That's Barack Obama from today's incredible press conference where the Illinois senator combined petulance and ignorance in an unnerving display of just how unqualified he is to be Commander-in-Chief

For the record, Kennedy and Khrushchev met in Vienna in June of 1961.  We were not on the brink of nuclear war.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was 15 months in the future.  

 

Wednesday's decision to list the polar bear as a "threatened species" under the federal Endangered Species Act will create enormous burdens on many industries, but especially coal and oil production, shipping and large infrastructure projects like highway construction.  My new Townhall.com column outlines the best legal strategy for pushing back against the listing's burdens.

The listing decision combines with the California Supreme Court's diktat on same sex marriage to mark the worst week in the legal world for conservatives in a very long time.  The opportunity to rebuke the California Supreme Court will be on November's ballot in the Golden State --see ProtectMarriage.com-- but the burdens of the polar bear decision will be with us for years to come unless the impacted industries push back hard and immediately.

More than three dozen villages have not even been reached yet by relief workers or the Chinese Army. 

CaringforChina.org operates orphanages and medical clinics in this region, and donations to the earthquake relief fund they have established will be at work in the area immediately.  I have known their leaders for more than a decade, and they are an extraordinarily effective Christian group that are superb stewards of the resources they are donated.

You can give online, or by sending a check to:

Caring for China
3300 S. Fairview
Santa Ana, CA 92704.

All contributions are fully tax deductible.

Photo: Liu Jin/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images

A constitutional amendment to the California Constitution will almost certainly qualify to be on the ballot in November as more than a million signatures had already been turned in even prior to the Caluifornia Surpreme Court's putsch today.  You can contribute to the effort and volunteer to help pass it and thus rebuke the out-of-control California Supreme Court at ProtectMarriage.com.

See Justice Baxter's ringing denunciation of the majority's usurpation of the People's rights below.  Then get involved.  You don't have to live in California to help deliver this message.  Advocates of judicial imposition of same sex marriage will be pouring millions of dollars into defeating the amendment, and it will require an enormous effort to send the message that despite the ambitions of judges and cultural elites, majorities do matter in a Republic built on constitutional majoritarianism.

This will be an enormously important election for the future of the country. Marriage is of course a central institution that society must protect and nurture, but the idea of separation of powers and accountability for courts is also a bedrock principle of the rule of law, and it is eroding before our eyes.  The California electorate will be asked to decide if it is willing to be ruled by judges, whether it will simply accept being told what they will do and when they will do it.  I hope every interested citizen in the country, every religious leader fond of religious liberty, every legislator who takes his or her job seriously will grasp that the vote on the marriage amendment on the Califoria ballot is really much much more than just a marriage amendment and concerns far more than just California law --it is a vote on who rules, judges or the People, and its result will mark a decisive beginning of a rollback of judicial imperialism or a capitulation to the courts on this and on any other issue the courts decide to impose their will upon.

Townhall has launched its new monthly magazine, and we are pleased that Fred Thompson is also going to be contributing via Townhall.com and the magazine to recapturing momentum for the conservative movement.

But don't believe me.  Try the magazine for free for a month by visiting GetTownhall.com.

Or subscribe and get a free copy of Michael Yon's extraordinary new book, Moment of Truth in Iraq.

The China quake death toll could reach 50,000.

Please consider a donation to the earthquake relief fund of CaringforChina.org, an extremely reputable and long serving group operating orphanages and medical clinics in the region hardest hit.

You can contribute online or by sending a check to:

Caring for China
3300 S. Fairview
Santa Ana, CA 92704

	By Aly Song, Reuters
A relative of an earthquake victim prays for the dead at the site of a collapsed school building in Wenchuan, Sichuan province, Thursday.

Today's decision by the California Supreme Court is yet another judicial putsch.  It is appalling.  Incredibly, a feverish will to power on the part of small numbers of judges is rapidly eroding a citizen's standing as the ultimate lawgiver.  Courts unbound by any sense of limits, by any sense of restraint, threaten the basic understanding that has long undergirded the Republic --that the laws  proceed from the open consent of the people, and that the ultimate laws, the federal and state constitutions, are documents of fixed meaning and structure, not merely window dressing on the rule of judicial elites or empty phrases waiting for elites to fill them with meaning.

Today's ruling framed the question before the California Supreme Court this way:

 

The question we must address is whether, under these circumstances, the failure to designate the official relationship of same-sex couples as marriage violates the California Constitution.

That was not in fact the central question.  The central question was whether the representative nature of the California state government, including its initiative provisions, would be upheld.

They were not.  The California Supreme Court asserted its ultimate power today in a way that is shameful and deeply destructive of the ability of a free people to govern themselves. 

UPDATE:  From Justice Baxter' opinion partially concurring and partially dissenting:

Only one other American state recognizes the right the majority announces today. So far, Congress, and virtually every court to consider the issue, has rejected it. Nothing in our Constitution, express or implicit, compels the majority’s startling conclusion that the age-old understanding of marriage —an understanding recently confirmed by an initiative law — is no longer valid. California statutes already recognize same-sex unions and grant them all the substantive legal rights this state can bestow. If there is to be a further sea change in the social and legal understanding of marriage itself, that evolution should occur by similar democratic means. The majority forecloses this ordinary democratic process, and, in doing so, oversteps its authority....

But a bare majority of this court, not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the People themselves.Undeterred by the strong weight of state and federal law and authority, the majority invents a new constitutional right, immune from the ordinary process of legislative consideration. The majority finds that our Constitution suddenly demands no less than a permanent redefinition of marriage, regardless of the popular will....

I cannot join this exercise in legal jujitsu, by which the Legislature’s own weight is used against it to create a constitutional right from whole cloth, defeat the People’s will, and invalidate a statute otherwise immune from legislative interference. Though the majority insists otherwise, its pronouncement seriously oversteps the judicial power. The majority purports to apply certain fundamentalprovisions of the state Constitution, but it runs afoul of another just as fundamental— article III, section 3, the separation of powers clause. This clause declares that “[t]he powers of state government are legislative, executive, and judicial,” and that“[p]ersons charged with the exercise of one power may not exercise either of the others” except as the Constitution itself specifically provides. (Italics added.)

History confirms the importance of the judiciary’s constitutional role as a check against majoritarian abuse. Still, courts must use caution when exercising the potentially transformative authority to articulate constitutional rights. Otherwise, judges with limited accountability risk infringing upon our society’s most basic shared premise — the People’s general right, directly or through their chosen legislators, to decide fundamental issues of public policy for themselves.

Judicial restraint is particularly appropriate where, as here, the claimed constitutional entitlement is of recent conception and challenges the most fundamental assumption about a basic social institution.

The majority has violated these principles. It simply does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice.

Yesterday's listing of the polar bear as "threatened" was accompanied by Secretary of the Interior Kempthorne's assurances that the listing would not be allowed to be manipulated to regulate greenhouse gas emissions throughout the U.S.

This was false hope dressed up as "guidance."  The law is the law, and the Endangered Species Act is very specific about how federal actions that could harm a protected species are to be treated, and the criminal penalties for those who ignore the ESA's commands.  Very quickly the environmental activists served notice that they would be using the ESA to stop greenhouse gas emissions. From USA Today's coverage:

Kassie Siegel, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the group does not accept Kempthorne's view.

The act requires federal agencies to take steps to reduce or eliminate those impacts on threatened species, she said. "There is no exemption for greenhouse gas emissions."

If the government fails to address global warming, "we can and will go to court to enforce the law," she said.

I am writing a column on a legal strategy that should be deployed to blunt the almost certain blizzard of litigation that the environmental groups will launch to force review of all greenhouse gas emission operations that rely on new federal permits.  For the moment, though, the advocates of Kyoto-style command-and-control regulation of gases tied to climate change have won an enormous victory. 

UPDATE:  An e-mail on where the first wave of ESA-polar bear litigation could hit:

Hugh, 

 

     I just heard on the podcast your request for a pilot to let you know about FAA involvement in private aircraft certification.  The short answer is that the FAA is HEAVILY involved in the approval and certification of all things aviation.  Every aircraft design must be certified by the FAA before the manufacturer may sell it, and then every single airplane that rolls off the production line must have an FAA-issued Airworthiness Certificate and an FAA Registration Certificate before it can ever leave the ground.  The environmental groups will have no trouble tying aircraft to the polar bear now that it is on the Endangered Species List.

 

Here's another one:  Nearly all small, propeller driven aircraft in the world use high octane, LEADED GASOLINE.  How easy will it be to connect the burning of leaded fuels to global warming?  That alone could devastate the thousands of businesses that rely on small aircraft to conduct their operations, i.e. flight schools, sight-seeing, air-freight, air-taxi's, etc.  This is very serious.

 

Hope that helps.  Keep up the good work.

In an article well worth reading yesterday at the Weekly Standard, Stanley Kurtz asked the question of what did Barack Obama know about the controversial views and statements of his friend, mentor and pastor of twenty years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and when did he know it.  Kurtz obtained a year's worth of Wright's writings, included as part of his monthly magazine, Trumpet. In analyzing the 2006 messages, Kurtz comes to the conclusion that Rev. Wright's political views were on such full public display that it's just not plausible to believe Senator Obama when he claims he never heard anything offensive from his pastor until he had to finally cut him loose after the National Press Club debacle.  He knew, and he had always known how radical he was.  Yet he chose to attend regularly for 20 years.

The larger question, though, comes from ABC News' The Note blogger, Jake Tapper, who in March of this year wondered who is scrubbing Trinity United Church of Christ of any references to Trumpet Magazine.  There used to be links on the Church website to get the magazine. There doesn't seem to a website available for the magazine now.  The only reference is here, which shows the Trumpet logo, and lists previous sermons you can purchase, but when you try to navigate to other parts of the magazine, you get redirected to a temporary domain host. 

Thanks to BizzyBlog, here are three instances where Barack Obama has graced the cover of Trumpet in the recent past.



January, 2005



February, 2006 - Note that the person on the right in the same row as Senator Obama is Louis Farrakhan.



March, 2007

CNN anchor John Roberts' pledge to make this a Wright-free zone notwithstanding, it is very relevant to try and determine whether Senator Obama is being truthful about his relationship with Wright and his knowledge of when he discovered how radical Wright's views are.  It goes to his judgment, and whether or not he subscribes to the same views as the people with which he had surrounding him.  The question is, why is it so hard to obtain the magazines?  Why have they all been disappeared? 

After a lot of digging, in addition to the 2006 volume that Kurtz has reviewed, here are two other random months that for now are available on the web. 

September, 2005

Here's some excerpts from Rev. Wright:

The conservative fanatics are made up of folks who are called “al-Qaeda” and/or “God Bless American Christians.” I will say more about that in a moment. The conservative fanatics are the people who make Christianity and “moral values” a matter of gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research and fighting a war against terrorism.

And,

Since 9/11/01, George Bush has convinced many Americans that to criticize his illegal war against Iraq is to be unpatriotic. That is conservative fanaticism.

And,

 

The faith handed down by Samuel DeWitt Proctor, the faith taught to me by Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Sr. and Dr. Mary Wright, the faith lived by Dr. Thomas Howard Henderson and the faith that teaches Africans to use their minds as Jesus said (“Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy mind”), that faith is not exciting. That faith does not make headlines. That faith does not bomb abortion clinics. That faith does not say that a vote against George Bush is a vote against God. That faith does not say that gays are going to hell. That faith does not say that we are right and everybody who is not on our side is wrong. The Christian faith that was given to me (from my past, that I keep looking back over) is a faith that faces each new challenge with the understanding that there would have been no civil rights movement if it had been left up to Christian fanatics. Christian fanatics used the Bible to keep us in slavery. Christian fanatics used the Bible to justify segregation and apartheid!

And,

Conservative fanatics line up on the side of al-Qaeda or they line up behind George Bush. Both are terrorists! Both believe that war is the answer. Both believe in murdering innocent people. George Bush lied to the public.

Remember, Obama had consented to have a picture of himself with his arm around Wright on the cover of this magazine eight months earlier.  Still think Obama had no idea in what Wright believed?

Two months later, in November of 2005, here is sections of what Rev. Wright had to say. 

Tom DeLay had finally gotten caught!  He had been indicted not once but twice and his illegal gerrymandering of the districts in Texas negate the Black vote have been exposed for what it is; but my mother was dying.The White House Iraq Group had been exposed.The lies that they had told since 09.11.01 and the plan to take over Iraq (and secure all the oil in the Middle East for American interests!) that had been in place since 1992 was coming to light; but my mother was dying.The cooking of the books, the fixing of the facts to make it justify an illegal war was being exposed day-by-day; but my mother was dying.  The politicians who had pulled the wool over Christians eyes with their lies, their deceptions and their putting all of their attention on gay marriage were being caught “with their drawers down”; but my mother was dying.

And,

Rove and Libby found themselves in the crosshairs of a Special Investigator and Grand Jury probe.Their deliberate attempts to “out” Valerie Plame to pay her husband back for daring to tell the truth about the lies told about the Bush Administration; but my mother was dying. Ms. Plame who was an undercover CIA operative was married to a man high up in the Bush Administration.  He found out that there was no enriched uranium being sent to or exported from Niger as lied about in the Bush “evidence” and quoted in the Presidential State of the Nation speech.  He had to go!  Because he dared to say that there were no weapons of mass destruction before we invaded Iraq, he had to be silenced and the White House Intelligence Group sought out to silence him.  Christians needed to know that; but my mother was dying.  Bush appointed an undercover conservative to the Supreme Court; but my mother was dying. I had warned the members of our congregation and the citizens of this nation prior to the election in 2004 that Christians needed to be concerned about the 2004 Presidential Election because two possible Supreme Court judges would be named by whoever was in the Oval Office; and nobody listened.  I needed to speak a prophetic word to help connect the dots between what I said in the fall of 2004 and what was happening to us in the fall of 2005; but my mother was dying.

And,

The Bush-Cheney-Halliburton financial rip-offs that were taking place not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but now in New Orleans, in Louisiana and Mississippi were matters that the Christian church needed to address; but my mother was dying.  The President was trying to put onto the Supreme Court a woman who had never been a judge.  Christians were coming to me asking me, “How can he do that?”  I wanted to point out in a national forum that his daddy had done the same thing.  Judge Clarence Thomas never sat on a judicial bench either!  I needed Christians to see the games that were being played on them by the persons in whom they had put so much misplaced faith; but my mother was dying.

About three months later, Obama's face was part of an all-star line-up on the cover of the February, 2006 edition.  Joining Obama's face was that of Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam co-founder Elijah Muhammad, Dick Gregory, and Johnny Cochran. 

Trumpet Magazine was founded in 1982.  Each month, the magazine is offered and promoted in the Trinity United Church of Christ bulletin.  Members of that church are affiliated with the magazine.  Yet for twenty five years, the musings of Jeremiah Wright, and others he esteemed, are hiding somewhere outside of routine view, with the Barack Obama campaign hoping they stay hidden from view until after the election in November.  Who will be the first blogger to find the extended cache of Trumpet magazines? Who will be the first MSM'er to connect the dots and call Senator Obama on why this radical pastor wasn't considered by Obama to be radical until polls in Pennsylvania forced him to publicly disown him?   

Let the Trumpets sound. 

If Secretary of the Interior Kempthorne announces that the polar bear is now officially "threatened," the impacts on the American economy will be extreme and almost certainly not anticipated or understood by the public at large.

Background column number one here.

Background column number two is here.

The Endangered Species Act operates in a very unaccountable fashion, and if the polar bear is listed as a "threatened" species, every federal action --the grant of a permit, the award of a grant-- that leads even indirectly to the emission of greenhouse gases will come under at least the theoretical review of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service pursuant to Section 7 of the ESA.  MSM continues to report the controversy as though its impact will be limited to the arctic region, when in fact it is as likely to delay or destroy economic activity in any part of the lower 48 as it is in Alaska. 

The immediate response of impacted industries and consumers should be a series of test cases to force the delineation of the reach of the Act's application to the polar bear and the gases allegedly causing the destruction of its ice habitat, test cases brought  in jurisdictions most reasonable on such matters.  Allowing the ESA to slowly ensnare industries previously unregulated by its commands via suits in jurisdictions cheryy-picked by environmental activists would be the worst possible result.

UPDATE:  The bear is listed.  We are all officially polar bear predators now.

As expected, the death toll is shooting up, and thousands --tens of thosusands?-- are still trapped.

Please consider a donation to the earthquake relief fund established by CaringforChina.org, which can be made over the web or by sending a check to

Caring for China
3300 S. Fairview
Santa Ana, CA 92704

   
AP.

 

ElectionProjection's updated electoral college map shows Obama with a 10 vote lead over Mccain, but it also shows Obama winning Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, not to mention Colorado, Iowa and Minnesota:

 

What Hillary's blow-out, 41% win last night shows us, though, is that with Obama as the nominee, West Virginia is going to be deep red in November, and that suggests a very-real-if-difficult-to-detect-in-the-polls antipathy towards Obama.

Politico.com has a Ben Smith story that notes a Clinton supporter waving a bowling pin after last night's big win, "a symbol of the cultural distance between Obama, who bowls poorly, and the state’s working-class white voters."

But Clinton's margin of victory is too huge to simply assign it to one demographic.

There's obviously a "Bradley effect" at work, but that doesn't account for the landslide either. 

It seems as Obama has cemented his image of being from outside of the American political mainstream, and the attention paid to his "bitter" comments, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Michelle Obama have all been contributing factors.

The vast majority of Americans would gladly vote for an African-American provided that his or her politics are mainstream.

But Obama's aren't, and as that recognition spreads, his numbers plummet among the vast number of voters who live in the middle and who follow politics only sporadically.

Which means Obama's map is shrinking before our eyes while McCain's is expanding.  Suddenly the light blue states have to be considered the battlefield for the fall, and McCain has to be looking at a strategy and a running mate that puts even more pressure on Obama in the industrial midwest.  Of course Romney puts Michigan in play, as well as Colorado where Romney did very well in the GOP caucuses, but Minnesota's Governor Tim Pawlenty also brings strengths in the upper midwest. Either man as veep would expand McCain's map in key areas.  By contrast, it is difficult to imagine an Obama veep who can take a red-leaning state and put it in play.  Fred Barnes wrote that Obama needs to play defense in the must-win state of Pennsylvania with a pick of Ed Rendell, but of course Rendell's got huge negatives, as does almost every other Obama potential pick.  The key point is that Obama is playing defense  --the huge momentum of early spring is gone, and it isn't coming back.  Dismiss West Virginia and Kentucky as they will, but Team Obama knows the glow is gone and the rapidly freezing ice over his reputation as hard left will be difficult to break after the primaries are over.

Lots of white knuckles among GOP congressmen considering another special election loss, but the silver lining last night is that the more voters focus on Obama and the hard left agenda he represents and would work with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid to enact, the more they reject him and his policies.  If Hillary was the nominee  --Bill carried West Virginia in '92 and '96-- the GOP would be staring down a very long barrel, but Howard Dean, the netroots and the MSM have managed to deliver a fractured party and a deeply flawed nominee, one whose past and whose policies could resurrect the fortunes of an old soldier promising tough talk, security and a second American century.

Hillary won by 40%?

Put West Virginia in the McCain column.  Along with Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Barack Obama is far outside the mainstream, and Democrats know it.  

Yes, GOP candidates are facing tough weather, as the special elections show.

But not against hard left candidates, and Senator Obama is hard left.

First, please consider a donation to CaringForChina.org.  This organization runs orphanages and medical clinics in China, with a specific mission of caring for abandoned children with specific health needs.  One of their orphanages was evacuated in the quake and the children --many with special needs-- are in tents outside their home.  Their medical facilities are going to be operating at full tilt for the foreseeable futurte and your help will go directly to victims of the disaster.  CFCC has opened a special earthquake fund.  You can contribute online or send a check to:

Caring For China
3300 S. Fairview
Santa Ana, CA 92704

Thank you.

I had lunch today with three Hoover Institution fellows --Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell and Peter Robinson.  I am not in the habit of quoting my lunch guests, but VDH and Peter will be my guests in the first two hours of today's show and I have a rain check from Dr. Sowell.

This is why Hoover is such a crucial institution in the U.S.: It allows some of greatest public intellectuals to work and write throughout the year.  To get a copy of the Hoover Digest, go to www.Hoover.org, click on publications and sign up for the Digest.

And if you want to correspond with Peter, you can at robinsononthecorner@mac.com.

Barack Obama is the least-prepared-to-be-president major presidential candidate in modern times.

The combination of naivete and arrogance in the interview he gave to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg ought to stop every supporter of Israel in his or her tracks. Obama's "we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy" is a huge red flare.  There isn't much nuance needed when terrorist organizations on Israel's northern and southern borders are proponents of the destruction of Israel.  "Nuance" when it comes to dealing with terrorists equals appeasement at best, surrender at worst.

John Hinderaker comments here.

Jennifer Rubin comments here and here.