Senator Chris Dodd, one of the gang still at large that caused the housing bubble and the consequent collapse of the global economy, is also answerable for the Livable Communities Act, which prescribes:

• Where you must live. – In a tightly packed urban ‘community’.

• How you must live. – For instance, how warm your house and water can be. Big Daddy can easily control this by a device fitted to your thermostat that will hold it to an approved degree. You will be monitored for cheating. Your heating in winter and cooling in summer may be switched off completely ‘to save energy’ without your being consulted or even notified. California is a pioneer in this particular leap forward.

• Where you may work. – Near enough for you to get there by walking, biking, or taking a ride on a bus if you must.

• How you may get about. – By foot, bicycle, wheelchair, scooter, skates, or bus if you must. But not by your own car. To do that is to waste fuel and spoil the atmosphere, and so to darken your soul with the worst of sins in the new religion of environmentalism: harming the environment. This will soon be not only a sin but a crime.

You can read the Livable Communities Act, number S.1619, at Thomas.loc.gov.

And you can enjoy a discussion of it by witty people who share your disgust at PajamasTV here.

Life in Britain is increasingly nasty. One of the many conditions making it so are laws conforming to political correctness and EU nonsense about ‘human rights’ – two considerations that guarantee injustice. It was most likely political correctness more than any other consideration that was responsible for the framing of the tyrannical gun laws.

A case in point:

Paul Clarke, an ex-soldier, was standing on the balcony of his home when he spotted a black bin-liner lying at the end of his garden. He went to  see what was in it and found a sawn-off shotgun and two shells. He phoned the Reigate police and  told them what he’d found, then took it to the police station. On his arrival he was arrested, charged with possession of a firearm, and locked up.

At his trial he was found guilty of having a firearm in his possession and will be sentenced  on December 11. The penalty is five years in prison, minimum.

Telling and commenting on the story in Canada Free Press, Jerry A. Kane writes:

In court, Clarke’s defense attorney pointed to a police leaflet that urged citizens to report found firearms. The attorney argued that the leaflet contained no information warning citizens not to touch the firearm, report it by telephone, or take it into a police station.

The prosecutor argued that possession of a firearm is a “strict liability” charge and one’s intent is irrelevant. The prosecutor maintained that Clarke is guilty of having the gun in his possession and therefore has no defense in law against the charge.

Although the judge admitted the case was unusual, he added that “in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.” …

Only in totalitarian societies can handing in a discarded firearm to the police be construed as criminal behavior punishable by imprisonment.

Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984 Kane concludes:

To picture what lies ahead for the UK, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

Lynne Stewart is to go to prison for 28 months.

A Clinton-appointed liberal judge considers that sufficient punishment for her crime, which was, in simple truth, treason against the United States of America.

Many on the left admire her. (It is the patriot Sarah Palin whom they hate and scorn.)

The following, from the Norfolk Crime Examiner, San Francisco, provides some details of the case and a profile of this despicable woman:

On Tuesday, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ordered convicted criminal defense attorney Lynne Stewart to begin her prison sentence, as the court upheld her 2005 conviction for aiding imprisoned terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman.

Despite the conviction for such a serious crime, Stewart had been allowed to remain free for the last four years, while her appeal was pending. During that time, she made speeches and numerous public appearances in which she often thumbed her nose at the country she betrayed, while describing terrorists as “liberationists.“

On February 10, 2005, Lynne Stewart was found guilty of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists and defrauding the federal government. Stewart was contacting al-Gamma’a al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Group) on behalf of Abdel-Rahman. In addition to master-minding the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center which killed six people and left more than 1,000 injured, the blind sheik was convicted of planning to destroy other New York City targets including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the United Nations building, and the George Washington bridge. The Islamic Group dubbed the multiple target attack plan “The Day of Terror.” …

Lynne Stewart knowingly aided a convicted terrorist and avowed enemy of the United States during a time of war and deserves to be executed for her crimes. …

Lynne Stewart aided Rahman’s communications with his followers and even personally issued decries on his behalf. Stewart had defended Rahman in his 1995 trial and continued to visit Rahman in prison. Apparently at some point, Stewart ended her role as his lawyer and began one as his co-conspirator. …

Under the guise of giving legal counsel, Stewart helped pass along a fatwah from Rahman to his followers which commanded: “brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwah that urges the Muslim nations to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are.” …

In Rahman’s 1995 trial, Stewart argued that issuing the order to destroy the World Trade Center was merely a necessary part of his religious duties as a Muslim leader. After Rahman was sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 65 years, Stewart was seen weeping uncontrollably inside the courtroom.

Federal prosecutors filed court papers which said Stewart’s crime was in fact, “egregious, flagrant abuse of her profession, abuse that amounted to material support to a terrorist group, which deserves to be severely punished.”

Amazingly, while U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said Stewart’s actions could have had “potentially lethal consequences” and represented “extraordinarily severe criminal conduct,” the Clinton-appointed judge waited until October 2006 to sentence Stewart…A full 20 months after her conviction.

Though Stewart could have received a 30 year sentence under federal guidelines (which the prosecution sought), Judge Koeltl only sentenced her to 28 months. In an insulting move to the victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he has even allowed her to remain free while her appeal is pending. …

Lynne Stewart seems to have a particular affinity for murderers and enemies of the state. Over her career, she has defended Black Panther Willie Holder, Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, Philadelphia cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and mafia hit-man Sammy “The Bull” Gravano. Stewart has even expressed a desire to defend Osama bin Laden.

In a 2003 speech to the National Lawyers Guild, Stewart listed Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Mao Tse Tung as “heroes.”

In 2002, Stewart told reporter Susie Day of Monthly Review: “I don’t have any problem with Mao or Stalin or the Vietnamese leaders or certainly Fidel locking up people they see as dangerous. Because so often, dissidence has been used by the greater powers to undermine a people’s revolution.”

She went on to talk about her client Abdel-Rahman, by saying: “Now, certainly somebody like Sheikh Omar, who was a world figure, someone who was listened to by the entire Muslim population for being a very learned scholar, deserved to have a platform, deserved not to be entombed in the middle of America and not able to speak. They said the Sheikh was responsible for, I dunno, everything except flat feet. They made it sound like a worldwide conspiracy… He’s a blind, elderly, sick man. He may be a spiritual head …  But he’s certainly not a combatant in any sense whatsoever.” …

Though she has been disbarred, Stewart has become a regular speaker at several law schools. In 2003, one such event at Oregon’s Portland State University Law School was billed as “Lynne Stewart vs. John Ashcroft.” Another engagement at the Arizona State University School of Law was entitled “Emphatically Not Guilty.” A Stanford University speech was canceled by Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan, when she learned of Stewart’s advocacy of violence.

Stewart is certainly not without her admirers. According to the IRS, left-wing activist George Soros gave Stewart a $20,000 donation for her legal defense. In addition to money, Stewart also receives honors. In 2003, the law students at City University of New York voted to honor her with that school’s Public Interest Lawyer of the Year award. However, once news of the award was picked up by the press, the dean thought better of it and rescinded the offer.

Stewart has remained defiant and filled with hatred for the United States. Stewart’s official website (www.LynneStewart.org) states that her prosecution is “an obvious attempt by the U.S. government to silence dissent, curtail vigorous defense lawyers and instill fear in those who would fight against the U.S. government’s racism.”…

Stewart is as hypocritical as she is unrepentant. She has said that she approves of Fidel Castro “locking up” dissidents, but complains that the U.S. government has prosecuted her to “silence dissent.” Apparently, imprisonment is fine when communists use it against those who speak out for their freedom, but somehow wrong when it is used by a democratic republic against their enemies.

However, while Stewart seems to relish the role of dissident martyr, she is neither a dissident, nor is she a martyr. She is in fact, a convicted felon who has aided and abetted a terrorist leader and his organization. Period.

It is more than outrageous that Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean who sat in prison for two years, for shooting a drug smuggler, were not allowed to remain free while their appeals were pending (as is customary for law enforcement officers charged with crimes relating to the performance of their job), though Lynne Stewart who knowingly and willfully gave aid to a terrorist was given that courtesy.

While a lengthy sentence for someone who has colluded with the enemy during a time of war is of course not without precedence, it is also not without precedence that one could be put to death for this crime. Had Lynne Stewart committed her crime during World War II or even the early days of the Cold War, she would have undoubtedly been hanged for her actions.

Stewart however, has been the beneficiary of a federal bench heavy with left-leaning judges and a political climate which now has a great tolerance for what our parents and grandparents knew to be treason.

Every single day which Lynne Stewart was allowed to give speeches, talk to magazines, attend swanky dinners for some leftist cause, and sign autographs for adoring college students was a terrible affront not only to those who were killed and maimed in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but to every man and woman who has ever fought and died for this country. 

President Obama will bow to foreign heads of state – the Saudi ‘king’, the Emperor of Japan – but not to public opinion in America.

Michelle Malkin writes:

President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It’s the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him “a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

How do you say “You lie!” in Mandarin?

While the kowtower-in-chief’s press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama’s globetrotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home. Obama has lectured his critics in Washington to stop talking and “get out of the way.” He has stacked his carefully staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year. …

There are now more muzzled watchdogs in the Obama administration than on the sidelines of the Westminster Kennel Club show. …

In China, O proclaimed himself “a big supporter of non-censorship.” But his FCC “diversity” czar, Mark Lloyd, is bent on re-engineering public airwaves by redistributing free speech rights from conservative haves who earned their success to minority have-nots who demand talk radio entitlements in the name of “media justice.”

And among Obama’s closest advisers is a husband-and-wife duo who specializes in marginalizing and stifling the Democratic Party’s most effective enemies. Just days after White House interim communications director Anita Dunn — the administration’s resident Mao cheerleader and Fox News-basher — stepped down to take a planned role as a “consultant” behind the scenes, her husband, Robert Bauer, stepped up and shoved aside White House counsel Greg Craig.

The problem? Former Clinton lawyer Craig wasn’t tough enough for Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Obama needed an intimate ally who will put hardball politics ahead of policy and the law. Bauer fits the bill.

A partner at the prestigious law firm Perkins & Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Obama for America. He has served as Obama’s personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization America Coming Together during the 2004 campaign.

That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer’s watch. 

During the 2008 campaign, Bauer pooh-poohed GOP complaints about voter fraud. While decrying the Republicans’ “fear message,” it was Bauer who was on a fear-inducing crusade — pulling out all legal stops to silence conservative critics of Obama’s ties to the radical left.

As I’ve noted previously, and in light of Obama’s self-serving praise for political dissent abroad, I note again: It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer and his legal goon squad who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. In a parallel effort launched the same week as Bauer’s legal efforts, a nonprofit called “Accountable America,” spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit, began trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with “warning letters” in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.

It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country into pulling the spot. Team Obama then summoned their troops to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

With Bob “The Silencer” Bauer now working from the inside and Anita “News Commissar” Dunn working from the outside, Obama has a state media police apparatus the Chinese regime itself could love.

Thomas Sowell writes about the Obama administration’s decision to try 9/11 terrorists in a federal court in New York. Read the whole article here.

This is how he concludes:

The mindset of the left … was spelled out in an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said that “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will be tried the right way — the American way, in a federal courtroom where the world will see both his guilt and the nation’s adherence to the rule of law.”

This is not the rule of law but the application of laws to situations for which they were not designed.

How many Americans may pay with their lives for the intelligence secrets and methods that can forced to be disclosed to Al Qaeda was not mentioned. Nor was there mention of how many foreign nations and individuals whose cooperation with us in the war on terror have been involved in countering Al Qaeda — nor how many foreign nations and individuals will have to think twice now, before cooperating with us again, when their role can be revealed in court to our enemies, who can exact revenge on them.

Behind this decision and others is the notion that we have to demonstrate our good faith to other nations, sometimes called “world opinion.” Just who are these saintly nations whose favor we must curry, at the risk of American lives and the national security of the United States? 

Internationally, the law of the jungle ultimately prevails, despite pious talk about “the international community” and “world opinion,” or the pompous and corrupt farce of the United Nations. Yet this is the gallery to which Barack Obama has been playing, both before and after becoming President of the United States. 

In the wake of the obscenity of a trial of terrorists in federal court for an act of war — and the worldwide propaganda platform it will give them — it may seem to be a small thing that President Obama has been photographed yet again bowing deeply to a foreign ruler. But how large or small an act is depends on its actual consequences, not on whether the politically correct intelligentsia think it is no big deal.

As a private citizen, Barack Obama has a right to make as big a jackass of himself as he wants to. But, as President of the United States, his actions not only denigrate a nation that other nations rely on for survival, but raise questions about how reliable our judgment and resolve are — which in turn raises questions about whether those nations will consider themselves better off to make the best deal they can with our enemies.

In our post of  November 10, 2008, we quoted a 12 year-old’s joking definition of marriage:

Marriage is a union between two or more living things.

There are folk in Obama’s White House who wouldn’t find that funny.

Phyllis Schlafly writes at Townhall:

We thought our nation had settled the polygamy issue a century and a half ago, but this nomination makes it a 21st century controversy. Obama’s nominee for the EEOC, a lesbian law-achool professor named Chai R. Feldblum, signed a 2006 manifesto endorsing polygamous households (i.e., “in which there is more than one conjugal partner”).

This document, titled “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision for All Our Families & Relationships,” argues that traditional marriage “should not be legally and economically privileged above all others.” The American people obviously think otherwise, and current laws reflect our wishes.

Feldblum is not the only pro-polygamy Obama appointee. His regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, wrote a book in 2008 called “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness,” in which he urged that “the word marriage would no longer appear in any laws, and marriage licenses would no longer be offered or recognized by any level of government.”

Sunstein argues that traditional marriage discriminates against single people by imposing “serious economic and material disadvantages.” He asks, “Why not leave people’s relationships to their own choices, subject to the judgments of private organizations, religious and otherwise?” …

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) was passed in 1996 by overwhelming majorities in Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified more than 1,000 federal laws that are based on the traditional definition of marriage, including the tax laws that permit married couples the advantage of filing joint income tax returns and the Social Security benefits awarded to fulltime homemakers, both very popular federal laws.

The peculiar push to recognize polygamy as just another variety of marriage is a predictable and logical corollary of the political movement to recognize same-sex marriage. If our government cannot define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, it follows that there can be no law against the union of a man and several women.

Or, to be consistent, none against the union of a woman and several men, a woman and several women, a man and several men.

And why leave it there? Why narrow the field to the living? A person recently married a fairground ride: must such a marriage be monogamous? Why not a person and several fairground rides?

Of course, a limitation to one spouse can be forced by circumstance,  as in the case of the person who married the Eiffel Tower. There just aren’t any other Eiffel Towers. Nothing, however, should prevent the Eiffel Tower itself getting married to several persons.

And if marriage to things is now okay among some sections of public opinion, what about marriage to animals?

In welfare-state Britain  wives are entitled to ‘benefits’ from the state just for being wives, and while polygamy is illegal under the law of the land, the several wives of a Muslim can all get these hand-outs. In effect this is a displacement of British law by sharia. Some Muslim men, in addition to a plurality of wives, keep an animal or two on the side for the further satisfaction of erotic urges; a practice not forbidden by sharia law, as is acknowledged by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in his Little Green Book. Fortunately for the British tax-payer, sharia does not require a man to marry his four-legged ‘bits of fluff’.

Phyllis Schlafly goes on to say:

For years, polygamy, even though it is totally demeaning to women, has been embraced by the powerful American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). …

The ACLU’s feminist president, Nadine Strossen, stated in a speech at Yale University in June 2005 that the ACLU defends “the right of individuals to engage in polygamy.” On Oct. 15, 2006, in a high-profile debate against Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Strossen stated that the ACLU supports the right to polygamy.

Speaking to the Federalist Society on Nov. 18, 2006, the ACLU’s executive director, Anthony Romero, confirmed his organization’s support of polygamy.

The massive immigration that the United States has accepted in recent years includes large numbers of immigrants from Third World countries that approve of polygamy as well as marriage to children and to close relatives. …

Attacks on the traditional legal definition of marriage come from the gay lobby seeking social recognition of their lifestyle, from the anti-marriage feminists and from some libertarians who believe marriage should be merely a private affair, none of the government’s business. These libertarians want to deny government the right to define marriage, set its standards or issue marriage licenses. …

We may have to depend on the Republican Party to maintain government’s proper role in defining and protecting traditional marriage. The very first platform adopted by the Republican Party, in 1856, condemned polygamy and slavery as the “twin relics of barbarism”. …

Here’s a bit of fun: energy environmentalists versus endangered species environmentalists.

From The Washington Post:

Workers atop mountain ridges are putting together 389-foot windmills with massive blades that will turn Appalachian breezes into energy. Retiree David Cowan is fighting to stop them.

Because of the bats.

Cowan, 72, a longtime caving fanatic who grew to love bats as he slithered through tunnels from Maine to Maui, is asking a federal judge in Maryland to halt construction of the Beech Ridge wind farm. The lawsuit pits Chicago-based Invenergy, a company that produces “green” energy, against environmentalists who say the cost to nature is too great.

The rare green vs. green case went to trial Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt.

It is the first court challenge to wind power under the Endangered Species Act …

At the heart of the Beech Ridge case is the Indiana bat, a brownish-gray creature that weighs about as much as three pennies and, wings outstretched, measures about eight inches. …

The case probably will come down to a battle of bat experts.There is no question turbines in other locations have killed tens of thousands of bats. Some strike blades. Others die from a condition known as barotrauma, similar to the bends that afflict divers. It occurs when the swirl of the blades creates low-pressure zones that cause the bats’ tiny lungs to hemorrhage. …

‘Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!’  – not the bat, but the environmentalist, torn between one moral imperative and another incompatible one.

… as Satan says in Paradise Lost.

Satan’s HQ on earth is, as we all know, the United Nations. That hellish institution inverts all values. Now it wants criminals to be ‘protected’ as ‘victims’.

Joseph Klein writes at FrontPage:

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, told reporters at UN headquarters during his October 20th press briefing that criminal detainees are “vulnerable” people who need to be protected by a new UN treaty devoted just to the rights of detainees. He said that detainees deserved as much protection by the international community as children and the disabled do — which those groups already receive under the separate UN Conventions devoted just to them.

Presumably, terrorist suspect detainees would also be covered under this new treaty that Nowak is proposing. In fact, he reiterated his opinion – based, he said, on his experience as an international jurist – that the “victims” of rendition and detention are entitled to “adequate reparations”.

But that is not all. In response to my question whether the United Nations’ view of international law would trump a contrary decision by the highest court of a functioning democracy with an independent judiciary such as the United States, Nowak said that international law has “absolute priority.” His rationale was that a UN member state that voluntarily decides to sign and ratify a treaty is bound by the obligations of that treaty. …

In other words, he believes, along with much of the UN establishment, that neither the U.S. Senate nor our judiciary has the final say as to how the United States’ treaty obligations should be interpreted and administered if the United Nations has a different opinion! … In his view, the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court cannot be used to justify an action that is at variance with international law as interpreted by the relevant UN bodies.

Here is the problem. The United States cannot be forced into surrendering its own sovereignty to some global governance body unless we look the other way and let it happen. Even if our political leaders decided to enter into a treaty that started us down this slippery path, treaties can neither override nor amend the Constitution under the Constitution’s “Supremacy Clause.” As the Supreme Court concluded years ago, it would simply make no sense for a treaty, once in effect as a result of the exercise of the President’s and the Senate’s constitutional powers, to become the instrument for usurping the legal authority of the Constitution that established those powers in the first place.

Thus, the United States Constitution by definition trumps the United Nations Charter, and all other treaties we may enter into under the UN Charter or otherwise, as the governing instrument for the American people.

However, the danger to this constitutional protection for America’s self-governance lurks within our own judiciary. UN officials are filing so-called friend-of-court briefs with the Supreme Court on human rights issues and the Court is increasingly deferring to their views. …

For example … the former UN High Commissioner took it upon herself while in office to advise the Supreme Court that the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights required the Court to reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals denying the detainees’ petition for habeas corpus and ensure a full habeas corpus proceeding … The Supreme Court listened to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. It incorporated her notion of international law into its decision interpreting what was required under the United States Constitution, over the legislation supported by the two elected branches of our government.

With President Barack Obama expected to increase the number of Supreme Court justices who believe that international and foreign law should be reflected in their interpretations of the U.S. Constitution, Mr. Nowak may get his way after all by default.

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.

Here are three recent news stories:

From the Mail Online, a display of criminal ignorance by  a UK judge:

A judge lambasted a rapist for claiming his victim was a liar – then commended him for becoming a Muslim. Judge Anthony Goldstaub QC sentenced Stuart Wood for seven years for the attack, then told him: ‘You have turned to Islam and this promises well for your future, particularly as you are now an adherent of a religion which respects women and self-discipline.’

From The Daily Star, Bangladesh, an example of how Islam respects women:

A septuagenarian moneylender has married a 13-year old girl in Muladi upazila [district] of Barisal after her poor father failed to repay him the borrowed money. The marriage between Akhinur and 75-year old Lokman Sikder was solemnised on September 4, as Azhar Bepari, father of the girl, could not pay Tk 4,000 he had borrowed from Lokman after cyclone Aila hit their Banimordhon village in May this year. Locals said Lokman took advantage of the financial crisis of the poor family and forced Akhinur’s parents to marry off their under-aged daughter to him in default of non-repayment of his credit. When The Daily Star correspondent visited the remote Muladi village after the marriage, there was literally no move to catch the moneylender, who coerced the Bepari couple to marry off their daughter to him [against her will] and also against the will of Lokman’s first wife Ayesha Bibi, 53.

And here’s an AP report giving another example from Yemen:

A 12-year-old Yemeni child-bride died after struggling for three days in labor to give birth … Fawziya Abdullah Youssef died of severe bleeding on Friday while giving birth to a stillborn in the al-Zahra district hospital of Hodeida province, 140 miles (223 kilometers) west of the capital San’a. Child marriages are widespread in Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, where tribal customs dominate society. More than a quarter of the country’s females marry before age 15 …  Youssef was only 11 when her father married her to a 24-year-old man who works as a farmer in Saudi Arabia …