Obama’s signature on a climate treaty in December could irretrievably compromise American sovereignty.

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Note: This column appeared at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog, with an accompanying supplement on the constitutional situation with any sovereignty-compromising treaty that might be signed there, on Friday morning.

Update 1: The column text says that Obama may — emphasis may — attend the UN -sponsored Copenhagen climate change conference. On Saturday, Giles Whitell, reporting from Washington for the UK Times Online, asserted that “President Obama will almost certainly not travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit in December and may instead use his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech to set out US environmental goals, The Times has learnt.” Update 1A: Major Garrett at Fox News reports that Obama is, in a senior administration official’s workds, “leaning toward not going.”

I advise vigilance. He’s already going to be in the neighborhood on December 10 to accept his accomplishment-free Nobel Peace Prize.

Update 2: See the vid at this post of Glenn Beck’s interview with Lord Monckton and the discussion that follows concerning the purported superiority of international treaties over a country’s internal laws.

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In early October, President Obama, his wife, and his entourage flew in to Copenhagen, Denmark in hopes of helping their hometown of Chicago secure its 2016 Summer Olympics bid. That didn’t work out very well. Among other things, Chicago’s elimination ultimately in favor of Rio de Janeiro sent the grand designs of Windy City Mayor/Dictator for Life Richard Daley into a more serious tailspin than they were already.

In December, Obama may — emphasis may — make another visit to Copenhagen. If he does, watch out, as the stakes will be far greater than the well-being of a single city. What appears to hang in the balance is nothing less than the future of our country’s ability to determine its own destiny.

Denmark’s City of Spires is the site of the December 7-19 United Nations Climate Change Conference. The conference’s objective is “a global climate change agreement.”

What would the “COP” (“Conference of the Parties) agreement entail? Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has said that it involves agreement on the answers to these four questions:

1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
4. How is that money going to be managed?

“If Copenhagen can deliver on those four points I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer.

You bet Mr. de Boer would be happy, especially with Items 3 and 4. So would the motley crew of the Third World’s largely autocratic rulers who could mostly care less about what may or may not be happening to the earth’s climate.

That’s because if Mr. de Boer and the one-worlders of the environmental movement get their way in Copenhagen, the United Nations will finally have transformed itself from its original design — as “an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and the achieving of world peace” — into a de facto unelected government, complete with its own tax and spending authorities and its own powers of enforcement.

There’s a natural tendency to dismiss statements such as the one just made as overwrought hyperbole. I would suggest resisting that urge. First, I have been through the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action’s “revised negotiating text,” which is in essence a mock-up of the treaty containing many multi-bracketed items representing matters that remain to be ironed out. I have posted that 181-page PDF document at my blog so that anyone interested can read it. What I am asserting is in there is indeed in there. Second, I am far from the only person expressing this concern.

What follows are some key areas of the document containing what I believe are its most odious provisions. It is of course no substitute for a full reading.

On Page 6 in Preambular Paragraphs (PP) 13-15, signatories are expected to acknowledge the following non-bracketed items:

(PP. 13) “…. current and potential climate change impacts require a shift in the global investment patterns and that criteria for financing allocation shall clearly respond to the priorities identified by the international community, with climate change stabilization being one of these priorities.”
(PP. 14) “…. current atmospheric concentrations are principally the result of historical emissions of greenhouse gases, the most significant share of which has originated in developed countries.”
(PP. 15) “…. developed countries have a historical responsibility for their disproportionate contribution to the causes and consequences of climate change, reflecting their disproportionate historical use of a shared global carbon space since 1850 as well as their proposed continuing disproportionate use of the remaining global carbon space.”

Allow me to translate: Free-market capitalism hasn’t worked to our satisfaction, so it must be stopped. It has brought the earth to the eve of destruction. Oh, and it’s the developed world’s fault, especially America’s. The date chosen in PP. 15 appears to betray a belief that the entire Industrial Age has been one big mistake.

Now let’s go to where the money is.

Paragraph 33 on Page 39 of the Negotiating Text itself reads, “By 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70–140 billion] per year.” The bracketed amounts are the only alternatives. These duties would arrive after a proposed initial start of $50-86 billion.

Paragraph 41 on Page 43 contemplates all manner of potential wealth transfers from the developed world to everyone else, including but not at all limited to the following: possible assessments of up to 0.7% of a country’s gross domestic product (GDP); auctioning of emission allowances; levies on CO2 emissions; taxes on “carbon-intensive products and services”; levies on international transactions; and fines for non-compliance.

At the very bottom of Page 145, there is mention of assessing “financial penalties, at a minimum of ten times the market price of carbon, for any emissions in excess of the level implied by the emissions reduction commitment.” America, meet your carbon straitjacket.

Finally, let’s get to how UNFCCC becomes a governmental entity. Though it appears that it might be supplanted at crunch time by much more vague language, Paragraph 38 on Page 18 describes what the framers have in mind:

The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:
(a) “The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.”
(b) “The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows …” (FYI — they are Adaptation, Compensation, Technology, Mitigation, and REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation)
(c) “The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include …. an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries.”

From all appearances, agreeing to COP would mean signing away a significant portion of our national sovereignty in the name of solving a problem that even former climate-change cheerleaders are starting to doubt, which may just have been totally scientifically debunked, and whose origins are based on raw data that is apparently no longer available — all for the sole purpose of transferring vast amounts of wealth that will be spent on projects accomplishing very little of economic value, thus threatening to impoverish the entire world.

If there’s an alternative way to interpret what I have described here and the totality of the COP itself, I want to know what it is.

Our president, possibly softened up by his achievement-free attainment of the Nobel Peace Prize, has signaled that he’s ready to sign if everyone else is:

US officials said Washington is behind the deal and pledged that President Obama will attend the talks himself if enough progress is made.

I believe it’s fair to characterize a U.S. president who signs the COP treaty as seriously betraying his country’s best interests, regardless of how it might be watered down in negotiations, because its underlying premises are all either very dubious or false. Even though the Senate must ratify any treaty a president signs under what’s left of our Constitution, some might still describe Obama’s choice by employing a word that starts with “T” and rhymes with “reason.”

From Lima, Peru:

Oct 23, 2009 / 11:22 pm

Peru’s Constitutional Court has ruled against the distribution of the “morning-after pill” at public health care facilities because the abortifacient effect of the drug has not been ruled out.

According to the public relations office of the Court, the justices hold that “the inexistence of the abortifacient effect, the inhibition of the implantation of the fertilized ovum in the endometrium, has not been demonstrated.”

The court accepted the arguments of various NGOs after evaluating the arguments presented by national and international institutions and found that supporters of the pill could not prove that it does not affect the right to life of the unborn, which is protected by the Peruvian Constitution.

The court’s ruling bans the free distribution of the morning-after pill in public health care facilities, however the drug can still be sold in pharmacies as long as consumers are provided with information on the drug’s potential abortifacient nature.

According to Carlos Polo, director of the Office for Latin America of the Population Research Institute (PRI), the court “has acted correctly because it put things into proper perspective. The promoters and sellers of the pill needed to show that the anti-implantation effect did not exist and they could not do so.”

PRI is one the organizations cited in the court’s ruling. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

Either LA Times op-ed writer Peter Dreier lives in a cave, or he’s all too willing to spread falsehoods to defend an organization where he once served as a consultant. Perhaps it’s a little of both.

In that Thursday op-ed (“The war on ACORN; Conservatives are distorting and playing up the community organizing group’s so-called scandals”), Dreier parroted ACORN CEO’s now-discredited claims that “not a single person who signed a phony name on a registration form ever actually voted,” and that undercover filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles were only able to get help from two ACORN offices in starting up their proposed prostitution enterprises involving the importation of immigrant girls.

In running Dreier’s op-ed, the Times miscalculated at least twice:

• First, the paper failed to disclose Dreier’s past relationship with ACORN as a consultant, something that is right there in his Occidental College bio, and that readers had a right to know.
• Second, the Times somehow thought Dreier’s propaganda would get past LA blogger and certified Times nemesis Patterico. That was the far more serious blunder.

Here are key paragraphs from Dreier’s drivel:

The attack on ACORN is not really about bogus names on voter forms or about staffers encouraging people to lie on their tax forms. Rather, it is part of a broader conservative effort to attack progressive organizations and discredit President Obama and his liberal agenda.

Over the years, ACORN has made powerful enemies. Many businesses oppose the group’s efforts to raise wages for the working poor. Banks, mortgage companies and payday lenders have fought ACORN’s campaigns to strengthen regulation of the financial industry. Business groups have funded anti-ACORN websites, such as rottenacorn.com, that aim to destroy the group’s credibility. Republicans have long opposed ACORN’s success at registering low-income, mostly minority voters, who are more likely to vote for Democrats.

Christopher Martin, a journalism professor at the University of Northern Iowa, and I recently analyzed media coverage of ACORN over the years. In our published report, “Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong,” we found that, despite ACORN’s effective community organizing work in more than 70 cities across the country, 55% of the stories about the organization during 2007 and 2008 dealt with voter fraud.

The coverage was largely driven by the GOP. In the third and final presidential debate last October, McCain charged that ACORN was “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.” At rallies and media events, McCain and Palin repeated this charge and demanded that Obama disclose his ties with ACORN — echoing attacks that first appeared in conservative publications.

…. Did ACORN engage in election fraud? Absolutely not. As part of its highly successful voter registration drive, the group — like many others — paid outside contractors to gather signatures. A few of them turned in bogus forms, registering names such as “Mickey Mouse” or “Donald Duck.” ACORN’s staff did what was required by law and promptly reported the questionable names to authorities. In some cities, those local officials — mostly Republicans — turned around and accused ACORN of voter fraud.

Our study documented that many news outlets reported the voter fraud allegations without attempting to verify them. Had they done so, they would have discovered that not a single person who signed a phony name on a registration form ever actually voted. What occurred was voter registration fraud, not voter fraud, and it was ACORN that exposed the wrongdoing in the first place.

…. And what about the prostitute-and-pimp video? It also isn’t quite what Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly would have you believe. Two “gotcha” right-wing activists showed up at about 10 ACORN offices hoping to entice low-level staff to provide tax advice for an illegal prostitution ring. In most ACORN offices, the staff kicked the pair out. In a few cities, staffers called the police. In two offices, however, the staff listened and offered to help. That was wrong. But ACORN immediately fired the errant staffers.

Patterico pounced. First, he debunked the obvious misstatements to be detailed shortly. He then documented Dreier’s undisclosed ACORN relationship (I suspect that a further look would reveal that other organizations on Dreier’s list have ties to ACORN). Finally, the LA blogger fired off a letter to the editor demanding a detailed retraction of misstated facts and disclosure of Dreier’s ACORN relationship.

As to Dreier’s errors, let’s start with the “not a single person who signed a phony name on a registration form ever actually voted” claim.

Tell that to ACORN Cleveland and Darnell Nash, as documented by Matthew Vadum at the American Spectator:

The conviction of Darnell Nash, apparently known by several aliases including Serina “Sexy Slay” Gibbs, is hugely significant for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that ACORN has long maintained that vote fraud, as opposed to the lesser crime of voter registration fraud, essentially never happens.

…. While ACORN has not yet been charged in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, the fact that an individual voter registered by ACORN has been convicted of actually casting a fraudulent ballot appears to be a historic first for the embattled radical advocacy group.

…. (Cleveland prosecutor Bill Mason’s spokesan Ryan) Miday explained that Nash was registered nine times to vote with the assistance of what the spokesman called “ACORN outreach workers.” Nash repeatedly used different names and different addresses to register to vote. He was indicted by a grand jury earlier this year.

Nash cast a fraudulent ballot at the local board of elections office, Miday said.

Nash entered a guilty plea to one count of casting a fraudulent ballot and to several counts of false registration on August 5. On August 19 he was sentenced to six months imprisonment by Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Nancy Margaret Russo.

As to the O’Keefe-Giles video stings:

• Dreier says, “In most ACORN offices, the staff kicked the pair out.” He refers to 10 offices visited by O’Keefe and Giles (how he knows this is a mystery, but stick with me). We know now that in six cities (Baltimore, DC, Brooklyn, San Bernardino, San Diego, and Philadelphia, the pair were not kicked out. That only leaves four cities out of 10. Last time I checked, 4 is not “most of” 10.
• Dreier asserts, “In a few cities, staffers called the police.” As far as I know, that has only been shown to be the case for Philadelphia, the site of the latest proven example of a successful O’Keefe-Giles sting — and in that case it would appear that the cops were only called after the pair had departed ACORN’s premises.
• Dreier further dissembles by saying that “In two offices, however, the staff listened and offered to help.” As already noted, the number of instances where “the staff listened and offered to help” is six — so far.
• Dreier wanders into the neighborhood of the truth when he writes that “ACORN immediately fired the errant staffers.” But then, the awful fired staffers in Baltimore became parties in ACORN’s lawsuit against O’Keefe and Giles. That’s an odd way to punish malfeasance.

As its circulation in March showed yet another steep decline compared to the previous year, one thing the Times doesn’t need is Patterico with a laundry list of perfectly valid complaints. But he’s got ‘em, and I don’t think he’ll let go.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

This is a good segment that among other things rips RomneyCare’s real fiscal results:

Here’s the transcript of Beck’s opening monologue on RomneyCare:

Beck: …. Remember, while the White House is waging war on Fox, what this is really all about is the effort to push health care.

I want to show you what we’re headed for with universal health care. …. Don’t forget …. we don’t have to look across the pond or in Canada. There is an example that is much closer to home. Yes, it’s in Barney Frank’s home state. Universal health care. How’s that RomneyCare working out for them, hmm?

Since 2006, the state’s overall cost — remember, the overall cost is supposed to go down — there in Massachusetts program (costs) have skyrocketed 42%. It’s out of control; it’s eating up the state budget.

Democrats are now scrambling to compensate. How? Taxes. They’ve increased fines also for those who didn’t get insurance under the individual mandate. They’ve increased business penalties. They’ve taxed insurers and hospitals. They’ve raised premiums. They’ve even in Massachusetts — this isn’t, y’know, Botswana — Massachusetts, they have resorted to group doctor visits. Like, okay, “He’s got a gallstone and I have a sore throat. Can you do this at the same time?”

It’s still not enough. So what are they considering? Excluding coverage of “low-priority, low-value services.” Also, limit the coverage. Implementing spending caps.

Wait a minute here. This sounds like everything they’re denying would happen in a (national) universal plan.

So less service, less innovation. Oh, and guess who decides what the value is. Not the doctors. Not you. Those in the Statehouse. I can’t wait.

In the Stossel interview (Stossel has an “I’m not settled in yet” look, which is understandable given that this is his first Fox appearance since leaving ABC), Beck talks about his efforts to set up a health care plan building on the idea of health savings accounts, and asserts that such an arrangement is illegal where he is based for business purposes, which I believe is New York. Stossel points out that individuals and families under such health savings account arrangements are more vigilant consumers, and that doctors welcome the opportunity to get paid directly without hassling with mountains of government/insurance company paperwork.

In an e-mail, Gregg Jackson also points out that Beck/Stossel didn’t get to the $50 subsidized abortions and other RomneyCare shortcomings, which is true enough, but normally wouldn’t be expected in a Stossel interview.

That said, as yours truly has noted (here and here), abortion is indeed in ObamaCare. As of yesterday, it remained present in the BaucusCare iteration. As I wrote several months ago, even if abortion disappeared from all related proposals under consideration tomorrow, ObamaCare’s various incarnations are moral clunkers.

It would appear that the Apparatchik Press — er, the Associated Press — thinks that part of its job is to soften the impact of embarrassing admissions made by Obama administration members.

Take the wire service’s Thursday afternoon AP report by Jim Kuhnhenn on Council of Economic Advisers’ chair Christine Romer’s observations about the stimulus package. Romer said (in AP’s words) that “the government’s economic stimulus spending has already had its biggest impact,” and will (in Romer’s words) “likely be contributing little to further growth by the middle of next year.”

As you’ll see shortly, AP’s headline doesn’t reflect what Romer said. Additionally, Kuhnhenn allowed Romer to mischaracterize the economy’s performance in the second quarter without challenging it, and saved the big news — yet another administration official admitting that unemployment will stay near double digit through the end of next year — for his eighth paragraph.

Here’s a graphic capture of Kuhnhenn’s first eight paragraphs, posted for fair use and discussion purposes:

There’s a self-evident difference between what Romer said (“contributing little to economic growth”) and what AP’s headline communicates (“Impact of stimulus will level off next year”). The headline is perhaps deliberately vague; readers who don’t go to the content will have no idea whether the “leveled-off” impact next year will still be significant. Obviously, it won’t. “Little stimulus impact expected next year” would have communicated the reality quite nicely.

As to Romer’s contention that the stimulus “expanded the economy in the second and third quarters of this year,” a widely cited official government report refutes half of that assertion.

For the stimulus to have “expanded the economy,” there first has to be a recorded economic expansion. The trouble is that the Bureau  of Economic Analysis tells us that the economy contracted during the second quarter by 0.7%. Though it still would have been dubious, if Romer had wanted to claim that the contraction would have been worse without the stimulus, that would have at least been coherent. Most analysts seem to believe that the economy will show expansion during the third quarter, but that doesn’t change the fact that it didn’t during the second.

Romer’s prediction that the unemployment rate will stay so high for so long may be the most specific and gloomy prediction that has come from an administration spokesperson about persistent unemployment. I submit that its relevance to readers would have justified its placement well above the eighth paragraph. I daresay that in a Republican administration an unemployment prediction such as Romer’s would have been part or all of the story’s headline.

Finally, let’s get to Romer’s continuation of the administration’s tired claims about jobs “created or saved.” As I showed in early December 2008 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I could not find a single instance during the presidential campaign where candidate Obama promised in any possible variation of the phrase to “create or save” jobs. He always said that his policies would “create” them.  The phraseology magically and dishonestly transformed into “create or save” within weeks of the election and has been employed with almost no challenge from the establishment media in the ten or so months that have since transpired. As I noted in that December post, “Old Media’s failure to note this shift is journalistic malpractice that would never occur during a Republican presidency.” That malpractice continues.

The laughable imprecision of Romer’s “created or saved” claim (“600,000 and 1.5 million”; are you kidding me?) virtually proves how utterly foolish and unprovable the administration’s assertions have been all along. The establishment press’s adoption and continued parroting of those “created and saved” assertions demonstrates how generally valid a characterization of them as apparatchiks really is.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Newton, Massachusetts:

Posted Oct 15, 2009 @ 03:44 PM

For Laura Geraghty, a 46-year-old from North Attleborough, Newton is far from a place on a map.

It’s where two Newton school staffers help saved her life.

Shortly before noon on April 1, Geraghty suffered a massive heart attack while working as a bus driver at Newton South High School. Though her heart stopped for nearly an hour – and she underwent 21 shocks from a defibrillator to restart her heartbeat – she survived without any brain damage.

She credits her survival to Gail Kramer, the school’s nurse, and Michelle Coppola, a CPR instructor, with saving her life.

“Those girls are just awesome,” said Geraghty, who also thanked the firefighters, ambulance medics and police who responded to the school that day.

Geraghty will be profiled by CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Saturday, and has spoken to doctors about her experience. But Geraghty’s heart attack also had an impact on Kramer and Coppola.

“It’s something Michelle and I think about everyday,” Kramer said, calling Geraghty “a lucky woman.”

Kramer said the South high school’s portable defibrillator was key to saving Geraghty’s life.

“It clearly saved her life (to) have a defibrillator here,” said Kramer, who noted the devices were installed last week in the city’s elementary schools.

On April 1, Geraghty was driving a bus for a private transportation company, and drove to Newton South High School as part of her job.

After she got to the school, she felt a strong pain in her stomach, and then another pain that shot up her left arm and into her heart. She knew she was suffering a heart attack – and asked a nearby teacher’s aide for help.

“’I’m having a heart attack. Go get the school nurse,’” Geraghty recalled saying to the aide.

She lost consciousness within a few minutes of her heart attack, and the last thing she remembered was being placed on a gym mat.

Kramer, the school’s nurse, and Coppola, a CPR instructor, were the first on the scene. They began administering CPR and using a portable emergency defibrillator to restart her heart.

“Those two women at Newton South High School saved my life,” said Geraghty, who credited continued CPR as the reason she never suffered brain damage from a lack of oxygen.

After three shocks, she turned blue, said Geraghty, who reviewed the medical reports of her case. An ambulance called to the scene took Geraghty to Newton-Wellesley Hospital, and she was given additional shocks and medics continued CPR during the trip.

At Newton-Wellesley, an emergency room team continued administering shocks to restart her heart. Nearly 56 minutes had passed since her heart stopped by the time she got to the emergency room, she said.

“The chances of me living were basically zero,” she said.

On the 21st shock, her heart was restarted. But she remained in grave condition, as the emergency room team found a blockage in her heart that could’ve killed her. She was taken in a second ambulance to Massachusetts General Hospital for emergency surgery.

Geraghty said she had an out-of-body experience: she felt herself leave her body, saw the people working to save her life, and then was surrounded by bright lights.

Geraghty said she experienced a religious awakening.

“The mystery part of it is, why did God pick me?” she asked, and noted her priorities have changed.

“It’s not a material world… material things come and go. You can’t take them with you,” she said. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

…. , which is indeed a very iffy proposition, they’ll put a muzzle on these folks really fast:

Save the planet: eat a dog?

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The real guide to sustainable living.

The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created bypopular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.

….. Professor Vale says the title of the book is meant to shock, but the couple, who do not have a cat or dog, believe the reintroduction of non-carnivorous pets into urban areas would help slow down global warming.

“The title of the book is a little bit of a shock tactic, I think, but though we are not advocating eating anyone’s pet cat or dog there is certainly some truth in the fact that if we have edible pets like chickens for their eggs and meat, and rabbits and pigs, we will be compensating for the impact of other things on our environment.”

Professor Vale took her message to Wellington City Council last year, but councillors said banning traditional pets or letting people keep food animals in their homes were not acceptable options.

It’s one thing to talk about inconveniencing humans in the name of environmental purity. But getting between pet owners and their pets is more dangerous than getting between Chuckie Schumer and a microphone.`

On second thought, let’s find this couple a booking agent and send them on a U.S. tour. The enviro-nutty movement is what will end up being dead in just a few months.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

The succinct sub-headline: “Obama’s signature on a climate treaty in December could irretrievably compromise American sovereignty.”

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Copenhagen and the Constitution

The Copenhagen treaty’s “negotiating document” is here (2.1 mb PDF).

Read/peruse it for yourself and see if you agree with my core PJM paragraph:

From all appearances, agreeing to the COP would mean signing away a significant portion of our national sovereignty in the name of solving a problem that even former climate change cheerleaders are starting to doubt, which may just have been totally scientifically debunked, and whose origins are based on raw data that is apparently no longer available — all for the sole purpose of transferring vast amounts of wealth that will be spent on projects accomplishing very little of economic value, thus threatening to impoverish the entire world.

One person who is at least as concerned as I am about the treaty is Lord Christopher Monckton:

Transcript of the first half of Lord Monckton’s video excerpt:

…. At Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the Third World countries will sign it because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes around the world like the European Union will rubber-stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I have read that treaty. And what it says is this: That a world government is going to be created. The word “government” appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.

The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to Third World countries in satisfaction of what is called coyly, “a climate debt” –because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t and we’ve been screwing up the climate. We haven’t been screwing up the climate but that’s the line.

And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, if enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once.

So at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year — because they’d captured it — now the apotheosis is at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world.

You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace laureate; of course he’ll sign it.

And the trouble is this. If that treaty is signed, your Constitution says that it takes precedent over your Constitution. And you can’t resile from that treaty unless you get the agreement of all the other states (and) parties. And because you will be the biggest-paying country they’re not going to let you out. ….

Is it really that serious? Well, only two other things potentially stand in the way.

• First, the U.S. Senate would have to ratify such a treaty. It would be dangerous to bet against that.
• Second, Lord Monckton’s take on the superiority of the treaty over our Constitution has never been tested. It is, like many other things relating to our Founding Documents, incorrect on the merits but widely understood by modern legal “scholars” and supposedly settled “wisdom” to be the case.

The relevant passages from the Constitution are these:

Article II, Sec. 2: “[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur….”

Article III, Sec. 2: “The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority….”

Article VI: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

Article VI to the one-world government folks means that treaties automatically trump the Constitution. A reasoned reading of the Article really tells us that treaties change “the Law of the Land,” but that “the Law of the Land” is subject to the El Supremo document above all, the Constitution.

To see an expression of what the conventional wisdom has been, you can go back to John Foster Dulles, who was Secretary of State under President Eisenhower. No, he’s not normally seen as an anti-constitutionalist, but that’s actually the scary point. The view that follows has been considered “mainstream” by Washington’s elites for decades.

In an April 11, 1952 speech in Louisville less than a year before he became Secretary of State, Dulles told his American Bar Association audience that:

Treaties make international law and also they make domestic law. Under our Constitution, treaties become the supreme law of the land…. [T]reaty law can override the Constitution. Treaties, for example, … can cut across the rights given the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights.

Thus, the conventional “wisdom” is that any treaty, no matter how outrageous, will override the Constitution. To exemplify just one extreme from this point of view, as long as the President and 2/3 of the Senate agreed that our young people must be conscripted for two years to join United Nations peacekeepers and serve overseas in whatever capacity the UN thinks is appropriate, that would be that.

Unsurprisingly, the Founders in their writings, including Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton, totally disagree:

“I say the same as to the opinion of those who consider the grant of the treaty-making power as boundless. If it is, then we have no Constitution. If it has bounds, they can be no others than the definitions of the powers which that instrument gives. It specifies and delineates the operations permitted to the federal government, and gives all the powers necessary to carry these into execution. Whatever of these enumerated objects is proper for a law, Congress may make the law; whatever is proper to be executed by way of a treaty, the President and Senate may enter into the treaty; whatever is to be done by a judicial sentence, the judges may pass the sentence.” (Thomas Jefferson, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Bergh 10:418-419. [1803])

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As he debated the treaty making power which was granted to the President and Senate as found in the Constitution, James Madison addressed the logical limits to the treaty making power, and made this statement:

“Does it follow, because this power is given to Congress, that it is absolute and unlimited? I do not conceive that power is given to the President and Senate to dismember the empire, or to alienate any great, essential right. I do not think the whole legislative authority have this power. The exercise of the power must be consistent with the object of the delegation.” (James Madison, Jonathan Elliot, Debates on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Vol. 3, p.514)

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Alexander Hamilton, one of the most forceful of the Federalists and one who often clashed with Jefferson, nevertheless agreed with his distinguished adversary on this important point. Hamilton wrote:

“The only constitutional exception to the power of making treaties is, that it shall not change the Constitution…. On natural principles, a treaty, which should manifestly betray or sacrifice primary interests of the state, would be null.”

“A treaty cannot be made,” Hamilton maintained, “which alters the Constitution of the country or which infringes any express exceptions to the power of the Constitution of the United States.”

The author of the linked item properly concludes that:

The Founding Fathers of this Nation unquestionably felt that the power to make treaties did not embrace the power to modify the Constitution. In their view, the treaty-making power was a limited grant of power that could not undermine or destroy individual God-given rights, or the structure or framework of the limited, carefully defined government they established.

In honest circumstances, Lord Monckton’s ultimate fears of lost sovereignty would be overblown. But we’re not in honest circumstances. If the Copenhagen agreement ever got through the Senate, the establishment’s repeated remonstrances that “Copenhagen is now the law of the land” would attempt to drown out sensible, Constitution-based opposition.

Such drown-outs have already been acceptable, or at least acquiesced to, in other areas:

• Gay marriage has never been legalized in Massachusetts (“The Goodridge ruling resulted in a complete cave-in by politicians of both parties on this issue. Same-sex ‘marriage’ is still illegal in Massachusetts. On November 18, 2003 the court merely ruled that it was unconstitutional not to allow it, and gave the Legislature six months to ‘take such action as it may deem appropriate.’” The Legislature has never taken action.). Yet it’s supposedly a settled matter that it has.
• The Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision is supposedly “the law of the land.” No it’s not; it’s a ruling in one case that has never been accompanied in most states by the enabling legislation required to overturn laws against the practice that have never been formally repealed in most if not all of them. Absent those legislative repeals, abortion is still illegal (it is probably also presumptively illegal because the practice violates the God-given entitlement to life recognized in the Declaration of Independence).
• The Obama administration has simply seized unconstitutional powers in many areas, not the least of which involve taking over or intervening in the management of supposedly private businesses and recasting bankruptcy and contract law on the fly. Barely anyone has objected on constitutional grounds.

With this disturbing backdrop, if the elites say that a Copenhagen agreement’s effect on the Constitution is what they say it is, who will stop them?

From Philadelphia:

Oct 23, 2009 / 03:38 am

A philanthropic mother of ten and grandmother of 28 will be honored for her work at the upcoming Tenth Annual Awards for Outstanding Catholic Leadership. The Catholic Leadership Institute (CLI) will present the award to Barbara Henkels on Nov. 13 in Drexel Hill, Penn.

CLI reports that Mrs. Henkels, with her late husband Paul, has worked “tirelessly” to promote “authentic Catholic education.” She has helped found two private Catholic elementary schools in the Philadelphia area and is a founding board member of Ave Maria University in Florida.

Mrs. Henkels also has served on a number of Catholic leadership boards, such as those of Cabrini College, St. Thomas Aquinas College and International Legatus. She is a past recipient of the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice papal medal and the Philopatrian St. John Newman Medal.

“Barbara’s commitment to Catholic leadership has inspired those in her hometown, the country and the world,” CLI said.

Go here for the rest of the story.

As I pointed out Monday night (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), Associated Press reporter Martin Crutsinger, in his Saturday morning report on the federal government’s full-year fiscal results, conveniently “forgot” about a major accounting change that enabled President Obama’s Treasury Department to report a final “deficit” of “only” $1.417 trillion.

That’s hundreds of billion of dollars lower than the $1.75 trillion expected in February. The change, which caused “investments” in financial institutions, General Motors, Chrysler, and other entities to be accounted for on a “net present value” (NPV) basis, had an initial impact of over $175 billion when first implemented. Crutsinger ignored the change, even though its implementation occurred after that February estimate.

Though the end of a fiscal year represents a perfect opportunity to extend readers’ understanding of how our government (sort of) works, Crutsinger also did not tell readers that the reported “deficit” is nowhere near the amount of the increase in the national debt that occurred during the fiscal year. As of September 30, the national debt was $11.910 trillion, or $1.885 trillion higher than the national debt a year earlier. That means that the most recent year’s “unreported deficit” was $468 billion.

One other area where Crutsinger erred was in his breezy opening paragraph assessment that the precipitous drop in cash receipts during the most recent fiscal year – officially understated for a reason I will note shortly — was entirely due to the recession:

The federal budget deficit has surged to an all-time high of $1.42 trillion as the recession caused tax revenues to plunge while the government was spending massive amounts to stabilize the financial system and jump-start the economy.

…. For 2009, the government collected $2.10 trillion in revenues, a 16.6 percent drop from 2008. That was the largest percentage decline on records going back nearly seven decades.

Not so, sir.

The first thing to understand is that the drop in receipts from economic activity was much worse.

The only reason the government is able to claim that receipts dropped by “only” 16.6% is that Treasury treated the $96 billion in economic stimulus payments made during calendar 2008 as “negative receipts” instead of more properly accounting for them as outlays. A case could be made for this treatment if every taxpayer had received a stimulus payment proportional to the amount of tax paid. But this isn’t what happened. Many higher-income tax payers did not get a stimulus check, while many lower-income filers who paid no tax at all still got one. By contrast, a similar mass-check payment program that occurred earlier this year involving payments that went to Social Security recipients was properly accounted for as outlays.

The properly stated degree of the receipts drop is 19.5%, as shown here:

Now that the full extent of the decline in receipts is clear, let’s look at how and when the drops occurred. Let’s start by looking at the situation quarter-by-quarter:

The fact of the matter is that this recession — where the drop in real GDP has been less than 4% — doesn’t fully explain why year-over-year quarterly receipts dropped by as much as 31% during the past fiscal year. Something else is at work here. Martin Crutsinger should have looked into what that something else might be.

I described what I believed it was in July 2008. I came to this description after watching Democratic nominee-to-be Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid spend the previous weeks demonstrating total disinterest in or hostility towards getting this economy the energy it needs to function and promising to radically raise taxes on the most productive in the name of wealth redistribution. Here is what I wrote:

Businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness (about energy and taxes) by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.

The most productive people began to withdrew into their cocoon not because the economy was in a serious recession — at least as normal people define it (second quarter 2008′s annualized growth was +1.5%). What happened is that enough of them to matter started “going Galt.”

Looking back in April 2009 at the previous nine months, I wrote the following about what subsequently took place:

Starting in June (2008) and all the way through to Election Day, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Harry Reid repeatedly told the country that they were ready, willing, and would soon be able to starve the country of the conventional sources of energy it needs to keep its economic engines running, regardless of the consequences, bowing before what may be the greatest hoax in human history. Enough high producers to make a difference believed them and abandoned their previous guarded optimism.

Starting in June and all the way through to Election Day, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid — but especially presidential nominee Obama — told the country that they were ready, willing, and would soon be able to punitively tax the 5% of the nation’s most productive so they could redistribute money to everyone else. Enough high producers to make a difference believed them and abandoned their previous guarded optimism.

In September, the decades-in-the-making, Democratic Party-driven housing and mortgage lending mess came to a head at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Washington then allowed itself to be blackmailed into a series of financial sector and other bailouts that appeared to be, and have turned out to be, seemingly endless. Enough high producers to make a difference headed for the lifeboats and abandoned what little optimism remained.

Enough high producers to make a difference abandoned their spring (2008) optimism, not because of then-current economic conditions, which were at worst mediocre. They did so because of their assessments of what economic conditions would be in the not-too-distant future, based on the perilous pronouncements of Pelosi, Obama, and Reid. Many of those who didn’t catch on during the summer did so after observing the reckless September-October actions of the Washington establishment.

As a result, they took steps that businesspeople, entrepreneurs, and investors ordinarily take when a serious recession takes hold — not hiring, not expanding, letting people go and not replacing them, making worn-out equipment last longer instead of buying new, and others — before the serious recession took hold. They deliberately downsized in response to stated promises by powerful government officials Pelosi, Obama, and Reid to penalize and punish them and the economy as a whole, if and when they gained power.

In other words, enough high producers to make a difference preemptively “went Galt.”

The horrid collections results of the first three calendar quarters of this year, especially the cliff-dive in individual income tax receipts, were at least as much the result of the “going Galt” phenomenon as they were of the recession itself.

The third calendar quarter’s shortfall of “only” 14.4% might appear to be cause for hope.

Nope. Thanks to this administration’s failure to do anything about the chronic uncertainty and fear it has injected into nearly every nook and cranny of the economy, the government’s collections shortfall has spread to what it gets through withholdings from workers’ paychecks:

Year-over-year collections from withholdings fell over 10% during the most recent quarter, even though average quarterly unemployment increased “only” 3.5% during the intervening year. Many formerly well-paid employees are earning much less, paying not only less tax, but proportionally less as a percentage of their lowered income. Employees at the lower end of the pay scale are working fewer average hours. Given that most economists and other analysts both in and out of the government are saying that unemployment will stay high until at least late 2010, future year-over-year improvements in the withholdings number, which is by far the most important one on the list, are probably not on the horizon.

That’s especially true because the disincentives to work hard have increased significantly during this administration’s early months, and there are more possible disincentives on the horizon. This Forbes report by Janet Novack and Stephanie Fitch (“When Work Doesn’t Pay For The Middle Class”) explains how ugly the situation is in great detail.

What the Forbes pair is essentially telling us is that “Going Galt” has spread from the highest producers to above average and average ones. This, at least as much as the recession itself, explains why collections have cratered so severely, and why anyone expecting a robust recovery in money coming into the Treasury is probably setting themselves up for significant disappointment.

The establishment media’s failures to recognize and cover the “going Galt” phenomenon of the past 16 months, and the more recent “it isn’t worth it to work” trend, are two more significant journalistic oversights in a very, very long list of them.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

…. is the fact that banks had their TARP money forced onto them in the first place:

So when “the Obama administration’s special master for executive compensation” (are these titles starting to scare anyone yet?) says, as phrased by Bloomberg, that “seven taxpayer-rescued firms should become the model for the rest of Wall Street and corporate America,” he’s really saying “Now that we forced money on you by pointing a (figurative in the physical sense but very threatening in a real sense) gun to your heads, we’re also going to force you to pay your people the way we want you to pay your people. And if you resist, you can expect the full weight of our bully pulpit to come crashing down on you — and, if necessary, as you saw with AIG, on your families.”

The original CNBC vid from last year is still there, as chilling as ever.

As noted here late last night, BigGov posted James O’Keefe’s and Hannah Giles’s latest video yesterday. It totally nuked claims by ACORN National and ACORN Philly that O’Keefe and Giles had been “shown the door” and “kicked out” after a “few minutes” in their Philly Office visit — claims that establishment media outlets and the Obama-ACORN apparatchiks at Media Matters for America continued to repeat even, as shown in the excerpt that follows, after ACORN was proven to have lied about what happened in New York City and San Diego.

Billy Hallowell at BigGovernment.com has a great recap of the not well-known ACORN and media goofs that have occurred since James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles released their first two sting videos (links are in original):

The mainstream media were complicit in their coverage of the ACORN scandal. Their behavior was and continues to be an insult to democracy and journalistic responsibility as the Fourth Estate has ignored facts, engaged in one-sided sourcing, and avoided basic and inherently important journalistic questioning.

…. there were cases of gratuitously sloppy journalism. Some of the outlets that did cover the story simply skipped over basic interview questions. In several instances, Bertha Lewis made the false claim that the filmmakers were turned away in “dozens of cities.” In a CNN interview with Rick Sanchez, Lewis said, “…the filmmakers went to dozens of offices. They were turned away.” In a more flagrant example of corroborating untruths, Lewis reiterated her “dozens” on MSNBC, stating, “…They were thrown out of dozens of offices. And, in fact, in Philadelphia, we called the police, filed a police report.”

Similarly, Wolf Blitzer, failed to adequately question Lewis. While on his show, Lewis made the following statement: “This sort of notorious crew went around to dozens of our offices. What you don’t see are the offices that threw them out… offices that filed police complaints.”

The lack of depth of these interviews with Lewis has been egregious. Upon hearing of the “dozens,” even the most unseasoned journalist would know to ask, “What were the cities where filmmakers were thrown out?” And, what about the police reports (plural) that were filed by multiple “offices”? Like Sanchez’s treatment of the “dozens,” Blitzer failed to ask for a list of cities that took such action. Lewis was granted a free pass, as no probing questions were asked about the issues in question.

…. On Sept. 12, just two days after the Maryland tape was made public, Lewis released a statement on ACORN’s Web site, writing, “This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.”

Following subsequent video releases, New York and San Diego were dropped from ACORN’s list of cities where the filmmakers were allegedly “turned away” and the aforementioned statement was removed from ACORN’s Web site, thus erasing evidence of inconsistency.

Along the way, as Hallowell notes, both the Associated Press and the Washington Post smeared O’Keefe with a false charge of racism and then quietly corrected those assertions after their slanderous seeds had been planted (sound familiar?).

But the press let Bertha Lewis tell the same lie all over again (bold is mine):

Despite the fact that Bertha Lewis’ credibility had been completely compromised on September 14th with with the release of the New York ACORN investigation (not to mention the San Diego videos released on Sept. 17), she was granted a forum with The National Press Club on Oct. 6; the conference was broadcast on C-SPAN. In that presser, Lewis used the debunked information from the Associated Press and Washington Post articles that had since been corrected. Yes, the NPC gave her a platform to continue touting untruths that were previously purveyed by the supine media. She said, “O’Keefe, himself, told The Washington Post, ‘They’re registering too many minorities. They usually vote Democratic. Somebody’s got to stop them’…”

… The ACORN story has, once again, shown the media’s inability to fulfill its duties.

The National Press Club still has the video of Lewis’s lying October 6 speech at its site without any hint of its proven shortcomings.

At the beginning of that video, you’ll see an introduction of Lewis by Bloomberg’s Jonathan D. Salant that sounds more like a talking press release than the “we’ve asked her to come here to defend herself” introduction that would have been appropriate in the circumstances.

That the slanted Salant would make such a fawning introduction should not surprise anyone familiar with his work. This is the same guy who tried to turn lemonades into lemons in early October by pretending that a Quinnipiac poll showing that voters oppose ObamaCare was still good news.

A revised and extended version of this entry went up at NewsBusters.org this afternoon.