

They know what’s best for us. Stop griping. It’s all for our own good. Who wants liberty when you can be nursed like a child by the government if you’ll only do what you’re told?

David Harsanyi writes at Townhall:

How can Americans be expected to wrestle with the myriad dangers that confront them each day? Insalubrious cereal? Unregulated garage sales? …

You know what we desperately are crying out for? An army of crusading federal regulatory agents with unfettered power. Who else has the fortitude and foresight to keep us all safe?

Mercifully, as The Washington Post recently reported, many of President Barack Obama’s appointees “have been quietly exercising their power over the trappings of daily life … awakening a vast regulatory apparatus with authority over nearly every U.S. workplace, 15,000 consumer products, and most items found in kitchen pantries and medicine cabinets.”

If there’s anything Americans are hankering for in their everyday lives, it’s a vast regulatory apparatus. Hey, it’s dangerous out there.

At least in the eyes of global warmists, Osama bin Laden has his good points: his life-style is very ‘low carbon-footprint’.

PETA, however, wouldn’t approve of him at all – he gassed kittens. But they would see a good side to Adolf Hitler, a vegetarian.

What feminists on the left think of Osama we don’t know: when it comes to the treatment of Muslim women, they prefer to remain non-judgmental. Still, the left in general can give both Osama and Adolf full marks for being anti-Jewish.

Phyllis Chesler writes:

Osama bin Laden’s first wife and one of their sons, Omar, have written a Memoir, Growing Up Bin Laden. … For a son to go public, exposing his father, and for him to stand by his mother, is unheard of, wondrous, heroic, and quite dangerous. Growing Up Bin Laden shows us how cruel, weird, misogynist, and tyrannical Osama is both as a husband and a father. …

Osama did not allow modern medicine for his children; refrigerators were forbidden, as were air conditioners, phones, toys, and televisions. Osama expected his sons to also become suicide killers and he subjected his young children to dangerous and frightening military maneouvers. According to Omar and Najwa, Osama also murdered his children’s pets in chilling ways …

Once, Osama killed a pet monkey. He had one of his lackeys run it over with a car. Osama said “The monkey was not a monkey but was a Jewish person turned into a monkey by the hand of God.” He gassed a new litter of puppies … to see how long it would take them to die.

But what was it that sent Osama totally over the edge? What compelled him to plan the mass murders of civilians on every continent? Omar tells us. When Osama saw American female troops on Middle Eastern Arab soil, he cried out. “ Women! Defending Saudi men!”

Read  more here.

John Hinderaker of Power Line quotes Lawrence Kadish (writing in the Wall Street Journal, October 12):

It is the interest on the national debt that makes our future unstable. The exploding size of that burden suggests that, short of devaluing the dollar and taking a large bite out of the middle class through inflation and taxation, there is no way to ever pay down that bill. …

In stark but simple terms, unless Americans are made aware of this financial crisis and demand accountability, the very fabric of our society will be destroyed. Interest rates and interest costs will soar and government revenues will be devoured by interest on the national debt. Eventually, most of what we spend on Social Security, Medicare, education, national defense and much more may have to come from new borrowing, if such funding can be obtained. Left unchecked, this destructive deficit-debt cycle will leave the White House and Congress with either having to default on the national debt or instruct the Treasury to run the printing presses into a policy of hyperinflation.

It is against this background that Washington is now debating whether to create social programs it can’t afford.

He comments on this – and we agree:

It is hard to overestimate the danger to which the fecklessness of our current leaders in Washington exposes the nation.

But if  Americans are ‘made aware’ of the great danger they are in – and many of them are aware, as witness the tea parties and the 9/12 protest – what can and should they do about it? ‘Demanding accountability’ would not be enough, even if they got it.

‘Comes the hour, comes the man.’ But does he? And who is he?

The Democrats are doing so much harm to the country, both domestically and internationally, and arousing such intense opposition among voters, that a Republican revival looks highly probable. What’s missing is the leader – not ‘a’ leader, but ‘the’ leader.

If we knew him we would be able to say what makes him the right man. (Or the right woman. I’m only saying ‘man’ for convenience.) But as he’s not standing unmistakable before our eyes, we can at least try to describe what sort of person he should ideally be: what experience he should have had; what beliefs he should hold; what qualities and abilities he should have acquired or been endowed with by nature.

Completely irrelevant are his (her) ethnic derivation, racial descent, color, or class.

First, he must be proud of his country. He should know its history. He should want above all to preserve what it has always stood for: liberty. He should believe that American power is a force for good in the world and be determined to maintain it.

Next, he should have been a leader in some walk of life, and have proved himself to be trustworthy and competent at directing others.

He must of course be a person of honor, decency, civility, and probity. He should deeply desire to be just, but hold the law and the Constitution in higher esteem than his own inclinations.

He should be a good judge of character, know how to weigh advice, but be intelligently decisive and firm in implementing what he decides.

He should be able to talk to the nation plainly, to say what he means and mean what he says.

He should broadly share the values, understand and respect the aspirations of his fellow Americans.

He must be a zealot for national prosperity, keen to let the free market work as the unique bread machine that it is, by keeping taxes low, government curbed, and private property safe.

Finally, he should be the sort of commonsensical soul who takes himself with a pinch of suspicion.

Is he out there somewhere? Can anyone put a name to him?

Jillian Becker    October 13, 2009

There is yet another subversive adviser in the White House.

From the Telegraph:

Miss [Dalia] Mogahed, appointed to the President’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified” and the majority of women around the world associate it with “gender justice”.

The White House adviser made the remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party.

The group believes in the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world.

Miss Mogahed appeared alongside Hizb ut Tahrir’s national women’s officer, Nazreen Nawaz.

During the 45-minute discussion, on the Islam Channel programme Muslimah Dilemma earlier this week, the two members of the group made repeated attacks on secular “man-made law” and the West’s “lethal cocktail of liberty and capitalism”.

They called for Sharia Law to be “the source of legislation” and said that women should not be “permitted to hold a position of leadership in government”. …

Miss Mogahed … said: … “The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance.” …

Miss Mogahed admitted that even many Muslims associated Sharia with “maximum criminal punishments” and “laws that… to many people seem unequal to women,” but added: “Part of the reason that there is this perception of Sharia is because Sharia is not well understood and Islam as a faith is not well understood.” …

Miss Mogahed, who was born in Egypt and moved to America at the age of five, is the first veiled Muslim woman to serve in the White House. Her appointment was seen as a sign of the Obama administration’s determination to reach out to the Muslim world. …

During this week’s broadcast, she described her White House role as “to convey… to the President and other public officials what it is Muslims want.” …

What Muslims want? Such as ‘the destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world’?

Of course, the more we understand about Islam and Sharia, the more we are likely to admire them. Or possibly not.

But we have no doubt at all that the President is listening sympathetically to Dalia’s advice.

Lawrence Solomon writing for the Financial Post exposes fibs and crimes in the global warming racket:

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York — the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

The latest news from the Arctic — delivered daily via satellite — is no better. Two years ago with the Arctic ice in rapid retreat, the doomsters, convinced of the coming of an ice-free Arctic, could scarcely contain themselves. Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature. …

The red faces aren’t all caused by Nature’s refusal to cooperate in Earth’s demise. The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with £1-billion by illicitly trading carbon credits. In Australia, authorities are investigating claims that a supplier to Carbon Planet, a carbon trading business, has been using fake carbon trading certificates to persuade forest dwellers in Papua New Guinea to sign over the rights to their forests under a UN scheme called REDD, for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.’’ Australia’s REDD-faced Climate Change Minister Penny Wong may now be unable to tout Carbon Planet — about to list on the Australian stock exchange on the promise of A$100-million in REDD assets — at the upcoming climate change meetings in Copenhagen. Other dodgy carbon dealings led to the suspension of the UK branch of SGS, one of the world’s largest clean energy auditors, and of the Norwegian certification company DNV.

If universities could blush, Stanford would be setting the skies ablaze with its latest embarrassment, an attempt to censor a global warming documentary about to be released that had filmed one of its professors, global warming catastrophist Stephen Schneider. “You are prohibited from using any of the Stanford footage you shot, including your interview of Professor Stephen Schneider,” Stanford demanded in a letter. “Professor Schneider likewise has requested that I inform you that he has withdrawn any permission for you to use his name, likeness or interview in connection with any film project you may undertake.”

What caused Stanford and Schneider to go ballistic over the release of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, by independent Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer? He asked Schneider about his many predictions of global cooling catastrophe in the 1970s. …

From Politico:

It’s the biggest mystery in global finance right now: Who conducted a sneak attack on the U.S. dollar this week?

It began with a thinly sourced but highly explosive report Monday in a British newspaper: Arab oil sheiks are conspiring with the Russians and Chinese to quit using the dollar to set the value of oil trades — a direct threat to the global supremacy of the greenback.

Is it true? Everyone from the head of the Saudi central bank to U.S. officials scrambled to undercut the story, but no matter.

With the U.S. economy on the ropes and America by far the world’s biggest debtor, investors aren’t feeling as secure about the dollar as they used to. And the notion of second-tier economies ganging up on Uncle Sam didn’t sound so far-fetched.

For American officials, the possibility of the dollar losing its long-term dominance in global commerce is a nightmare scenario because it would likely mean sharply higher interest rates at home and a declining ability to finance the U.S. debt. No one believes it could really happen right now, but stories like the British report this week make it seem incrementally more likely.

So the piece by Robert Fisk of the Independent shocked currency traders around the world and almost instantly sent the value of the U.S. dollar spiraling downward and the price of gold skyrocketing to an all-time high, as a hedge against a weakened dollar.

The website drudgereport.com quickly amplified the impact of the story with a headline atop the site: ARAB STATES LAUNCH SECRET MOVES WITH CHINA, RUSSIA, FRANCE TO STOP USING DOLLAR FOR OIL TRADING …

“You read that story, and you do two things: You sell the hell out of dollars and you buy gold,” said Les Alperstein, president of the financial research firm Washington Analysis. “The story has a lot of credibility, with some caveats.”

So who wanted dollars diving and gold rising? In other words, who is Fisk’s source, and why did he or she want to tank the dollar? It’s the global currency version of the old Washington parlor game of speculating on the real identity of Deep Throat.

No one knows. …

But what we do know is that Robert Fisk is the toadie of Arab despots, the propagandist of  terrorists, the hater and calumniator of Israel, the denigrator of America, and above all the veteran inventor of ‘news’. His reports of Middle Eastern wars have notoriously been full of vicious fabrications, designed to denigrate and impugn Israel. He does not need a Deep Throat – he is his own source. And he has not been ineffective. We grant him that. There can be little doubt he has contributed significantly to the continuing misery of the Palestinian people and the intensity of European anti-Semitism. Now he has had his biggest effect yet. There may be very little truth in his story, but such a tale told at such a time was sure to have a dramatic and dire effect.

This is a triumphant moment for a villain, the consummation of a career in bearing false witness.

Here is Mark Steyn talking with Hugh Hewitt on the question of whether the war in Afghanistan should be abandoned:

In Afghanistan, it was illegal, it was under the Taliban, illegal by law, by law, for a woman to feel sunlight on her face, illegal by law. And leftist feminists, the left wing feminist organizations in the Western world had absolutely nothing to say about that.

And George W. Bush liberated those Afghan women. He got them out of their burkas. He allowed them to feel sunlight on their face. A year after the Afghan invasion, there were a higher proportion of women elected to the Afghan parliament than to the Canadian parliament. And the idea that you can simply allow this disgusting party of the Taliban effectively to return large parts of Afghanistan to a prison state, is, speaks very poorly for us.

But in a sense, you know, in hard national interest terms, if you want to get out, the thing to do would be to figure out a way to get out without making it look like a defeat. The minute you re-burkaize parts of Afghanistan, what you’re telling the world is that you have been defeated, that the patrons of Osama bin Laden are now back in charge. You couldn’t stick it. You couldn’t stick it. You’re, as the historian Niall Ferguson says … the superpower with ADHD. It hasn’t got the staying power, can’t concentrate long enough… harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.

Now having said that, I think we’ve got confused here. We’re not nation building in Afghanistan. You can’t nation build in Afghanistan. It’s never been a nation in the sense that anybody in the United States or Sweden or Switzerland would recognize. You’re there to identify bad guys, kill bad guys in large numbers. And what has happened, I think, in the sort of multilateralization of the mission there, which wasn’t true at the beginning, by the way, this was a largely American operation in the fall of 2001, with a few special forces from select allies. But since all the sort of non-combat members of NATO have gone in, your Germans and Norwegians and all the rest, the whole thing’s being schoolgirl’d up. And the young men on the streets of Afghanistan and in the hills know that the rules of engagement favor them enormously. And they’ve made a mockery of these NATO forces. NATO and the United States should be there to kill large numbers of bad guys, and nation building is something that will take thousands of years in Afghanistan.

Kill large numbers of the bad guys. Find a way of getting out without  making it look like defeat. Stop using soldiers as social workers. Give up any idea of nation-building.

In our view, all good advice.

But the Afghan women will be re-burkaized. For them to be saved, it is Islam itself that needs to be defeated.

First Islam must be recognized as an irredeemably evil ideology. Then it must be anathematized, in the same way as racism has been anathematized.

If the energy and passion that has gone into saving the world from the imaginary threat of global warming were to be invested instead into saving it from the real threat of Islam, Afghan women might reasonably hope to live their days in the light – and warmth – of the sun.