Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

OBAMA TO CEDE U.S. SOVEREIGNTY IN DECEMBER

- Update 10/27/09 - AP - UN Signals Delay in Climate Change Treaty

UNITED NATIONS — Just weeks before an international conference on climate change, the United Nations signaled it was scaling back expectations of reaching agreement on a new treaty to slow global warming.   [more. . .] 

- (Original post) So says Lord Christopher Monckton, a global warning skeptic, and former science adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  Pamela Geller, of Atlas Shrugs, has posted one of the most dire warnings I have read in a long time.  It represents MUST READING.  Be sure to view the four-minute video (embedded in her post) of Lord Monckten issuing his warning at Bethel University on October 14, 2009.

Geller writes:

TRANSNATIONALISM: WHAT'S AT STAKE? WHAT ARE WE IN FOR?

Andy McCarthy writes:  [my bolding]

Ed Whelan's Bench Memos series on Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh's jurisprudence of transnationalism is absolutely essential reading. 

Dean Koh has been nominated to be the legal adviser to the Obama State Department. I posted a response here in the Corner on Saturday to Ted Olson's endorsement of Koh and intimation that opposition should be construed as an attack on the nominee's integrity and intellect.  As I said, that is most decidedly not the case. 

This is a vitally needed debate about policy: in particular, about whether the  covenant between the American people and their government — our very existence as a self-determining nation — should be eradicated in favor of a post-sovereign arrangement in which we are ruled by federal judges and unelected international bureaucrats imposing international law as continuously "evolved" by law professors and Leftist NGOs.

Here in the Corner, Ed has just posted some of Dean Koh's astounding views on what he regards as America's troubling "narcissism" on such fundamental rights as free-speech. The Bench Memos posts (three so far) can he found here, here, and here.

Me: Ed Whelan has now posted a 4th memo here.

QUOTE OF THE DAY - (ON MEDIA'S FAILURE TO EXPLICATE TRANSNATIONALISM)

 Andy McCarthy writes:

The mainstream media did not vet President Obama.  His transnational progressive positions were not scrutinized — and even though the President is even now on an important trip, crafting new global regulatory arrangements with other heads of state, we still have not gotten anything approximating an examination of Obama's views.  Bluntly, the public has been better informed about Gov. Sarah Palin's handling of the Alaska State Police than about their President's fondness for international redistribution of wealth, international treaties, and the transfer of national sovereignty to transnational bureaucracies and tribunals.  [my bolding]

Me:  McCarthy made this statement in the midst of a larger blog post concerning the upcoming confirmation hearing for Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh for the job of State Department legal adviser.  I encourage you to read McCarthy's whole post.  It's important.

JOHN BOLTON: THE LIBERAL VISION OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

John Bolton writes on "The Coming War on Sovereignty" in Commentary magazine [Emphases mine]. 

Barack Obama’s nascent presidency has brought forth the customary flood of policy proposals from the great and good, all hoping to influence his administration. One noteworthy offering is a short report with a distinguished provenance entitled A Plan for Action,1 which features a revealingly immodest subtitle: A New Era of International Cooperation for a Changed World: 2009, 2010, and Beyond.

In presentation and tone, A Plan for Action is determinedly uncontroversial; indeed, it looks and reads more like a corporate brochure than a foreign-policy paper. The text is the work of three academics—Bruce Jones of NYU, Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institution, and Stephen John Stedman of Stanford. Its findings and recommendations, they claim, rose from a series of meetings

SAMUEL HUNTINGTON ON AMERICAN NATIONAL IDENTITY UNDER SIEGE BY MULTICULTURAL TRANSNATIONALISTS

John Fonte over at National Review's Corner writes:

Excellent article today by Fouad Ajami on Sam Huntington in the Wall Street Journal. Huntington argues in Who Are We? that issues such as transnationalism, globalism, dual citizenship, “racial preferences, bilingualism, multiculturalism, immigration, assimilation, national history standards, English as the official language, Eurocentrism,” and so on, are “all battles in a single war over the nature of American national identity.” Huntington’s core point is that “de-nationalized elites” are promoting the “transnational” and the “multicultural” in order to “deconstruct” America’s creed and common culture.

...  What is being contested is the nature of America’s liberal democratic regime as it has been traditionally understood. Will this regime be perpetuated and transmitted to future generations or will it be transformed into a new type of transnational-multicultural-regime? Huntington’s thesis is a tour de force that cuts to the heart of this question. Needless to say, Huntington was hysterically attacked by nervous “de-nationalized elites” on the left, who don’t want these issues discussed openly. [my emphases]

Me: All of the above represents good reason to read Ajami's article.