Environmental Wacko From 'Peaceful Uprising' Gets Prison Time, Supporter Threatens Violence

If you do the crime, be prepared to do the time.

A sentencing hearing turned into a rally supporting an environmental activist who has become an antihero after disrupting a government auction of oil and gas leases near two national parks in Utah.

Protesters gathered around the courthouse and dozens were arrested Tuesday as Tim DeChristopher launched into a lengthy address urging others fight climate change by taking similar steps of civil disobedience.

But U.S. District Judge Dee Benson said there was no excuse for the 29-year-old former wilderness guide's blatant disrespect for the rule of law.

Benson sentenced DeChristopher to two years in prison on Tuesday, making him the first person to be prosecuted for failing to make good on bids at a lease auction of Utah public lands. He ran up bids on 13 parcels totaling more than 22,000 acres near Arches and Canyonlands national parks in 2008.

"My intent both at the time of the auction and now was to expose, embarrass and hold accountable the oil and gas industry, to the point that it cut into their $100 billion profits," DeChristopher told Benson.

How about protesting the government that does nothing to earn money yet profits more than any industry could ever imagine?

In one fell swoop he goes from "antihero" to martyr. Yes, really.

DeChristopher certainly is a martyr for those who want to focus attention on human-caused global warming, and he probably takes some comfort in that. He said he has no regrets. But this extreme sentence, more than a rallying point, is an indictment of the judicial system that zeroed in on one young man who was acting according to his conscience but looks the other way when others illegally make the opposite point.

Two years is extreme? Really?

It gets even more amusing.

Since his arrest, DeChristopher has become a hero to others worried about environmental damage from drilling and convinced that greenhouse gases released from burning fossil fuels are warming the Earth, causing extreme weather, drought, wildfires and ultimately starvation, homelessness and disease for millions around the globe.

He's convinced of things that just aren't happening.

Maybe a couple of years in the clink will make him comes to his sense. Yet judging by the company he keeps, that's an extreme long shot.

The case has become a symbol of solidarity for environmentalists, including celebrities like Robert Redford and Daryl Hannah. Peter Yarrow of the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, led a sing-a-long and rally outside the courthouse in the hours leading up to the hearing.

The event was organized by DeChristopher's nonprofit group, Peaceful Uprising.

Carlos Martins, a college student at the protest rally, said after the sentencing that "they gave him that sentence to deter us, but they're proving that by making civil disobedience impossible, they're making violent actions inevitable."

OK, so if they don't get their way, just threaten violence. Thanks for the heads-up, Carlos. Now the authorities know your name.

Does Carlos see the irony that he's with a group called Peaceful Uprising while he's threatening violence?

Meanwhile, leave it to convicted child molester to rally to his side.

"Throughout American history, acts of civil disobedience have led to change. Think about the Underground Railroad that helped escaped slaves to freedom, or about the courageous actions of people like Rosa Parks, who refused to stay in the back of the bus simply because of their skin color. Without this kind of defiance of unjust laws, our country would likely still be denying people of colour basic freedoms."

Rosa Parks? Huh?

Prosecutors: Radical Hag Lynne Stewart Deserves Lengthier Sentence

I figure since they won't execute her then life in prison will suffice, especially since this terrorist-loving beast is most unrepentant.

Attorney Lynne Stewart, convicted of helping an extremist cleric pass messages from prison to terrorist followers, deserves an enhanced sentence because of statements she made after her conviction and sentencing, U.S. prosecutors said.

A federal appeals court in New York in November ruled that Stewart, 70 should be resentenced in a way that reflects the “seriousness” of her crime. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan, who originally sentenced Stewart to 28 months in prison and is presiding over the case, has scheduled her resentencing for July 15.

Stewart was convicted by a federal jury in New York in 2005 for helping her former client, the blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, smuggle messages to followers in defiance of U.S. prison restrictions. Stewart, who was free pending appeal, was ordered to prison Nov. 19 and is currently being held at a federal jail in lower Manhattan.

“Stewart has made it clear that if given the opportunity to engage in the unlawful conduct for which she now stands convicted she would do it again,” federal prosecutors in the office of Preet Bharara said in court papers.

Stewart’s lawyers argued in court papers that the 28-month term imposed by Koeltl was “reasonable, just and satisfied the purposes of sentencing.”

“Ms. Stewart’s 28-month sentence is reasonable, especially when viewed alongside sentences in other terrorism prosecutions, including those where the defendants joined terrorist groups and clearly intended that harm would result from their actions,” wrote Stewart’s lawyers, Liz Fink and Jill Shellow.

Her lawyers said Koeltl, who presided over the nine-month trial, was in the best position to know the appropriate term to impose and that longer terms imposed in other terrorism cases cited by an appeals court judge were for crimes which occurred after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Defense lawyers argued she hadn’t committed perjury during the trial and that she didn’t know the true terrorist nature of followers of Rahman.

Fink wasn’t immediately available for comment yesterday and federal prosecutors declined to comment on the case.

Prosecutors said in court papers that Stewart deserves an “enhanced” sentence. While the U.S. didn’t ask for the 30-year prison term which they’d previously requested, they said they would make a recommendation at a later date about what kind of sentence would be “appropriate.”

The government said Stewart deserved a harsher term because was likely to continue breaking the law, citing statements Stewart made in interviews in the days after the appeals court’s decision.

“I’d like to think I would not do anything differently,” Stewart said in an interview with the Democracy Now Network on Nov. 18, prosecutors quoted her as saying. “I think it was necessary. I would do it again. I might handle it a little differently, but I would do it again.”

Her own words make the case for a long stay in prison. A permanent residence there will do.

Excellent News: Civil Disobedience To Become Hip Again

Not that Tea Partiers necessarily have been practicing civil disobedience, but based on typical media coverage you would think they're the greatest threat to humanity in centuries.

Well, Barack Obama's pal Al Sharpton is glomming on to the Arizona illegal alien issue like it's a pork chop and plans to start milking it for all it's worth. It'll be interesting to see the media finger-waggers decrying the civil disorder when it's one of their favorite pets doing it.

The Rev. Al Sharpton says he will challenge Arizona's new immigration bill in court and on the streets.

Sharpton is joining Lillian Rodriguez Lopez from the Hispanic Federation to announce a legal challenge to the bill. They say activists are also prepared to commit civil disobedience to fight the Arizona immigration bill.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill Friday. It requires police to question people about their immigration status — including asking for identification — if they suspect someone is in the country illegally.

Since the Obama regime has already weighed in, Sharpton takes that as a green light to pour some gas on the fire.

President Barack Obama has called the new law "misguided" and has instructed the Justice Department to examine it to see if it's legal.

Update: They're already becoming violent, but the media calls it largely peaceful.

Thanks to Instapundit for the link.

Wonderful: Top Obama Legal Nominee Has No Problem With Sharia Law

Think that's bad? This maniac also lumps in the United States with North Korea and the Saddam-era Iraq. Oh, and forget U.S. law. This guy would gladly surrender our sovereignty to world opinion. If all that isn't bad enough, consider Obama plans to install him at the State Department.

God help us.

JUDGES should interpret the Constitution according to other nations' legal "norms." Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an "axis of disobedience" along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq.

Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government's top lawyers: Harold Koh.

President Obama has nominated Koh -- until last week the dean of Yale Law School -- to be the State Department's legal adviser. In that job, Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control, and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.

It's a job where you want a strong defender of America's sovereignty. But that's not Koh. He's a fan of "transnational legal process," arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish.

What would this look like in a practical sense? Well, California voters have overruled their courts, which had imposed same-sex marriage on the state. Koh would like to see such matters go up the chain through federal courts -- which, in turn, should look to the rest of the world. If Canada, the European Human Rights Commission and the United Nations all say gay marriage should be legal -- well, then, it should be legal in California too, regardless of what the state's voters and elected representatives might say.

He even believes judges should use this "logic" to strike down the death penalty, which is clearly permitted in the US Constitution.

The primacy of international legal "norms" applies even to treaties we reject. For example, Koh believes that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child -- a problematic document that we haven't ratified -- should dictate the age at which individual US states can execute criminals. Got that? On issues ranging from affirmative action to the interrogation of terrorists, what the rest of the world says, goes.

Including, apparently, the world of radical imams. A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that "in an appropriate case, he didn't see any reason why sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States."

Read the rest. The next time some liberal ignoramus tells you Obama is a centrist, show them this column.

Here's a 2007 profile of Koh from The Volokh Conspiracy. It isn't pretty.

Peaceful Progressives

They're probably just misguided youths.

Militant opponents of this week's Group of Eight summit claimed responsibility Tuesday for a firebomb attack on a Mercedes car dealership in Zurich.

An anonymous fax sent to The Associated Press and other media organizations also demanded the release of G-8 opponents arrested by German police. The overnight attack caused about 200,000 Swiss francs (US$160,000; 120,000 euros) in damage.

Blaming America First

Great piece by Michael Barone today (via Power Line).

After seeing all the misinformed malcontents whining and parading across the country this past weekend, this is certainly a welcome piece.

"They always blame America first." That was Jeane Kirkpatrick, describing the "San Francisco Democrats" in 1984. But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The "we" can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries. Such people are seen as privileged and selfish, greedy and bigoted, rash and violent. If something bad happens, the default assumption is that it's their fault. They always blame America -- or the parts of America they don't like -- first.

Where does this default assumption come from? And why is it so prevalent among our affluent educated class (which, after all, would seem to overlap considerably with the people being complained about?). It comes, I think, from our schools and, especially, from our colleges and universities. The first are staffed by liberals long accustomed to see America as full of problems needing solving; the latter have been packed full of the people cultural critic Roger Kimball calls "tenured radicals," people who see this country and its people as the source of all evil in the world

Read the rest.