Europe in the vice.

The structure of the European Union is such that power will ebb inexorably away from national governments and flow to Brussels. European Union laws supersede national laws and can be enacted to some degree free of control by national legislatures. This bodes ill for Europe.

Any hope that there are strong constituencies within the European Union willing to safeguard democratic control of government cannot but be dashed when there is such evident contempt for voters in European political circles as evidenced by the manner in which they are attempting to implement the defunct E.U. Constitution.

First, the structure of the E.U. that facilitates centralization:



[L]aws in the EU are made by the Council of Ministers, i.e. the committee of 27 ministers for whichever subject is being voted on, EU integration means that governments receive wide-ranging law-making powers.



This is, of course, incompatible with the principle of the separation of powers. According to that principle, the executive power (the government) should be separate from, and accountable to, the legislature (the national parliament) and of course the judiciary. Dictatorship is precisely the form of government in which the executive is not so constrained, and this is also the case in the EU. Because the EU represents a dramatic and constant transfer of legislative power from national legislatures to national executives (sitting in the Council of Ministers), it can also be dubbed “a permanent coup d’état”. . . . The fact that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s legislature, meets and votes in secret only makes the fundamentally anti-democratic character of the European construction even clearer.[1]



The structure of the European Union thus favors a dangerous transfer of power to a Council of Ministers meeting and voting in secret.

The conduct of the E.U.'s proponents, as opposed to its structure, shows similar contempt for democratic governance. Witness the underhanded way in which the previously rejected-by-voters E.U. constitution is being foisted back on the people of Britain and Europe by merely breaking apart the same constitution and attaching those parts to existing treaties. This is being done by a process of amendment, which amendments deliberately use impenetrable hypertechnical language and require the interested observer to plough back through the extant treaties to understand how a disembodied amending provision relates back.

Then there's always the aboveboard contempt for European voters. From Valery Giscard d'Estaing, former president of France:



The rejection of the constitution [by the voters in referendums] was a mistake which will have to be corrected [by more sagacious people].[2]

And:



"Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly [...] All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.[3]



This drift toward a powerful and unconstrained executive in the European Union is deathly serious. It is the opposite approach taken by our founding document, which should be as useful a guide to Europeans as it is -- or might be -- to us.

Alas, European political leaders now flirt with centralization of power in a manner demonstrating that the preeminent political lesson of the twentieth century was not learned. They thus risk laying the foundation for an oppressive superstate. How far this process will go before Europe slides back into black fascism or red fascism is no small question.

Tragically, at the same time, these political leaders remain blind to – or cowed by -- the totalitarian menace growing in their midst, but which has its roots not in the twentieth but in the seventh century.

Europe is now effectively caught between the arms of a vice.

Notes
[1] "Why Europe’s National Politicians Sign Away National Sovereignty." By John Laughland, The Brussels Journal, 12/19/07 (emphasis added).
[2] "The Betrayal of Freedom in Europe: Back in the EUSSR." The Brussels Journal, 12/19/07.
[3] Id. (Emphasis added.)

posted by Col. B. Bunny at 12/19/2007

Scientists doubt climate change

Washington Times


December 21, 2007


By S.A. Miller - More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.

The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet.

"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number — entirely without merit," said Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, one of the researchers quoted in the report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

"I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached," Mr. Tennekes said in the report.

Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over."

"The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day," he said.

After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp.

Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.

"Recycling of that kind of discredited conspiracy theory is nothing more than a distraction from the real challenge facing society and the energy industry," he said. "And that challenge is how are we going to provide the energy needed to support economic and social development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions."

The Republican report comes on the heels of Saturday's United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, where conferees adopted a plan to negotiate a new pact to create verifiable measurements to fight global warming in two years.

In the Senate report, environmental scientist David W. Schnare of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said he was skeptical because "conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. ... As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain."

The hundreds of others in the report — climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, glaciologists, physicists and paleoclimatologists — voice varying degrees of criticism of the popular global-warming theory. Their testimony challenges the idea that the climate-change debate is "settled" and runs counter to the claim that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling.

The report's authors expect some of the scientists will recant their remarks under intense pressure from the public and from within professional circles to conform to the global-warming theory, a committee staffer said.

Several scientists in the report said many colleagues share their skepticism about man-made climate change but don't speak out publicly for fear of retribution, according to the report.

"Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the report.

The IPCC has about 2,500 members.

HEATED DEBATE

The following are comments from some of the more than 400 scientists in a Republican report on global warming:

•"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double, man would not perceive the temperature impact."

Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences

•"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] number — entirely without merit. ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, former research director at the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute

•"The hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The [greenhouse-gas] hypothesis does not do this. ... The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."

David Wojick, expert reviewer for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

•"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming."

Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo-Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

•"There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried."

Anton Uriarte, a professor of physical geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain

Source: Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee

Boiling down the UNCLOS "debate"

UN Dispatch



November 5, 2007


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While Gail Collins's shtick on the political attention being paid to the Convention on the Law of the Sea does her readers a bit of a disservice considering its actual importance, her column in Saturday's Times does a pretty good job of boiling down the "debate."



Bill Clinton wanted the treaty, but gave up trying to find 67 votes in the Senate. Nothing much has happened since, except 155 other countries have ratified it, including several that didn't exist when it was first passed. The United States, of course, is not the only nation holding back because of well-considered reservations. I hear Libya made some excellent points. And our side also includes all the parts of the Axis of Evil we have yet to invade.

...



While the pros will tell you all about the importance of having a rational system for arbitrating disputes over the Alaskan continental shelf, the cons spin up conspiracy theories about how the International Seabed Authority will force us to give up our cars and cancel the war on terror.



Just take my word. The Navy wants the treaty. Greenpeace wants the treaty. The oil and gas industry wants the treaty. George W. Bush wants the treaty.





The fact that the U.S. Navy backs the treaty is a point that the "Captain" seems to have missed. And while Pejman Yousefzadeh feels better that Tyler Cowen has reservations about UNCLOS, I'm a little more comforted by the fact that everybody who has a dog in this fight -- the military, the environmentalists, industry, the President, and rational thinkers in general -- supports the convention.



The number of people who really care about stopping the treaty is not large. But even if there were only 200, what if 120 of them go to the Iowa caucus? John McCain, who used to support the treaty, recently waved the white flag on a conservative Web site. "I think that we need a Law of the Sea," he blogged. "I think it's important, but I have not frankly looked too carefully at the latest situation as it is, but it would be nice if we had some of the provisions in it. But I do worry a lot about American sovereignty aspects of it, so I would probably vote against it in its present form."

...



The other candidates have issued statements that seem to reflect an inability to come up with any rational arguments. Rudy Giuliani said he "cannot support the creation of yet another unaccountable international bureaucracy that might infringe on American sovereignty and curtail America's freedoms," and Fred Thompson roused himself long enough to announce that "the efforts of treaty proponents would be better spent reforming an ineffective, unaccountable and corrupt United Nations." Mitt Romney's spokesman just said Mitt has "concerns."





Posted by Matthew Cordell - November 5, 2007 12:04 PM - Validators

The Precautionary Principle in the Law of the Sea

Ecologic (Germany)

Book: The Precautionary Principle in the Law of the Sea - Modern decision Making in International Law

By Simon Marr, lawyer with Ecologic Legal (2003)



Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag/London
Pages: 253
Language: English
ISBN: 90 411 2015 7










The purpose of this study is to examine the present status of implementation of the precautionary principle in the law of the sea and to extract evidence of its acceptance as part of customary international law.

The thesis examines the precautionary principle in the law of the sea. The precautionary principle is a risk management tool for policy makers which has been broadly implemented in international environmental law in a variety of different sectors and formulations. It is best described in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration which states that "Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation".



For example, it is commonly applied in the area of health, the environment and sustainable development. Despite the fact that it has been implemented in a number of international treaties as well as national laws, its content and status is still highly debated and various questions arise which make further examination of the precautionary principle necessary. Questions such as: its status as a rule of customary international law including its scope, addressee, triggering threshold, precautionary action measures, and eventually limits of the precautionary principle still have not been clarified, and it seems as if vagueness and ambiguity preclude a more detailed evaluation of these questions.



Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the present state of affairs regarding the implementation of the precautionary principle in the law of the sea and to extract evidence of its acceptance as part of customary international law.



The scope of this study is limited by its primary focus upon the precautionary principle in different sectors in the law of the sea, i.e. pollution of the marine environment, conservation and management of marine living resources, and transboundary transports of radioactive and hazardous wastes. To this end, it is deemed important to scrutinize the precautionary principle on a sector-by-sector basis, discovering whether it has been implemented in different sectors differently.

As environmental protection is difficult to restrict to specific sectors, however, in some cases the scope has been extended to areas not directly linked to marine environment, i.e. air emissions of hazardous substances. Furthermore, this study is not meant to be exhaustive, focusing only on the most pertinent international or national implementations of the precautionary principle in the relative sectors.

Moreover, Chapter 4 draws upon national court decisions dealing in most cases with the licensing requirements of the relative authorities and which have no direct bearing on marine pollution. This study takes these licensing requirements into account since the overall sector in which the courts decided was that of environmental protection. Hence, they are secondarily related to the marine environment and could serve as an indicator for the justiciability of the precautionary principle in national jurisprudence.



Chapter 1 sets out the history and some basic considerations of the precautionary principle. Chapter 2 identifies the key to the precautionary principle: science and its implications. Chapter 3 formulates limits to the precautionary principle. The subsequent chapters then turn to the state practice in different sectors: Chapter 4 - pollution of the marine environment, Chapter 5 - marine biodiversity, Chapter 6 - dumping of radioactive and hazardous substances and incineration, Chapter 7 - conservation and management of marine living resources, and Chapter 8 - transboundary movements of radioactive and hazardous substances, where the implementation of the precautionary principle in international agreements, national legislation and its application in litigation as far as available will be scrutinized. Chapter 9 sets out the prerequisites for state practice as accepted custom, which would also be the applied standard for finally evaluating whether the precautionary principle has evolved into a rule of customary law. Last but not least, Chapter 10 will draw some preliminary conclusions.



Key conclusions


One key conclusion of this thesis is the fact that the precautionary principle has developed from a "soft law" instrument with only guiding qualities for policy makers to a "hard rule" of customary international law in the sectors of pollution of the marine environment and conservation and management of living marine resources. This thesis demonstrates that as a minimum standard the precautionary principle as a rule of customary international law is best reflected in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration. It also shows that there is an emerging practice of law which makes the precautionary principle subject to a proportionality test which includes a cost-benefit analysis. In addition to these findings, this thesis shows which sectors of the law of the sea the precautionary principle is being applied to in a common way. To this end, it indicates that there is also an emerging practice of international law, which includes, inter alia, to make GMOs subject to a strict risk analysis, discharge ballast water on the high seas, decommission disused offshore platforms on land or make the transit passage of ships carrying radioactive or hazardous waste dependent on prior notification or authorization.



Furthermore, this thesis argues that in relation to procedural matters, the precautionary principle as a rule of customary international law includes the switch of the burden of proof. Accordingly, the onus of proof for the harmlessness of the effects of an environmentally sensitive activity lies with the one wanting to pursue the activity. To this end, under certain conditions the application of the precautionary principle as a rule of customary law can also have an impact on the provisional measures according to Art. 290 (5) of the Law of the Sea Convention.

Why Europe’s National Politicians Sign Away National Sovereignty

Brussels Journal

By John Laughland

Created 2007-12-19 15:15



I have often compared the European Union to a cartel – a cartel of governments, engaged in a permanent conspiracy against their own electorates and parliaments. This analysis seems to have been dramatically confirmed by the Lisbon Treaty, signed last week, which replaces the defunct “constitution” rejected in referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005.

Although a lot of anti-EU rhetoric rightly concentrates on the overweening power of the unelected European Commission – which indeed generates far too many laws and has an institutional self-interest in augmenting its own power – what many Eurosceptics overlook is that European integration also, and crucially, favours the power of national governments over that of their respective national parliaments. Because laws in the EU are made by the Council of Ministers, i.e. the committee of 27 ministers for whichever subject is being voted on, EU integration means that governments receive wide-ranging law-making powers.

This is, of course, incompatible with the principle of the separation of powers. According to that principle, the executive power (the government) should be separate from, and accountable to, the legislature (the national parliament) and of course the judiciary. Dictatorship is precisely the form of government in which the executive is not so constrained, and this is also the case in the EU. Because the EU represents a dramatic and constant transfer of legislative power from national legislatures to national executives (sitting in the Council of Ministers), it can also be dubbed “a permanent coup d’état” (to use the phrase François Mitterrand used in 1965 to attack the powers of the Fifth Republic, long before he was happy to wield them himself). The fact that the Council of Ministers, the EU’s legislature, meets and votes in secret only makes the fundamentally anti-democratic character of the European construction even clearer.

It is for this simple reason that all establishment politicians, whether of Left or Right, are in favour of the EU. It increases their power and their room for manoeuvre. How much easier it is to pass laws in a quiet and secret meeting with your twenty-seven colleagues, than it is to do so in front of a fractious parliament where there is usually an in-built opposition which will attack whatever you do! How much more comfortable to engage in a bit of mild horse-trading with like-minded politicians from other countries, than to have to argue your case in the glare of public criticism! How much better to be able to vote an unpopular law and then blame “Europe” for it instead!

For many decades, this conspiracy worked wonderfully, mainly because Europe adopted and stuck to the so-called “Monnet method”. Named after the European Community’s brilliant if vain founder, Jean Monnet, the Monnet method consists in sapping power away from national parliaments on the quiet. This is achieved by pretending that the powers thus alienated are non-political – technical things like coal and steel, the common market, the single currency. This impression that the powers transferred are merely technical is reinforced by the fact that the transfers are usually effected by means of impenetrable treaties written in a language no one can understand.

There have been only two occasions when this principle has been abandoned, and on both occasions it had led to failure. The first was after the signature of the Maastricht treaty in December 1991. That treaty was conceived as a geopolitical quid pro quo for German unification: France agreed to the reunification of Germany on the basis that it would subsume its deutsche mark hegemony into that of the euro. In other words, it was a big political project which was presented to the electorate as such and as a great leap forward for European unification in general. It was rejected by Danish voters in June 1992. France responded by declaring that she too would hold a referendum, which in turn was very nearly rejected in September of that year. The Danes were forced to vote again in 1993, and so Europe’s pet project, the euro, passed by only a whisker.

The second time that Europe announced a big political project was when it drew up the constitution. However little interest people took in the details of treaty law, the word “constitution” was politically resonant. It focussed attention on the federal vocation of the EU, hitherto hidden from view by the Monnet method. People understood that it meant the permanent alienation of power from their nation-states, but it also allowed people to project their other worries clearly onto the EU, especially about excessive deregulation, competition from cheap labour countries in Eastern Europe, and of course the prospect of a new wave of immigration from Turkey if ever that country is admitted as an EU member.

Voters in France and the Netherlands, two founder members of the EU, therefore rejected the proposed constitution.

As a result of that rejection, Europe’s leaders have now decided to put behind them their foolish flirtation with democracy and return instead to the tried and tested method of doing things behind closed doors. Rather than announcing a big political project in a language which most people can understand, the new Lisbon Treaty goes back to the old method of formulating only amendments to previous treaties. You simply cannot understand the text unless you go back through the previous treaties to see what articles are amended, which few people have the time or the inclination to do. Whereas the constitution at least had the merit of clarity, the new treaty displays all the old EU vices of opacity and legalese. This is quite deliberate. Europe’s leaders know that such a difficult text will never attract the same hostility as the old constitution because it is simply too difficult to understand.

How do we know that this is deliberate? We know because the author of the defunct constitution, the former French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, has told us so. In an article in Le Monde in October, Giscard wrote that the new treaty had been composed “by jurists” who had taken the content of the old constitution and simply re-formulated it in terms of amendments to existing treaties. “They started with the text of the constitution,” he wrote, “took its elements apart one by one, and made them correspond by means of amendments to the two existing treaties, Rome (1957) and Maastricht (1992) […] What is the purpose of this subtle manoeuvre? First and above all to escape from the constraint of having to hold a referendum by dispersing the articles and by renouncing the constitutional vocabulary.”

As I say, the EU is a cartel of governments and a conspiracy by them against their electorates. It is an affront to democracy and should be dissolved.

Belien: Back in the 'EUSSR'

The following excerpt was taken from an article prepared by former George Mason University educator Eleanor Duckwall. It appears on “Eleanor Duckwall’s Spotlight” blog, which analyzes current events and exposes anti-Americanism of all forms.



http://sixthcolumn.typepad.com/duckwalls/2007/12/belien-back-inhtml#more



From an agreement on the coal and steel industries in 1951 to a totalitarian state, all within my lifetime:

Last Thursday, the heads of government of the 27 member states of the European Union convened in the Portuguese capital Lisbon to sign the EU Reform Treaty. That "Treaty of Lisbon" is almost identical to the European Constitutional Treaty, the so-called EU Constitution, which was rejected two years ago in referendums in major EU member states.

The EU rules stipulate that treaties only become effective when they have been ratified in all 27 member states. The "no" votes in the 2005 referendums killed the constitution, which would have transformed the EU from a supranational organization of 27 sovereign member states into a genuine single European federal state with 27 provinces. It was clear from the outset, however, that the peoples of the various European states were not willing to renounce their national sovereignty for a "United States of Europe."

Nevertheless, the European leaders are determined, no matter what their electorates say, to transform the EU into a USE. As Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, said prior to the referendums: "If the vote is yes, we will say: We go ahead. If it is no, we will say: We continue." Or as the former president of France, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the chairman of the so-called convention, which drew up the constitution, said: "The rejection of the constitution [by the voters in referendums] was a mistake which will have to be corrected."

In order to correct the voters' mistake the reform treaty was drafted. This treaty is a copy of the constitution, with the articles in a somewhat different order, with many additions to deliberately complicate the text and without references to a national flag or anthem. As Mr. Giscard explained in June to the Paris leftist paper Le Monde: "Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly... All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way."

Or as Guiliano Amato, the foreign minister of Italy and the former vice chairman of the convention, said about the document that the European leaders signed last week: "They decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception."

The EU leaders agreed that none of the member states (apart from Ireland, which is obliged to do so under its own constitution) will hold a referendum about the new treaty. Instead, the national parliaments will ratify the treaty. "There is a cleavage between people and governments," admitted French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "A referendum now would bring Europe into danger. There will be no treaty if we had a referendum in France."

Once the Lisbon Treaty is ratified in all member states, the legal nature of the EU will change into that of a state. The national constitutions and the national parliaments will be subordinate to the EU, which will be enabled to unilaterally increase its own powers.

Europe's politicians are very eager to sell out their national sovereignty to the EU because the Brussels-based EU governing bodies are either unelected (the commission) or unaccountable (the council). Moreover, the European Parliament is not a real parliament. It cannot reject the so-called EU directives, which the national parliaments are obliged to incorporate into their national legislation. Even today, up to 70 percent of the legislation in the various 27 EU member states emanates from Brussels.

Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky has coined the term "EUSSR" to refer to the EU. He claims Europe is on its way to developing into a totalitarian state. In the early 1990s Mr. Bukovsky was given permission to research the secret documents of the Soviet leadership. To his amazement he found a transcript there of a conversation held during a visit in January 1989 of Mr. Giscard to then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In this conversation the former declared to the latter that "within 15 years Europe is going to be a federal state." The USE project was delayed a bit by the 2005 referendums, but European politicians have managed to get it back on track in Lisbon. "Today's situation is really grim. Major political parties have been completely taken in by the new EU project. None of them really opposes it. They have become very corrupt. Who is going to defend our freedoms?" Mr. Bukovsky asks...

UN Dispatch

October 11, 2007

The UNCLOS Battle

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At the Heritage Foundation's in house blog, Andrew Grossman admits ignorance to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Nothing wrong about that--you have to be fairly plugged in to know what the Convention is all about.

The problem is, he looks to Doug Bandow for enlightenment. Bandow, you may recall, was the syndicated columnist who resigned from CATO last year after it was revealed he was secretly on the take from Jack Abramoff, who paid Bandow $2,000 per column to shill on behalf of his clients. Bandow was picked up by an outfit called the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which apparently does not mind if one its "experts" used to accept cash to promote the clients of a now convicted felon.

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Note, Scott Paul offers some smart commentary on what is really at stake with the UNCLOS ratification battle:

The conventional wisdom is that multilateral treaties are dead on arrival in the Senate. If we're interested in promoting the International Criminal Court, a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, or the Conventions on women's rights, children's rights, landmines, or biological diversity, we've got to get the Law of the Sea done.

My colleague Don Kraus sums it up:

"Think about it. If a Senate with a Democratic majority can not muster the 66 votes to pass a treaty supported by a Republican president, what is the possibility of doing so under a potential Democratic president who will face much stiffer Republican opposition?

"If the U.S, cannot join an agreement supported by environmental groups, petroleum trade associations, peace groups, the Coast Guard, Navy, departments of State, Commerce, and the Interior (just to name a few) -- what is the chance that we engage on other agreements?

"One senate staffer I talked to recently has been yelling at groups coming to talk with him about climate change. He's been telling them that he doesn't want to talk to them unless the first words out of their mouth are "Law of the Sea," because "if we can't get this one through, none of the other agreements are going to get through."

The stars are aligning on UNCLOS' behalf. As Scott and Don like to say UNCLOS is "low hanging fruit." Perhaps this helps explain why folks like Bandow and Frank Gaffney are on a mission to make UNCLOS into a boogey monster. (To wit: this ad, flagged by Matt Yglesias, from "America's Survivial," which is an outfit dedicated to opposing international treaties.) The stakes are high for the knee-jerk anti-UN crowd. UNCLOS' wide support from diverse constituencies could mean ratification. And from there it is only a slippery slope to the moment when UN tax collectors come knocking at their door the United States becomes more positively engaged in multilateral institutions that advance American interests by promoting the rule of law.

Posted by Mark Leon Goldberg - October 11, 2007 10:04 AM - Critic Watch