Over at Political Affairs Magazine, a publication of the Communist Party USA, writer John Case is gloating. His article about the crisis is headlined, “A Dose of Socialism to Forestall Disaster.” He thinks that Paulson and Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke have been reading the works of closet Marxists.

But none of this is secret. At a time when many pieces of legislation before Congress take up thousands of pages and do their best to hide pork barrel spending, Paulson’s three-page plan for Wall Street socialism is straightforward and simple. If passed by Congress, Paulson would assume the dictatorial power and authority to designate financial institutions “as financial agents of the Government” and order them to perform “all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them…”

The bill gives Paulson automatic access to $700 billion and raises the limit on the public debt to $11.3 trillion. He gets the power to issue regulations, hire people, establish various financial “vehicles,” and take other “necessary actions.”

Conservative Senator Jim Bunning is brutally honest, saying that “…the free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America.” He said Paulson’s plan “will take away the free market and institute socialism in America. The American taxpayer has been misled throughout this economic crisis. The government on all fronts has failed the American people miserably.”

“After reviewing the Administration’s proposed bailout plan, I believe it is completely unacceptable,” said conservative Senator Jim DeMint. “This plan does nothing to address the misguided government policies that created this mess and it could make matters much worse by socializing an entire sector of the U.S. economy. This plan fails to oversee or regulate the government failures that led to this crisis. Instead it greatly increases the role for Secretary Paulson whose market predictions have been consistently wrong in the last year…”

Every newspaper in America should print a copy of his plan. Every news anchor and commentator should read it out loud to the American people. The American people have a right to know that President Bush and Congress are officially creating a socialist America.

Over at the “conservative” Fox News Channel, however, some commentators think this is just great. “I love it,” Fred Barnes of the “conservative” Weekly Standard said of the temporary market rise in response to the anticipated Paulson plan. “Look,” Barnes said, “when I keep hearing this is going to cost a trillion dollars, and so on, it may not cost anything.” The U.S. may “come out ahead” in the long run, he confidently predicted. He praised Paulson and Bernanke for acting “boldly.”

Another “conservative,” Charles Krauthammer, was almost giddy. “It took FDR a decade to put in place all the institutions of the New Deal,” he commented. “Paulson and Bernanke did it in ten hours. I mean, in one night, they created a whole new world.”

However, on the September 21 edition of Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace pointed out that Paulson has already been caught making reassuring but false statements about the crisis. In March, also on Fox News Sunday, Wallace had asked him, “Are more Wall Street firms in danger, at risk, of going under? Paulson replied, “I’ve got great confidence in our financial market, our financial institutions. Our markets are resilient. They’re flexible. Our institutions, our banks and investment banks, are strong.”

And this is the guy being entrusted with virtual dictatorial power over Wall Street? Rather than praise him for his intellect and ability, why aren’t Barnes and Krauthammer demanding that Bush fire him?

The liberal media are, of course, also trying to keep the American people in the dark about what is happening. The Washington Post deceptively calls it a “rescue plan.”

The “debate” taking place in Washington and the media is being carefully controlled. The Republican Bush Administration supports the plan and Congressional Democrats want to take it further. The Democrats want even more federal involvement in the firms that are being acquired. In other words, it is a question of how much socialism they want. The Democrats want more socialism; the Bush Republicans want slightly less. But it is still socialism.

There is a bipartisan note: both sides agree that there should be a new government board assigned to monitor America’s transition into a socialist economy.

Both major party presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have not objected to the proposed federal takeover, although McCain has raised questions about giving Paulson too much power.
Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin, who has been endorsed by Rep. Ron Paul, is ripping the Democrats and the Republicans. “That deer in the headlights look on the faces of Obama/Biden/McCain/Palin when discussing this crisis should tell Americans everything they need to know about these candidates,” he said. “Not one of them is letting on they know what’s really happening, much less how to fix it!”

He said, “So far, the only solution being talked about is more of the same failed monetary policies that got us into this mess in the first place―more fake money, more debt, more usury. It is time to demand a return to sound money.”

On the House side, 31 members of the House of Representatives have voiced public objections in writing to going further down the socialist road. They are members of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the Caucus of House Conservatives. They have sent a letter to Paulson and Bernanke.

Rep. Mike Pence, the former chairman of the RSC, said, “The Administration’s request amounts to the largest corporate bailout in American history. Congress should act, but should act in a way that protects the integrity of our free market and protects the American taxpayer from more debt and higher taxes. To have the freedom to succeed, we must preserve the freedom to fail. Any solution to our present crisis must preserve our essential economic freedom.”

“Government bailouts and takeovers are nothing new,” points out financial advisor Ric Edelman.

He cites the following: “In 1971, Richard Nixon rescued Lockheed by providing $250 million in loan guarantees. When the Penn Central Railroad failed in 1971, Nixon created Amtrak. Jimmy Carter gave $1.5 billion in loan guarantees to Chrysler in 1979. Under Ronald Reagan, the FDIC in 1984 spent $4.5 billion to rescue Continental Illinois, which still holds the record as the largest U.S. bank failure. Then, during the S&L crisis of the 1980s, George H. W. Bush approved the bailout of 747 savings and loans at a cost to taxpayers of $124.6 billion. In 1998, under Bill Clinton, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York bailed out Long Term Capital Management at a cost of $3.6 billion. During the Mexican Peso Crisis, Clinton arranged for loans and guarantees to Mexico totaling almost $50 billion. Then, following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, George W. Bush approved $15 billion in subsidies and loan guarantees to aid the faltering airline industry. This year, the Federal Reserve approved a $30 billion credit line to help JP Morgan Chase acquire Bear Stearns and engineered takeovers of Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG. The names, dates and amounts are different, but that’s about it.”

In fact, however, the massive scope and price tag make the Paulson plan far different.

Meanwhile, some “progressive” economists and writers are urging the Democrats in Congress to take the plan much further by implementing the first phase of a global tax.

James Parrott of the Fiscal Policy Institute says that Washington needs to establish a “new regulatory regime that covers all financial institutions (including hedge funds), controls risk and introduces a tax on financial transactions to help repay U.S. taxpayers for coming to the industry’s rescue.” A tax on financial transactions, which would affect stocks and mutual funds, could be part of a global “Tobin Tax,” named after the late Yale University economist James Tobin, to bring in billions and even trillions of dollars a year to national governments and international institutions such as the United Nations. Such a plan has usually been marketed as a way to diminish “global financial instability.”

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research says that “The government should impose a modest financial transactions tax, comparable to the one in the United Kingdom. This can both restrain excessive trading and raise more than $100 billion a year in revenue.”

One cannot exclude the possibility of such a proposal being slipped into the final legislation. It is being reported that Senator Christopher Dodd, Democratic chairman of the Banking Committee, has been circulating a 44-page version of the bill. But Dodd’s Banking Committee website only has a three-page summary. What is in the rest of the proposal?

The next few days are critical. The American people can stop this rush into socialism, if only the liberal and conservative media start telling the truth about the socialist “new world” into which we are about to enter.

AIM Column
By Cliff Kincaid
September 23, 2008

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/socialism-is-coming-to-america/

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Response by Suzanne:

I've just finished reading this and I am ready to go puke!

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Response by Len Salonsky:

From my vantage point, the American people have been enabling the turn towards socialism for decades by their complacency and by their almost universal demand for entitlement increases whose implementation lie outside the principles and codification of the US Constitution. Unscrupulous politicians (perhaps the majority) are glad to accommodate any end-run around the Constitution if such an act will bring them a majority of votes.

The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism, but under the name of Liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program until one day America will be a Socialist nation without knowing how it happened. ~ Norman Thomas - Socialist Party Presidential candidate (1976)

No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that they could vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. ~ Alexander Tyler

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of citizens to give to the other. ~ Voltaire (1764)

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of many by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away mans initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. ~ Abraham Lincoln

There are severe limits to the good that the government can do for the economy, but there are almost no limits to the harm it can do. ~ Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate

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Can we have some coverage of the contrast between the two candidates on Memorial Day? It’s not just a matter of McCain serving in the military and Obama not doing so. It’s a matter of which side they were on.

McCain was on the American side during the Vietnam War. He personally risked his life and carried out the U.S. policy of resisting the communist military conquest of South Vietnam. Obama had friendly associations with those who had been on the other side and they helped launch his political career in Chicago. Obama can’t solve this problem by occasionally wearing an American flag lapel pin.

Keep in mind that we are not talking about associating with those who simply opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Obama’s friends, such as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, cheered for a communist victory and visited Havana, Cuba and Hanoi, North Vietnam to bring that about. Like his comrades in the communist Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden of “Progressives for Obama” wrote a letter urging a communist military victory over the U.S. These were people who actually supported the enemy.

In the case of Frank Marshall Davis, Obama’s childhood mentor, we are dealing with someone who was on the communist side long before the Vietnam War. Davis supported Stalinist Russia even after the Hitler-Stalin pact. This relationship may help explain why Obama would leave Hawaii, associate with Marxist professors and attend socialist conferences in college (as he admits in his book, Dreams From My Father), and then associate with terrorists, communists, and socialists in Chicago, where he would launch his political career. Davis was a key influence over the young Obama, filling his head with anti-American thoughts.

Thanks to Joseph Farah’s WorldNetDaily and his excellent reporter, Jerome R. Corsi, many people are learning the basic facts about these relationships. Corsi covered the release of two reports on the subject through my America’s Survival, Inc. organization.

At our event, an audience member wondered what the media reaction would be if it were discovered that a Republican presidential candidate had been mentored by a Nazi or fascist during his growing-up years. You and I know that it would be enough of a story that the candidate would be forced from the race. The candidate would be peppered with questions about this relationship at every turn. Reporters would be scrambling to dig up more details about this relationship.

But rather than focus on Davis, some in the liberal media are making fun of McCain’s war injuries. Brent Baker reveals that, during a report on the release of McCain’s medical records, Dr. Jon LaPook asserted on CBS News that “people” notice that McCain is “not able to raise his arm” and think “doesn’t that look funny?” Baker asked, “Who thinks McCain’s limitation, caused by an attack on him after his plane crashed in North Vietnam and he was denied medical care, looks funny? In what circles does CBS’s doctor travel?” The answer, of course, is the circle of Obama’s friends, where veteran correspondent Linda Douglass has now ended up. She has taken a job as a press secretary and adviser to Obama and previously worked for CBS News, ABC News, and National Journal.

Significantly, the basic facts of the Obama-Davis relationship were originally disclosed by Professor Gerald Horne, a contributing editor of the Communist Party journal Political Affairs, who talked about Obama coming under the influence of Davis during a speech at the reception of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) archives at the Tamiment Library at New York University.

Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who had moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 “at the suggestion of his good friend [and secret CPUSA member] Paul Robeson,” came into contact with Obama and his family. As Horne describes it, Davis “befriended” a “Euro-American family” that had “migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago.”

However, in Obama’s 1995 book, Dreams from My Father, Frank Marshall Davis was identified only as “Frank.” Among other things, according to Obama’s own account, “Frank” told him that blacks had a reason to hate and that he should not believe all of that (expletive deleted) about the American way of life.

When one of Senator Hillary Clinton’s supporters brought up the issue of Davis’s influence over Obama, by circulating an article I had written for AIM about Davis playing the role of Obama’s mentor, he was pilloried by the left-wing blogs. The reaction suggests awareness that the role of Davis in the formation of Obama’s political views could sink the candidate. They are desperate to keep this information suppressed.
Horne is not the only significant figure to talk about the influence of “Frank” on Obama. Dr. Kathryn Takara of the University of Hawaii, who knew and interviewed Davis and wrote a dissertation on his life and career, confirmed to me that the “Frank” is, in fact, Frank Marshall Davis.

Takara, an Obama supporter, confirmed that Davis was a significant influence over Obama during the three or four years that he attended the Punahou prep school. These would have been the years 1975-1979. She said Obama had been introduced to Davis by his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, who considered Davis a “strong black male figure” and thought he exerted a “positive” influence over the young man in his high-school years.

Asked why she thought Obama didn’t identify Davis in his book by his full name, she replied, “Maybe he didn’t want people delving into it.” She said that this could have had something to do with Davis’s lifestyle, rather than his politics. “Frank’s was a place where you could have drinks,” she said.

Yet, Obama has been open about some things—such as his past drug use. It is difficult to understand why he would not name “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis simply because “Frank” drank or hosted people who did. It is apparent that Obama covered up his full name because of the notoriety surrounding Davis’s political views. Remember this was a black communist who stayed with the CPUSA even while others, such as Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, broke with it.

So how long will Obama’s cover-up persist?

There are many in the liberal and conservative media who want desperately to avoid this subject. The liberals want to protect Obama. The “conservatives” avoiding the subject don’t want to be accused of “McCarthyism” if they mention it. But thanks to Farah’s WorldNetDaily and other new media outlets, the story is coming out and won’t be ignored.

By Cliff Kincaid
May 25, 2008
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/the-candidates-communist-connections/

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Yet, McCain’s new TV ad calls him “the American president Americans have been waiting for.” The public should not be fooled. He is as much of a globalist as Hillary and Obama.

Noting that McCain committed himself to adoption of a new U.N.-sponsored global warming treaty, which would be even more comprehensive and tougher than the Kyoto Protocol, Limbaugh said that “The theme here is that there’s nothing special about America, and that we’re not going to be able to do anything without involving other nations and making them like us and showing them that we intend them no harm and that we want to be good stewards of the planet just as they want to be good stewards.”

The latter was a reference to McCain declaring that “We need to be good stewards of our planet and join with other nations to help preserve our common home. The risks of global warming have no borders.” McCain sounded like another Democrat―Al Gore.

But despite his preference for what appears to be some kind of New World Order, McCain’s prior endorsement of a new Muslim state in Europe by the name of Kosovo could undermine all of his best-laid plans. Recognition of Kosovo could lead to war with Russia and more terrorist problems for Israel.

Scary Rhetoric

Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA commented, “Sen. McCain delivered a laundry list of all things non-conservative.” He said the speech wasn’t conservative or even Republican.

Amanda Teegarden, a grass roots pro-sovereignty activist, was also alarmed. “It is imperative that conservatives listen to this speech―especially if you are concerned about the sovereignty, and the economic survival, of the United States,” she said.

In addition to a new global warming treaty, she noted that McCain’s proposals included open borders in the Western Hemisphere, nuclear disarmament, and a Transatlantic free trade area.

Eberle focused on a segment of the McCain speech that included the statement that “Relations with our southern neighbors must be governed by mutual respect, not by an imperial impulse or by anti-American demagoguery. The promise of North, Central, and South American life is too great for that. I believe the Americas can and must be the model for a new 21st century relationship between North and South. Ours can be the first completely democratic hemisphere, where trade is free across all borders, where the rule of law and the power of free markets advance the security and prosperity of all.”

McCain’s strange rhetoric about “North, Central, and South American life” reflects a view that nation-states are disappearing and being replaced by regional alliances and institutions. He referred to “the powerful collective voice of the European Union,” as if the U.S. response would have to be submersion of our voice in a larger hemispheric entity. But McCain seems to be calling for something beyond even a North American Union (NAU) of the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. He talked about “creating the new international institutions necessary to advance the peace and freedoms we cherish,” as if they would be built on top of the EU and the NAU.

Earlier, McCain had declared, “With globalization, our hemisphere has grown closer, more integrated, and more interdependent. Latin America today is increasingly vital to the fortunes of the United States. Americans north and south share a common geography and a common destiny.” But why should trade with America’s neighbors necessarily lead to a “common destiny?” This implies a political merger of the U.S. with other countries.

Nuclear Disarmament

“We should work to reduce nuclear arsenals all around the world, starting with our own,” McCain said. This appeared to be a call for unilateral nuclear disarmament. He went on to call for the U.S. to lead “a global effort at nuclear disarmament.” This, too, seems to require more reliance on international institutions, in this case the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Indeed, McCain in the past has called for more funding for the IAEA.

McCain added, “We have to strengthen our global alliances as the core of a new global compact―a League of Democracies―that can harness the vast influence of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests.” But as I noted in a recent piece, “McCain, Soros, and the New World Order,” this is a liberal project that is being currently funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros and managed by former Clinton officials. It has nothing to do with democracy but is intended to create another global institution that will eventually help strengthen the U.N.

After calling for the closing of the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay (but not saying where he would put the detainees), McCain declared that “There is such a thing as international good citizenship.” This is the kind of rhetoric we would expect from an advocate of world government. If Hillary or Obama were spouting such silly rhetoric, conservatives would be laughing at them.

It goes without saying that McCain is oblivious to the evidence that the man-made global warming theory doesn’t hold up under serious scrutiny. His proposal for “a successor to the Kyoto Treaty” that “delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner” is potentially very damaging to the U.S. economy. But the proposal pleases the Europeans.

McCain talked about the virtues of the “transatlantic alliance,” which served a purpose during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, but went on to say that “Americans should welcome the rise of a strong, confident European Union as we continue to support a strong NATO.” The European Union was devised primarily as a counter to the influence of the U.S. in foreign affairs. It has also proven to be a bureaucratic disaster for the people of Europe. The “strong NATO” has proven to be extremely weak in Afghanistan, where it cannot field enough troops to defeat the Taliban terrorists. Expanding NATO has not resulted in making it stronger.

“The future of the transatlantic relationship lies in confronting the challenges of the twenty-first century worldwide: developing a common energy policy, creating a transatlantic common market tying our economies more closely together, addressing the dangers posed by a revanchist Russia, and institutionalizing our cooperation on issues such as climate change, foreign assistance, and democracy promotion,” declared McCain.

So not only is the U.S. going to move toward common policies for North, South and Central America, but it is going to develop common energy and economic policies with the European Union. Developing a common policy on “foreign assistance” is a recipe for more looting of the U.S. taxpayers. The Europeans have long complained that the U.S. isn’t devoting enough money to “official development assistance,” as the U.N. calls it.

Nightmare Vision

Does McCain’s vision look like an emerging world government? It is certainly a variation of “global governance,” which is the proposal that former Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott makes in his book, The Great Experiment. Talbott calls McCain a “pragmatist” in foreign affairs, just like Obama and Hillary, and says that he expects his liberal Brookings Institution to have influence over a McCain presidency.

On other issues in his speech, McCain talked tough about Iran and Russia.

The big problem for McCain, as we noted in a recent column, is that his vision of a New World Order is incompatible with his support for making the Serbian province of Kosovo into an independent state. Carving Kosovo out of Serbia is a threat to international peace and security. It has split NATO, which McCain says he wants to expand and strengthen. This policy, which has also been embraced by the Democrats, threatens a completely unnecessary war with Russia, which backs Serbian control of Kosovo and wants to aid the Serbs remaining in the province.

McCain spoke about Israel’s survival, without addressing the reality that Kosovo’s independence has energized the Arab/Muslim push for a Palestinian state that could threaten Israel.

While McCain said that the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is “the transcendent challenge of our time,” he seemed unaware how some of those same forces are behind the push for Kosovo statehood. It just doesn’t make sense to fight Muslim extremists in one place, Iraq, while helping them in another, Kosovo, and even giving them their own state.

This is a contradiction that McCain has failed to address.

“We have incurred a moral responsibility in Iraq,” the Senator declared. “It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature withdrawal.”

This rhetoric strikes a chord with conservatives. Yet, some say that genocide is already occurring in Iraq, in regard to the plight of Christians there. More than half have fled the country since the U.S. invasion, and those who remain are being kidnapped, threatened and murdered. Do we not have a moral responsibility to them? Shouldn’t the U.S. be less concerned about the survival of the Muslim government in Iraq and more concerned about the defenseless and unarmed Christians?

McCain seemed blind not only to the issues that conservatives regard as critical in an election year, but he went out of his way to reach out to liberals and Democrats. The only part of the speech they probably didn’t like was on Iraq.

But if the liberals get beyond their differences with McCain on Iraq, they will not only vote for him but promote his agenda as president. Then, as Rush Limbaugh notes, it may eventually be possible to change the name of the United States of America: “We’ll call ourselves New Europe.” In the process, true conservatism as a political force will be finished in the U.S.

The tragedy of this approach is that it comes from a man who served his country in uniform and risked his life on behalf of the U.S. McCain would have been a natural choice to lead a campaign for restoration of American sovereignty in foreign affairs. He could have been “The American President Americans have been waiting for.”

For reasons that remain largely a mystery, he has chosen to take the U.S. down the road of “global governance,” in which the U.N. and other international agencies, institutions and alliances determine our fate as a nation. It is the same road the Democrats are on. It is a tragedy for our country.

By Cliff Kincaid
March 28, 2008
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/mccains-incoherent-new-world-order/

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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When President Bush criticized these comments as tantamount to threatening a U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA, he said that “It’s not good policy on the merits and it’s not good policy as a message to send to...people who have in good faith signed a treaty and worked with us on a treaty.”

But it was not treated as a treaty in the U.S.

Clinton submitted NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate.

Clinton did it this way because he didn’t have the votes to pass NAFTA as a treaty (requiring 67 votes) in the Senate. But how did he pull off such a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional move?

Although the strict text of the U.S. Constitution includes the treaty clause as the only means by which the U.S. can enter into such international agreements, there’s a growing body of mostly liberal-left “legal opinion” that holds that “congressional-executive agreements” like NAFTA can serve as substitutes for treaties.

Clinton’s move was seen at the time, even by some on the left, as an effort to bypass constitutional processes and the United Steelworkers challenged NAFTA’s constitutionality in court. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, after lower courts had thrown the case out, saying it was a political matter between the President and Congress. The Bush Administration sided with Clinton and the Supreme Court declined to get involved.

The Bush Administration’s support for the unconstitutional Clinton approach could easily backfire on conservatives if the Democrats take the White House and hold Congress in the fall elections. Citing NAFTA as a precedent, liberal Democrats could submit and pass treaties by a simple majority vote.

In an article in the liberal American Prospect, Thomas Geoghegan lamented that the Kyoto global warming treaty and the International Criminal Court “are among the great global projects of our day” but are not getting through the Senate because of the two-thirds majority required for passage. “So what’s the way out of this bind? It’s the same way out we used for NAFTA or for fast-track free-trade agreements. That is, we just pass a simple law,” he said.
Geoghegan says the reason liberals can’t get these measures currently passed in the Senate is because this body “overrepresents” states like “Wyoming, Idaho and America’s backwoods.” In other words, Red State Senators have too much clout under the Constitution. They are obstructing the “progressive” vision.

Geoghegan says legal justification for this new approach can be found in an article in the American Journal of International Law by Steve Charnovitz, an associate professor of international law at the George Washington University School of Law. The article complains about Senate inaction on such treaties as the feminist Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the anti-parent U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, Convention on Biological Diversity, the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, and various U.N. human rights treaties.

Since this article appeared, in October of 2004, the Bush Administration has been trying to pressure the Senate into ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty. It now awaits full Senate action.

Charnovitz admits the approach of pushing these treaties as mere agreements would be controversial. But he finds comfort in the fact that the legal action against NAFTA was thrown out.

It would make a good issue for John McCain, except for the fact that he’s for NAFTA and most of the U.N. treaty agenda.

By Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
March 3, 2008

http://www.aim.org/aim-column/bipartisan-crimes-against-the-constitution/

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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In this battle, however, good sometimes wins over evil. That occurred when “a measure to expand hate-crime protections,” as the liberal Washington Post put it, was dropped from a Pentagon spending bill by House and Senate negotiators. The measure had been introduced in the Senate by the notorious Ted Kennedy, who goes down in history as the only senator in U.S. history to let a young girl die in the bottom of his submerged car. That was a fate much worse than waterboarding. Kennedy, of course, is also opposed to waterboarding. Terrorists, he believes, should enjoy more rights than Mary Jo Kopechne, who died in that car struggling to breathe as the water enveloped her.

Kennedy is a concrete example of liberalism as a mental disorder. In his warped world view, real people and real victims such as Mary Jo Kopechne have no rights, but it is wrong to “hate” people and such “hate” should be rooted out and punished by federal authorities. This is their agenda—making us think like them, or at least getting us to quit thinking and quit acting on behalf of what is truly important in this country, such as the survival of our nation and our families.

Credit goes to the White House and Congressional Republicans for forcing the dropping of the “hate crimes” provision. The White House had threatened to veto the measure. It would elevate homosexuals, the supposed victims of “hate crimes,” to protected status under law, and would leave other classes of people (such as the elderly, the military, police officers, and victims of prior crimes) without similar special status.

Now who are these “homosexuals?” Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth held a December 5 National Press Club news conference to unveil a video of what took place at the Folsom Street Fair in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district. The video showed naked homosexuals masturbating and having sex in public as children walked down the streets near them. Some were dressed up as animals being led around by leashes. Others were dressed in leather and being whipped. Homosexual pornography was sold openly. See it for yourself here.

Was LaBarbera guilty of a “hate crime” for bringing this perverted behavior to the public’s attention and demanding that Pelosi condemn it? That is what the homosexuals would like you to believe. That is apparently why all of the television media, with the exception of Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel, ignored LaBarbera’s news conference. Who wants to suffer the wrath of the militant homosexuals by focusing attention on what they actually do?

In another indication of a mental disorder, we are being told that waterboarding, which involves pouring water over a terrorist’s face, is torture and should never be used. This mentality is what drove Nancy Pelosi’s House of Representatives to actually pass a bill banning the practice. During a time of war, can you believe that the House would actually vote to tell terrorists in advance how we will interrogate them? Can you believe that the House would vote to ban a practice that has saved American lives and disrupted terrorist plots against America? The House does this because it has lost sight of who really died on 9/11 and because it puts the “rights” of terrorists above the right to live of ordinary Americans. For all intents and purposes, the House is acting like a terrorist front group.

Similarly, New Jersey politicians have voted to ban capital punishment. Like the measure to ban waterboarding, this can only result in more lives lost. That means that a murder in New Jersey, no matter how vicious, can never be punished by the death penalty. The practical result will be that crimes will go unsolved because police and prosecutors will not be able to threaten to use capital punishment to get information out of criminals. It means criminals will know that no matter who they kill or how many, they will be kept alive at taxpayer expense. Banning the death penalty constitutes open season on law-abiding citizens.

Which brings up the case of Michael Savage, who is being accused of “hate speech” by a Muslim group whose own holy book The Koran is full of hate against Christians, Jews and other unbelievers. Muslims are killing or threatening to kill people around the world over Teddy Bears and cartoons but companies advertising on his Savage Nation radio show are being pressured to stop sponsoring his program because he dares to exercise his First Amendment right of free speech and to criticize Islam.

There is some dispute over which companies have withdrawn advertising from his show. The names of those companies are less important than the campaign itself which is now underway. The purpose of the “Hate Hurts America” group that is now leading the charge against him is to intimidate companies into never advertising on his show. The names of those companies we may never know. This is the insidious danger of this campaign. It will force him off the air eventually—unless we speak up now.

(The) new book, The Death of Talk Radio?, makes the critical point that what we are seeing in the Savage case will become official federal policy if the liberals manage to capture the White House in 2008 and take control of the Federal Communications Commission.

Those determined to kill us are on the offensive, and they have powerful friends in important positions of influence in the media and politics today. It is literally a battle to the death. Our constitutional rights and our lives are at stake. (emphasis added)

The original article can be read at the excellent Accuracy In Media website:
http://www.aim.org/aim_column/5982_0_3_0_C/

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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In the Medellin v. Texas case, which we addressed in a June 12 special report, the Bush Administration acted so committed to the primacy of international law and global courts that it took the President's home state of Texas to court on behalf of a group of convicted Mexican killers. The Mexicans had been sentenced to death for murdering U.S. citizens, including teenagers and young children. It is another low point in the presidency of George W. Bush but it helps explain the twisted mentality behind the administration's push for ratification of the dangerous United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Medellin v. Texas figured in Mexico v. United States, the case brought before the U.N.'s International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ruled 14-1 on behalf of Mexico against the U.S., insisting that the killers were somehow denied their rights to seek outside counsel and advice from Mexican authorities. The ICJ was headed at the time by a judge from communist China, who also ruled against the U.S.

John B. Bellinger III, Legal Adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited Mexico v. United States of America in a June 6 speech trying to convince international lawyers that the administration is doing what it can to enforce international law in U.S. courts. He noted with pride that Bush had come down on the same side as the U.N.'s International Court of Justice. In the ICJ decision, Bellinger said, "the ICJ ordered the United States to review the cases of 51 Mexican nationals convicted of capital crimes." And the President, he said, "acting on the advice of the Secretary of State," decided to "require each State involved to give the 51 convicts a new hearing." That's a total of 51 convicted killers that the President sided with. Assuming the role of a dictator, Bush ordered Texas and the others states to comply with this U.N. court. Texas and many other states resisted. Hence, the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bellinger's audience for his June 6 speech was gathered at The Hague, a city in the Netherlands which is home to over 100 international organizations, including the U.N.'s International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Bellinger may have mollified the globalists but the reaction that the case is getting here in the U.S. is very different. The reaction is one of anger and outrage. Fox News and the Laura Ingraham radio show are among the media which have featured emotional interviews with the father of one of the murder victims, Jennifer Ertman. He flatly accused Bush of being a liar when he said he wanted to see justice done in the case and the killers punished for their crimes. He noted that Jose Ernesto Medellin has been on death row longer than his daughter lived. Medellin and other gang members raped and murdered Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña as the girls were going home.

James Oliphant of the Chicago Tribune provides some of the graphic details about the case: "Medellin stopped Peña. When she tried to run, he threw her to the ground. Ertman ran to help her but also was shoved to the ground. They were gang-raped and beaten. Even as the girls begged for their lives, they were dragged to nearby woods and strangled, one with her own shoelace, the other with a belt and then by a shoe pressed on her windpipe. Their bodies were found four days later." Medellin had no regrets and bragged about the crime.

Bellinger acknowledged to the international lawyers that "The first defendant to try to take advantage of the President's decision was in the state of Texas, which objected to the President's decision. In response, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the President had no power to intervene in its affairs, even to obtain compliance with an order of the ICJ. This Administration has gone to the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse this decision. We expect a ruling from that Court this time next year."

This is the case before the Supreme Court on October 10. A decision, as Bellinger indicated, is expected next year.

We don't know how the Supreme Court will rule on this case. But the people don't have to wait before sending the President a strong message of protest. They can send that message by having the Senate defeat Bush's U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty and by drawing the line at further interference by U.N. courts in our sovereign affairs.

The American people have shown, through derailing the Senate's illegal alien amnesty bill, that they won't play dumb or go to sleep when the issue is American sovereignty. That is why the Mexican killers case is striking such a chord, leading many to wonder if President Bush has lost his mind by intervening on behalf of the corrupt U.N. and its foreign judges against his home state of Texas.

The problem, of course, goes far beyond the Medellin case or UNCLOS. Trying to appease his foreign audience at The Hague, Bellinger declared that Bush was now trying to get 35 treaties, including UNCLOS, ratified. Bellinger declared that "international law binds us in our domestic system" and that the Bush Administration had entered into 429 international agreements and treaties last year alone. He bragged that, "…I have a staff of 171 lawyers, who work every day to furnish advice on legal matters, domestic and international, and to promote the development of international law as a fundamental element of our foreign policy."

After hopefully defeating UNCLOS--and the battle is now underway--we should show Mr. Bellinger and his fancy legal team the door.

As for the President, it looks like he's trying to bring into being the New World Order his father only talked about. It's not a legacy to be proud of. But it's one that a President Hillary Clinton would like to inherit. (emphasis added)

Original article: Accuracy In Media
http://www.aim.org/aim_column/5807_0_3_0_C/

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In the Medellin v. Texas case, which we addressed in a June 12 special report, the Bush Administration acted so committed to the primacy of international law and global courts that it took the President's home state of Texas to court on behalf of a group of convicted Mexican killers. The Mexicans had been sentenced to death for murdering U.S. citizens, including teenagers and young children. It is another low point in the presidency of George W. Bush but it helps explain the twisted mentality behind the administration's push for ratification of the dangerous United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Medellin v. Texas figured in Mexico v. United States, the case brought before the U.N.'s International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ruled 14-1 on behalf of Mexico against the U.S., insisting that the killers were somehow denied their rights to seek outside counsel and advice from Mexican authorities. The ICJ was headed at the time by a judge from communist China, who also ruled against the U.S.

John B. Bellinger III, Legal Adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited Mexico v. United States of America in a June 6 speech trying to convince international lawyers that the administration is doing what it can to enforce international law in U.S. courts. He noted with pride that Bush had come down on the same side as the U.N.'s International Court of Justice. In the ICJ decision, Bellinger said, "the ICJ ordered the United States to review the cases of 51 Mexican nationals convicted of capital crimes." And the President, he said, "acting on the advice of the Secretary of State," decided to "require each State involved to give the 51 convicts a new hearing." That's a total of 51 convicted killers that the President sided with. Assuming the role of a dictator, Bush ordered Texas and the others states to comply with this U.N. court. Texas and many other states resisted. Hence, the case now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bellinger's audience for his June 6 speech was gathered at The Hague, a city in the Netherlands which is home to over 100 international organizations, including the U.N.'s International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Bellinger may have mollified the globalists but the reaction that the case is getting here in the U.S. is very different. The reaction is one of anger and outrage. Fox News and the Laura Ingraham radio show are among the media which have featured emotional interviews with the father of one of the murder victims, Jennifer Ertman. He flatly accused Bush of being a liar when he said he wanted to see justice done in the case and the killers punished for their crimes. He noted that Jose Ernesto Medellin has been on death row longer than his daughter lived. Medellin and other gang members raped and murdered Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Peña as the girls were going home.

James Oliphant of the Chicago Tribune provides some of the graphic details about the case: "Medellin stopped Peña. When she tried to run, he threw her to the ground. Ertman ran to help her but also was shoved to the ground. They were gang-raped and beaten. Even as the girls begged for their lives, they were dragged to nearby woods and strangled, one with her own shoelace, the other with a belt and then by a shoe pressed on her windpipe. Their bodies were found four days later." Medellin had no regrets and bragged about the crime.

Bellinger acknowledged to the international lawyers that "The first defendant to try to take advantage of the President's decision was in the state of Texas, which objected to the President's decision. In response, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that the President had no power to intervene in its affairs, even to obtain compliance with an order of the ICJ. This Administration has gone to the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse this decision. We expect a ruling from that Court this time next year."

This is the case before the Supreme Court on October 10. A decision, as Bellinger indicated, is expected next year.

We don't know how the Supreme Court will rule on this case. But the people don't have to wait before sending the President a strong message of protest. They can send that message by having the Senate defeat Bush's U.N. Law of the Sea Treaty and by drawing the line at further interference by U.N. courts in our sovereign affairs.

The American people have shown, through derailing the Senate's illegal alien amnesty bill, that they won't play dumb or go to sleep when the issue is American sovereignty. That is why the Mexican killers case is striking such a chord, leading many to wonder if President Bush has lost his mind by intervening on behalf of the corrupt U.N. and its foreign judges against his home state of Texas.

The problem, of course, goes far beyond the Medellin case or UNCLOS. Trying to appease his foreign audience at The Hague, Bellinger declared that Bush was now trying to get 35 treaties, including UNCLOS, ratified. Bellinger declared that "international law binds us in our domestic system" and that the Bush Administration had entered into 429 international agreements and treaties last year alone. He bragged that, "…I have a staff of 171 lawyers, who work every day to furnish advice on legal matters, domestic and international, and to promote the development of international law as a fundamental element of our foreign policy."

After hopefully defeating UNCLOS--and the battle is now underway--we should show Mr. Bellinger and his fancy legal team the door.

As for the President, it looks like he's trying to bring into being the New World Order his father only talked about. It's not a legacy to be proud of. But it's one that a President Hillary Clinton would like to inherit. (emphasis added)

Original article: Accuracy In Media
http://www.aim.org/aim_column/5807_0_3_0_C/

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Another example of running out of gas is the decision to restore diplomatic relations with Libya, headed by the lunatic ruler, Moammar Gadhafi. This has been portrayed as a great breakthrough because Gadhafi has given up his weapons of mass destruction programs. But he still has the blood of dozens of Americans on his hands, including the destruction of Pan Am 103 in 1988, and he has never been prosecuted for these crimes. In addition, Gadhafi remains a dictator who shows no sign of giving any freedom to the Libyan people.

Still another example of a foreign policy that is running out of gas is the meeting that took place in Washington, D.C. between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a former leader of a terrorist organization.

It got almost no attention from the media, but Rice met with Agim Ceku, the so-called Prime Minister of Kosovo. We say "so-called" because Kosovo is not a country-not yet. It is a province of Serbia that is now under occupation by foreign forces, including from the U.N. and NATO. Ceku is a former leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the terrorist group that started a civil war that led to President Clinton ordering NATO intervention in the country on the pretext that he was stopping a "genocide" being committed by the Serbs.

Ceku, who was indicted by Serbia in 2002 for war crimes, is accused of responsibility for the murders by KLA terrorists of 669 Serbs and 18 members of other ethnic groups, 518 counts of inflicting serious bodily harm (including torture) and wounding, and 584 counts of abduction, many of the victims of which are presumed dead. Even after the end of hostilities between Serb forces and NATO, Ceku was accused of continuing attacks on Serbs, driving two-thirds of them from the province of Kosovo.

In meeting with Ceku, Rice was not only ignoring his record of violence, but lending the weight of her office to his campaign to separate Kosovo from Serbia and make it into an independent state. If this happens, it would become a Muslim state, by virtue of the fact that most of those left in Kosovo are Albanian Muslims. The Serbs, by contrast, are Christians.

The KLA, which was later disbanded and whose members were integrated into a "Kosovo Protection Corps," was accused of engaging in jihad terror practices such as the beheading of victims. Photographic evidence depicts this.

So we are fighting Muslim terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan but helping them come to power in Kosovo?

This is a foreign policy that has run out of gas and is running on empty. Strangely, Rice is continuing the Clinton policy on Kosovo. No wonder conservatives like Babbin are throwing their hands up in despair.

By Cliff Kincaid
July 11, 2006

Link to original article:
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/4699_0_2_0_C

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