Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

Another thinly veiled attempt at global wealth redistribution.

(Fox News) — Van Jones, the Obama administration’s controversial former “green jobs czar,” has found a new calling: helping to push for a new, global architecture of environmental law that would give Mother Nature the same rights status as humans.

The new movement is almost certain to be showcased at a U.N.-sponsored global summit on “sustainable development” to take place in Rio de Janeiro in May 2012, when similar issues of “global environmental governance” are a major focus of attention.

Jones is taking up the challenge as one of the newest board members of an obscure San Francisco New Age-style organization known as the Pachamama Alliance, which has been creating a global movement to make human rights for Mother Nature an international reality — complete with enforceable laws — by 2014. The Rio summit will create an important midpoint for that campaign.

Jones joined the alliance’s board last December, shortly after the organization announced creation of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature to carry the concept around the world—and install it not only in international law but in the statutes of communities and municipalities across the U.S.

He resigned from the administration in September 2009 after making public apologies for some of his past actions, including the signing of a 2004 petition that questioned whether the Bush administration had deliberately allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to happen, and his previous affiliation with a self-described communist organization, the Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM).

Keep reading…

Related:
U.N. Will Spend Wednesday Debating Whether “Mother Earth” Deserves Human Rights Status
Tree Huggers Rejoice! UN Treaty Will Give “Mother Earth” Same Rights as Humans

Here’s video of Congressman Gutierrez laying out his demands in a very calm demeanor . . . just kidding, he screams and shrieks like a maniac.

HT: Blaze

Then again, who are we going to beat him with? Certainly not Huckabee and Romney.

(Ballot Box) — Forty-six percent won’t vote for Obama, but about the same percentage say the same for Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee.

Forty-six percent of Americans say they definitely won’t vote for President Obama in 2012, but at least as many say the same about Obama’s would-be Republican challengers.

While much has been made about the number of voters who have ruled out voting for Obama, four of the Republicans hoping to unseat the Democratic president face equally strong opposition, according to a USA Today/Gallup Poll released Tuesday.

Forty-five percent of Americans said they would definitely not vote for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), while 46 percent said they would definitely not vote for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R).

That level of opposition tracks with the 46 percent who said they definitely wouldn’t vote for Obama. But the president enjoys a higher number — 31 percent — who said they will definitely vote for him in 2012.

Their devotion to Dear Leader can’t be questioned.

The UN never manages to disappoint.

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Human rights groups and a growing number of governments are working to prevent Syria from being elected to the U.N.’s top human rights body, as President Bashar Assad’s security forces crack down on pro-democracy protesters.

Syria’s election to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council is all but assured as one of four candidates selected to fill four Asian seats unless another candidate enters the race or Syria fails to win a majority of votes in the May 20 election in the 192-member General Assembly.

Since the 53-member Asian Group endorsed its slate — which also includes India, Indonesia and the Philippines — for the council in January, rights groups and some governments have engaged in a behind-the-scenes effort to keep Syria off the council.

Those efforts have gathered steam since a crackdown on pro-democracy protests since mid-March has left more than 350 dead and hundreds wounded, diplomats said.

One diplomat involved in the process, speaking on condition of anonymity because the consultations are private, said he was confident that another country would be found to contest the election but declined to say which countries were being pursued.

Feel good story of the day.

(LWJ) — A senior al Qaeda leader wanted by the Saudi government was among several terrorists killed in an airstrike in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar 12 days ago. The commander, Abu Hafs al Najdi, served as al Qaeda’s operations chief for Kunar province and was responsible for “establishing insurgent camps and training sites” throughout the province. ISAF said Najdi is one of more than 25 al Qaeda operatives killed in Afghanistan over the past month.

Najdi, a Saudi citizen on the list of that country’s 85 most wanted terrorists, was killed along with another senior al Qaeda leader in the April 14 airstrike in the Dangam district in Kunar. Najdi, whose real name was Saleh Naiv Almakhlvi Day and was also known as Abdul Ghani, was number 23 on the list of most wanted terrorist that was issued by the Saudi government in February 2009. US military officials told The Long War Journal that Hajdi was ISAF’s number two target in Afghanistan.

Najdi was meeting with Waqas, a senior al Qaeda operative who was from Pakistan, when both commanders and an unspecified number of other operatives were killed in the April 14 airstrike, the International Security Assistance Force stated in a press release.

As the operations chief for Kunar province, he “directed al Qaeda operations in the province, including recruiting; training and employing fighters; obtaining weapons and equipment; organizing al Qaeda finances; and planning attacks against Afghan and Coalition forces,” ISAF stated. Najdi “operated primarily from Kunar and he traveled frequently between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Najdi was responsible for “establishing insurgent camps and training sites, teaching insurgents, explosive device construction and attack procedures,” ISAF stated.

Racism is alive and well.

“[The enemy] is racist white folks and the government.”

HT: BBTV

He’s Ezra Klein and he’s smarter than us (just ask him).

Via Newsbusters:

Liberals are always trying to place themselves in the center. Washington Post business columnist Ezra Klein tried out the old saw on Tuesday that just as Bill Clinton described himself pejoratively as an “Eisenhower Republican,” Barack Obama isn’t a socialist, he’s a moderate Republican of the George H.W. Bush era:

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal health care; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans have staked out before.

Klein has a huge “but” in this theory — if you leave out the massive stimulus program and TARP and taking over the auto industry, he’s not a socialist.

Keep reading…

“We have a great relationship with them.” — US State Department

(RSN) — Al-Jazeera is spinning the newly released “Guantanamo files,” saying they show that dozens of enemy combatants detained at the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay were innocent. But that’s not what the previously secret documents say about one high-profile detainee, Sami al-Hajj, an Al-Jazeera journalist released from Guantanamo after legal intervention by his Soros-funded lawyer and protests from human rights and press freedom groups.

The controversial allegations against this former “enemy combatant,” as detailed in this document, are being denounced by al-Hajj’s lawyer as “false and discredited allegations.”

But they show that U.S. officials suspected high-level cooperation between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The charges also raise serious questions about why officials of the Obama Administration are currently praising the channel and cooperating with it.

The document says about Sami Muheidine Mohamed al-Haj, known as Sami al-Hajj and Prisoner 345, “His involvement as a money courier, involvement in the transfer of weapons and leadership position within the Muslim Brotherhood, along with his numerous connections made through Al-Jazeera and his pro-jihadist propaganda activities, illustrates his intelligence value.”

The detailed Department of Defense document, posted by WikiLeaks, is designated, “SECRET / / NOFORN / / 20330404DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE HEADQUARTERS, JOINT TASK FORCE GUANTANAMO U.S. NAVAL STATION, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA APO AE 09360”

Dated April 4, 2008, it recommends continued detention under Department of Defense control for the “Guantanamo Detainee” and is signed by U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mark H. Buzby. Incredibly, however, al-Hajj was released only about a month later.

Keep reading…

Just a tad bit overdramatic.

(Ballot Box) — Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), who vetoed a bill last week that would have required presidential candidates to prove they were born in the U.S. to get on the state’s ballot, implored members of her party Monday to move on.

In an interview with CNN’s John King, Brewer called the issue a “huge distraction” and said that doubters have failed to offer any proof that President Obama was born outside the country.

“It’s just something I believe is leading our country down a path of destruction and it just is not serving any good purpose,” Brewer said, calling it a distraction from the much more pressing issue of the economy.

“I think we really just need to move on,” Brewer continued. “Everybody’s had two years to prove, if they wanted to, that he was not born in Hawaii. They haven’t come up with any of that kind of proof.”

Correction, allowing the construction of a victory mosque next to the site where 3,000 people died at the hands of Islamic terrorists makes America look weak and cowardly.

HT: BreitbartTV

Damn, that’s a lot of closet racists (according to MSNBC’s nightly lineup).

Via USA Today:

Still, in the USA TODAY poll, only 38% of Americans say Obama definitely was born in the USA, and 18% say he probably was. Fifteen percent say he probably was born in another country, and 9% say he definitely was born elsewhere.

HT: Drudge

The inconvenient truth of those mass demonstrations, Egypt is full of overly devout Muslims, not secular liberals.

(Arabian Business) — A majority of Egyptians wants the country’s peace treaty with Israel to be annulled and says its laws should “strictly” follow the teachings of the Koran, a survey by Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project found.

Fifty-four percent of 1,000 Egyptians surveyed want the government to end the peace treaty with the Jewish state, Pew said in an emailed statement. About 60 percent of those surveyed said “laws should strictly follow the teachings” of Islam’s holy book.

I can’t help but doubt their sincerity.

BEIRUT (AP) — Thousands of soldiers backed by tanks and snipers moved in before dawn to the city where Syria’s anti-government uprising began, causing panic in the streets when they opened fire indiscriminately on civilians and went house-to-house rounding up suspected protesters. At least 11 people were killed and 14 others lay in the streets—either dead or gravely wounded, witnesses said.

The military raids on the southern city of Daraa and at least two other areas suggested Syria is trying to impose military control on the centers of protests against President Bashar Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for four decades. Residents and human rights activists said the regime wants to terrify opponents and intimidate them from staging any more demonstrations.

The offensive was meticulously planned: Electricity, water and mobile phone services were cut. Security agents armed with guns and knives conducted house-to-house sweeps, neighborhoods were sectioned off and checkpoints were erected before the sun rose.

“They have snipers firing on everybody who is moving,” a witness told The Associated Press by telephone. “They aren’t discriminating. There are snipers on the mosque. They are firing at everybody,” he added, asking that his name not be used for fear of retribution.

Witnesses said busloads of troops poured in before dawn and snipers took up positions on the roofs of houses and high buildings while other security agents searched houses for suspected protesters.

“They are entering houses. They are searching the houses,” said one witness. “They are carrying knives and guns.”

He said people were crying out over mosque loudspeakers for doctors to help the wounded and there was panic in the streets.

“We need international intervention. We need countries to help us,” shouted another witness in Daraa, who said he saw five corpses after security forcesopened fire on a car. He spoke to the AP by telephone.

The forces occupied two mosques and a graveyard.

“Let Obama come and take Syria. Let Israel come and take Syria. Let the Jews come,” shouted one Daraa resident over the phone. “Anything is better than Bashar Assad,” he said, playing on Syria’s hatred for Israel to highlight how much town residents despise their leader.

Last time I checked there was no such thing as the United States in the seventh century, when a warlord named Mohammed invented Islam and used it unite Arab armies and go on a conquering spree. It’s sad because Paul gets a lot of domestic-spending issues right.

Note: The man he’s praising Michael Scheuer blames America’s relationship with Israel for our war with al-Qaeda.

HT: GWP

Trump continues to hammer away.

NEW YORK (AP) — Real estate mogul Donald Trump suggested in an interview Monday that President Barack Obama had been a poor student who did not deserve to be admitted to the Ivy League universities he attended.

Trump, who is mulling a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, offered no proof for his claim but said he would continue to press the matter as he has the legitimacy of the president’s birth certificate.

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” Trump said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”

Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California.

He went on to Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude 1991 and was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama’s 2008 campaign did not release his college transcripts, and in his best-selling memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama indicated he hadn’t always been an academic star.

Trump told the AP that Obama’s refusal to release his college grades were part of a pattern of concealing information about himself.

New civility!

Via GWP

The sad part is these elections were widely considered to be free and fair for the first time in decades.

(Christian Post) — More than 60 churches were burned and thousands of Christian-owned homes destroyed in Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim north after the recent election of incumbent Christian president Goodluck Jonathan, according to the Christian persecution watchdog group Open Doors.

Riots broke out Monday after the preliminary results of Saturday’s vote were announced. Jonathan, who was sworn in as president in May 2010, was announced president over his Muslim opponent Muhammadu Buhari.

“Last year there were more martyrs in Nigeria — approximately 2,000 Christians killed in the northern part — than in any other country in the world,” said Open Doors USA President/CEO Carl Moeller. “Nigeria is such a key country in the spread of Christianity all over Africa.”

“Please join me in prayer for the Christians there, especially for those in the north,” he added.

Muslims complained that the vote tallies were rigged, but independent observers described the election as the fairest in decades.

“The elections for the National Assembly and the Presidency were both credible and creditable and reflected the will of the Nigerian people,” said the Commonwealth observers’ report.

And if you want to see the ROP’s handiwork in Nigeria, here’s a pic of the charred Christian bodies they left behind (Warning: VERY graphic).