Eleanor Duckwall's Spotlight

Law of the Sea Up for Senate Vote in October 2007

This post will featured at top of blog all through October. Scroll down for newer enteries.

Update: LOST Justice.

A Navy Lost by Frank Gaffney; Commentor InRussetShadows provided the following excellent links: EU Hides Behind 'Private Standards in Effort to Secure Global Regulatory Control; U.S. LOST at sea?

Oliver North: Permission Slip for the Sea

Foreign Relations Committee Hearing was held onThursday, October 4, 2007 9:30 a.m., C-Span2 "To examine UN Convention on Lw of the Sea, with Annexes..." SD-419 (See: How to find committee hearings). The video presentation has not yet been posted on C-Span.org, and the vote on the treaty has not been announced.

See Agenda for Today's Hearing

Do we want to allow International Law Court judges to make decisions that would trump the Constitution of the United States? What about being only one vote among more than a hundred without the power of the veto? Both of these would effectively nullify U.S. sovereignty and establish European-style socialism.

The United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty is coming up for a quick vote in October with no serious debate. This is another example of one of those treaties concocted by an international body that will not serve the American people as it not concerned with American interests or sovereignty which will significantly diminish in face of United Nations regulations. Because this "treaty" has so dimensions and affects us all to a significant degree, many feel that the Foreign Relations Committee has not only called on too few people, but on the wrong people.

[Listen to The Gathering Storm Report Frank Gaffney was a guest on episode.]

Why is this United Nations Convention so controversial and frightening to many? To start with, the Convention of the Law of the Sea would be under the auspices of yet another layer of bureaucracy within the United Nations and have an adverse effect on the United States.

Senate Floor Schedule (Sidebar) Active Legislation.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: The Risks Outweigh the Benefits

LOST: U.S. Senators' spines

Video: Vitter on the Law of the Sea Treaty: Part 1 See the several other videos offered in the right sidebar.

Call your senators (202-224-3121) while you still can!

If the Real Simón Bolívar Met Hugo Chávez, He'd See Red

James Roberts writes an extensively-annoted report at The Heritage Foundation:

If Simón Bolívar had returned to Venezuela in 2007 for his 224th birthday, he would have encountered a large man sporting a red shirt named Hugo Chávez exploiting his legacy. Although President Chávez claims to be Bolívar's worthy successor, the Liberator would see red when comparing Chávez's "21st century socialism" with the reality of his regime.

Bolívar would be embarrassed to see Venezuelans being oppressed by the same kind of Latin American caudillo (strongman) from which he fought to free them two centuries ago. Bolívar championed a unified South America and strong constitutional government to provide the same freedom, equality, and prosperity that he saw developing in North America. He opposed precisely the type of one-party, personalized, dictato rial rule that is embodied by Hugo Chávez.

A self-declared enemy of the U.S., Chávez aims to dominate the Caribbean Basin and Andean region and fulfill the long-time dream of his hero and mentor, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Chávez is a much bigger threat than officials in Washington seem to realize, and they need to wake up fast.

Islamic Economics - Do you know what that means?

Daniel Pipes has written a readable explanation that clarifies the meaning, and clears up some of the misconceptions about of the term "Islamic Economics" for the average reader.

For instance, we are lead to believe that Islamic economic policy was developed many centuries ago. In fact, it is "an invented tradition" that emerged in the 1940s in India. The idea of an economics discipline "that is distinctingly and self-conciously Islamic is very new," and was invented in order to "minimize relations with non-Muslims, strengthen the collective sense of Muslim identity, extend Islam into a new area of human activity, and modernize without Westernizing."

We are also fed the notion that Islamic economics forbids the collecting of interest on loans. Apparently this isn' true:

On "Fjordman's Course Correction"

The noted blogger Fjordman guest posts at several prominent blogs. This time at Gates of Vienna with commentary by Dymphna.

Fjordman's one-paragraph comment sums up the predicament in which now find ourselves:

“I keep thinking I have been focusing too much on the Marxists, and forgot about Big Business and the corporate interests behind mass immigration to the West. They have the money, and money makes the world go around, after all. The problem is that they treat countries as if they are corporations, and people as if they are commodities. They want us to import people as if they were toys or cheap toasters made in China. But people are not commodities, and countries are not corporations. It is a concept of capitalism that I cannot approve of, of reducing man to nothing but a worker and a consumer, homo economicus:”

Dymphna follows with:

U.S. adopts a new citizenship exam

In a era when fewer natural-born American citizens have knowledge of civics, it is refreshing to note that the U.S. is requiring new citizens to have a working knowledge of civics and of English. (At The Washington Times)

By Stephen Dinan - The federal government yesterday introduced a new U.S. citizenship civics exam designed to force would-be citizens to go beyond memorizing historical facts and instead grasp the fundamental meaning of being an American.

Gone are questions about the number of states in the union or what country the U.S. fought in the Revolutionary War. In their place are questions about why the colonists went to war with Britain or what powers are held exclusively by the federal government.

Dream Act "Nightmare" is dead

September 26, 2007, Dick Durbin announced that he is no longer trying to tack the DREAM Act onto an immigration bill due to supporting Republicans ended up switching sides because of public outrage. Hope fades for passage of to bill to aid young immigrants

The DREAM Act would allow illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. before the age of 16, and have lived here at least five years, to receive conditional legal status if they have graduated from high school and have a clean record. After six years, they could become permanent legal residents if they serve in the U.S. military for at least two years or complete at least two years of college. As with most green card holders, they could apply for citizenship after five years.

The non-partisan Migration Policy Institute estimates slightly more than 1 million high school graduates and children still in school could gain legal status under the legislation.

The bill is officially the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act.

U.N.'s sea law treaty pushed

More on this story at Washington Times:

By David R. Sands - The Bush administration today begins a fresh push for Senate ratification of the U.N. Law of the Sea accord, but treaty opponents say there is still time to derail an agreement they warn is a major attack on U.S. sovereignty.

A coalition of conservative groups yesterday debuted a pair of 30-second cable television ads attacking the treaty, on the eve of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in which a trio of top administration officials — including Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England — will call for Senate ratification.

The Bad Guys You Don't Know, and Some That You Do

There are many Muslim groups in the world. Though not all are bad people, some are, they all believe that someday Islam will take dominion over the earth. Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), or the Islamic Liberation Party, is little known in the United States, but has far-flung activities in Britain, Europe, Indonesia, Palestinestine, among other places, and "has lately entered the social networks of cyberspace, posting propaganda videos on YouTube to troll for recruits to its campaign for uniting Muslims worldwide in a new caliphate."

One of HT's goals is to destroy Israel and "liberate Palestine from occupation, racism and impurity by going back to the strict practice of a true Islam." In August, an HT rally in the West Bank city of Ramallah drew some 10,000 people under the banner "The caliphate, a force for the future." Although the man who founded HT in 1953 in Jerusalem, Sheikh Taqiuddin al-Nabhani, was a Palestinian--a qadi (Muslim judge) and an ex-Muslim Brother seeking a more radical alternative to the Brotherhood--HT was until recently an insignificant player in Palestinian politics. Not anymore. A Palestinian civil servant and HT adherent recently told the French daily Libération:

Who is the victim of racism here?

Strained racial relations continue to smolder in the United States, but in the 21st century is it all the fault of the power exerted by one race over the other? It is in the interest of certain leaders to continue flogging this concept to keep themselves in power.

From: Black Racism and "The Jena Six"

There is a larger issue at play, however, apart from whatever penalties the juvenile justice system metes out. That is the issue of black racism, a disturbingly widespread phenomenon in contemporary America. This phenomenon explains why tens of thousands of protesters willingly traveled long distances to stage a show of support for a pack of thugs who had indisputably perpetrated a brutally violent attack against a white person. It explains why they focused exclusively on defending the “rights” of those attackers, rather than on condemning the wrong they had done. And it explains why they chose to portray a group of raging predators as the innocent, misunderstood victims of modern America’s allegedly boundless bigotry.





Law of the Sea Up for Vote Soon

Top Five Reasons to Oppose the Law of the Sea
1. The treaty will undermine U.S. Sovereignty
2. The Treaty will become a back dloor for environmental activitists.
3. America should not participate in yet another U.N. Bureaucracy.
4. American participation will undermine U.S. military and intelligence operations.
5. The U.S. does not need the convention to guarantee navigation rights.

The Law of the Sea will give the U.N. the power to raise funds through a de facto international tax.

Sea Sickness in the Senate

LOST would create an International Seabed Authority (ISA) with the power to regulate and tax things like seabed mining, fishing rights and deep-sea oil exploration. The ISA would decide who gets access to the sea's resources, and the companies granted these rights would pay a royalty to the ISA. When he refused to sign ISA in 1982, President Reagan rightly decided the U.S. shouldn't be a part of this global resource grab and redistribution of wealth.

It's in the area of national security that LOST is most dangerous. The administration cites military support for the treaty because of its uniform limit on territorial waters and its establishment of "rules of the road" for littoral waters. But current international law already protects nonaggressive passage of military ships.
When Reagan vetoed the treaty, the U.S. Navy had 594 warships. We could protect our own right of passage. Today the fleet has withered to 276 vessels. Is that why we need the treaty?

The answer is to build more warships. Our access to the seas should be guaranteed by the Navy and not a U.N. bureaucracy.

Rubber Stamp by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Come Thursday, the future of the United States Senate will begin to take shape. On that day, the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee will begin the first of two days of hearings on the ratification of one of the most momentous international agreements in memory: the United Nation’s Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).

If all goes according to the proponents’ plan, few Senators will have any idea what LOST entails before they are asked to vote for it. The working assumption is that many legislators will be inclined to do in this case what the Senate has done too often in the past with respect to arms control and many other, complex multinational accords: fail to read the text; forego serious deliberation, let alone debate, about it; and rubber-stamp its approval in a matter of days, if not hours.