Behind many of President Obama’s recent forays into the international arena lies the issue of whether the United States is to retain its sovereign status or merge into something that is new. Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have already decided cases by promoting theories that meld U.S. law with foreign law. Are international norms a prism through which U.S. Constitutional law should be interpreted?

MEDELLIN VS TEXAS was a 2007 death penalty case that decided whether the State of Texas must give a psychopath a new trial. Its sordid origins trace to 1993, when José Medellín, a Mexican national, murdered two Houston teenagers. He was sentenced to death by a Texas jury, but his lawyers argued on appeal that he hadn’t had access to Mexico’s consulate before he confessed to his crimes.

Mr. Medellin’s claim was that a violation of the 1963 VIENNA CONVENTION had occurred; diplomats are supposed to be notified when their nationals are arrested. Mexican authorities sued the U.S. in the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The ICJ ruled in Mexico’s favor, ordering states to give Medellín and some 51 other nationals new hearings. The question before the Supreme Court was whether such international dictates must be enforced by sovereign state courts.

Justice John Roberts, writing for the 6-3 majority, ruled that the ICJ finding was not binding because the Vienna Convention is a diplomatic compact that was never intended to automatically create new individual rights enforceable domestically by international bodies. Thus, Texas’s violation of diplomatic protocols called for a diplomatic remedy.

Treaty provisions must be in accord with the plain meaning of the Constitution as it is written, not as some would have them to be. This distinction establishes a fire wall between international and domestic law. The day may come when Washington State’s Attorney General has to defend the protections afforded by our state Constitution against treaties negotiated by folks in Washington, DC.

Washingtonians may just be a bunch of cowboys but so far we are sticking to our guns! Despite the opinions of some law professors and elitists that believe a treaty supersedes the U.S. and Washington state constitutions, we should continue to uphold our Washington State Constitution even if we need to do so in the face of new treaties and/or Medellín being reversed by SCOTUS at some time in the future.

MEDELLÍN also disposed of the Bush Administration’s claims of Presidential power. The Bush Administration had attempted to calm the diplomatic world by directing states to comply with the ICJ ruling in a 2005 executive order. The Court ruled that the President’s power is limited by the Constitution.

For many years, elitist lawyers and politicians have been claiming that the Constitution is always changing based on the needs of each generation. This is not rule of law but an argument for tyranny which would interlineate international norms in place of Constitutional norms.

The crowd that expressed outrage against Bush’s claims of executive power can’t wait to turn greater executive powers over to international politicians who have already banned many freedoms- including freedom of speech and religion- in Europe, Australia and Canada, to name a few! Be vigilant and watch for the propaganda blitz that is coming. If MEDELLÍN is reversed, UN mandates squelching free speech, gun rights and even the ability to practice your religion may follow.

George Soros, a billionaire currency speculator whose origins are in Eastern Europe, invested heavily in the Obama campaign.

Is Soros funding tied to Soros’ currency speculation? What about Soros’ alleged international manipulation of currencies? It is becoming increasingly clear that tax exempt foundations, financed through a complex web of interlocking interests, are dictating U.S. economic policy. For instance, the Apollo Alliance has now been identified as the source of much of the stimulous legislation that has impacted the U.S. in an unpredictable way that economists are still trying to fathom at this time.

As the U.S. currency faces a devaluation that may cause the dollar to become worthless, why hasn’t the vaunted free press told us more about Soros, a currency speculator and short seller, and how Soros, an international fugitive, is related to Obama’s economic policies?

According to Michelle Malkin:

The far Left Center for American Progress has its tentacles everywhere.

I noted in my column on the Internet Snitch Brigade this morning that former CAP operatives have been installed at HHS and work closely with the health care czar.

At Newsbusters, Seton Motley reports on the new FCC “Diversity Officer” — a racial engineering czar who has been targeting conservative talk radio since his days working for CAP.

Know your enemy:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced a new “Chief Diversity Officer,” communications attorney Mark Lloyd.

But Doctor of Jurisprudence Lloyd is far more than merely a communications attorney. He was at one time a Senior Fellow at the uber-liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), for whom he co-wrote a June 2007 report entitled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.”

Which rails against the fact that the American people overwhelmingly prefer to listen to conservative (and Christian) talk radio rather than the liberal alternative, and suggests ways the federal government can remedy this free-market created “problem.”

* Restore local and national caps on the ownership of commercial radio stations.
* Ensure greater local accountability over radio licensing.
* Require commercial owners who fail to abide by enforceable public interest obligations to pay a fee to support public broadcasting.

Note the use of of “localism” to silence conservative (and Christian) radio stations. The National Endowment for the Arts began to use NEA subsidized artists to produce agitprop artistic expressions trumpeting the Administration’s agenda.

We also saw the President go directly to school children with a message that would have focused on Obamahood had it not been for the vigilance of concerned parents. All these developments are part and parcel of the Soros driven agenda.

Accusations against “astroturfers” displaying “brownshirt” tendencies at Town Hall Meetings, agitation and adulation on behalf of the president- all are common denominators in socialistic societies from Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela to North Korea. Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief law enforcement officer for the federal government is also closely associated with the Soros network.

One aspect of the Obama administration that is becoming apparent is that there are so many organizations that are connected at the hip to the President. Many of the communications that seem to originate from the President’s operations may be coming from people that take advantage of the apparent ease with which statements can be posted. Maybe this is by design? In the intelligence world this is called plausible deniability.

The controversies surrounding Van Jones (the Obama Administration’s Communist Green Jobs Czar) have become a case in point. Jones, a product of the environmental movement, had previously directed a Marxist group that followed the police around in order to monitor civil rights violations. He emerged from a tangle of George Soros funded foundations. Over the weekend of September 6, 2009, as the Administration defended the President’s unprecedented bid to insert his own personality into the educational process, Jones suddenly resigned.

But who is Deepak Bhargava?

I have recently been collecting links to articles about organizations like ACORN and other tax-exempt organizations, many funded by billionaire George Soros. Looking at how extreme left-wing Marxists (like Van Jones) seem to be appearing, often without Senate confirmation, within the upper levels of the federal government made me think of a book that I read many years ago about the vast array of strategies that wasps have developed for producing larvae within the living bodies of other organisms, including their own kind. Eventually the larvae destroy the organism within which they hatch but a horrifying variety of deceptions occur in order to ensure that the wasp life-cycle is perpetuated.

As I recollect, a certain female wasp seduces a male and then reaches around behind the male with her long tail and injects her eggs into her partner. Thus, the elegant cpmmencement of the male’s slow demise occurs during the sex act while in in flight! There ware many more scenarios that cover a bewildering variety of wasps existing in every conceivable natural environment upon the earth. I was looking for the book when I came across the following article at the Jerusalem Post’s website:

REGARDLESS OF their huge size and fearsome appearance, tarantulas are themselves the prey to a specialized and efficient predator, the spider wasp. Sometimes called tarantula hawks, they are solitary wasps belonging to two genera: Pepsis and Hemipepsis. These insects are large and conspicuous. Most species have bright red, yellow or orange wings with iridescent black or blue bodies. They are impossible to miss.

Several times I watched female Israeli spider wasps of the species Hemipepsis brunnea search for and find a tarantula, sting it with their paralyzing venom and then drag it to their lairs where they deposit an egg onto the still living, but paralyzed spider. The wasp then closes the lair and in some cases camouflages it. The egg develops into a larva that feeds on the living spider. The stuff of horror movies.

In a variation of this story, David Ward and Joh Henschel from the University of British Columbia in Canada studied a different spider wasp (Pseudopompilus humboldti) that lives in the Negev. They found that these wasps placed their paralyzed spider at the entrance of the spider’s own nest, exposed to birds and other animals which sometimes ate them. Why would the wasps not do more to protect their developing progeny?

Ward and Henschel hypothesized that temperatures in the Negev were so high that if the wasps didn’t place them thus, their larvae would be unable to develop. Sure enough, when the scientists moved the paralyzed spiders to a deeper, more protected area of the nests, the wasp larvae became too hot and died. It was better to risk some predation than the certainty of their larvae dying from excessive heat.

BUT THE adaptations of these wasps are dwarfed by Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga, another solitary wasp studied by Dr. William Eberhard of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Costa Rica. He found that this wasp actually changes the behavior of the spider for its own benefit. These wasps don’t paralyze the spider, instead they stick their egg on an active spider and the wasp larva feeds on the spider’s juices, much like a tick sucks blood. However, right before the larva is about to build a cocoon so that it can metamorphose into an adult wasp, it injects the spider with a drug. Suddenly instead of building a typical web, the spider builds a tangled structure that is devoid of the sticky threads normally used to catch insects, and is instead perfect to carry the wasp’s cocoon. After doing the wasp’s bidding the spider dies.

So the wasps prey on the spiders, sometimes with extraordinary powers, but what preys on the wasps? It turns out nothing preys on these creatures; they live la dolce vita at the very pinnacle of the food chain.

Even if we suddenly had a new administration tomorrow, the larvae of a new kind of politician has hatched within the party machines and within the bureaucracy itself. The body of the host organism- the American people and our political leadership- has lost the ability to formulate reasoned policy responses in the face of a number of challenges, any one of which threatens our continued existence. The news media lack the will to report many of the threats. Maybe due to anxiety about obtaining stimulus money when the “mainstream” news media’s house of cards crashes.

A case in point is the way in which ACORN now receives billions in federal stimulus money- no one is even sure exactly how many billions! Nevertheless, ACORN which agitated for affordable housing via loans to low-income, high-risk borrowers, is one of the biggest recipients of the largesse distributed by the Obama Administration. The funds are going to encourage “community organizing” at exactly the time that the housing bubble created by ACORN’s allies in Congress (along with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac- Government Sponsored Entities overseen by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank) has reduced the American financial system to a state of helplessness. Now the introduction of more affordable government sponsored health care is being sold as a cure for the current economic ailments. Enuf said?

If you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength! Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it.

Proverbs 24:10-12

The terrorist attack on Mumbai, India in November, 2008 lasted 60 hours. The fact that news media focused on the attack for such an extended period of time amplified the emotional impact.

A 2006 train bombing in Mumbai killed more people but the 172 people that were gunned down marked a new level of terror because of the way that ten shooters were able to move through the city without any effective response from India’s law enforcement or military for several hours. Experts studying the operation have concluded that many aspects of the attack demonstrate new tactics that should be expected in future operations.

Detailed surveillance and planning began at least as early as 2007. The attackers sailed from Karachi but, according to some accounts, at least some of the shooters had already been in the city posing as students. The ten attackers hijacked a trawler, killed the whole crew and then beheaded the captain when they got near enough Mumbai to come ashore in two inflatable boats.

Each terrorist carried a Chinese version of the AK-47 (AK-56 automatic assault rifle) with seven 30 round magazines and 9-mm pistols with two clips. Additionally they carried 8-10 grenades each and IEDs containing RDX, ball bearings for shrapnel, and a timer. There were Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns that may have been taken from downed Indian security personnel and accounts of prepositioned ammunition caches.

The four teams were able to keep moving and created enough confusion that the police could not seal off an area quickly enough to contain the shooters. The Indian police were totally outgunned as a result of the fact that their government does not trust the police to arm officers properly or even to provide enough ammunition for officers to practice properly. Nevertheless, whenever the shooters were confronted with armed force they moved on to other targets.

Mumbai is a financial center and contains a hub of hotels and other facilities that cater to elite businessmen and foreigners. The terrorists targeted middle class Indians and American, British and jewish travelers that normally utilize the restaurants and hotel facilities.

A two man team went to the train station and opened fire. Then they went to a hospital and began killing again. The team hijacked a police car and headed to a hotel when they were intercepted by the police. One terrorist was killed and the other captured but they caused a third of the total fatalities.

Meanwhile, a second team went to the Nariman House, a Jewish complex. This second two-man team killed eight. A third two-man team went to the Trident-Oberoi Hotel and began cutting people down with automatic weapons fire. During the 17 hours that the hotel was under siege two terrorists killed 30 people and then were themselves killed. The fourth team was a four-man team and deployed to the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

Chronology of the Attack

November 26, 2008 (all times are local)

21:20 Gunfire outside the Hotel Oberoi at Nariman Point in south Mumbai.

21:20 Terrorists run into Nariman House, where they take control of the Chabad Lubavich center.

21:30 Gunfire outside the Leopold Café at Colaba in south Mumbai, about 100 meters behind the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel.

21:40 Gunfire near the Bade Miyan Café (behind the Taj Hotel in south Mumbai).

21:45 Terrorists enter Taj Hotel lobby and fire indiscriminately.

21:45 Gunfire inside the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), Mumbai’s central train station. There are ten fatalities there.

22:30 Gunfire at the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai headquarters gate 2, opposite the CST.

22:35 Gunfire at Gokuldas Hospital, near the CST.

22:40 Gunfire at the Cama & Albless Hospital, near the CST.

22:50 Gunfire at the Metro Theatre (Metro Cinema Junction).

23:00 Explosion in a taxi in Vile Parle in north Mumbai. (This is one of the IEDs left behind in the taxi.)

23:00 Explosion in a taxi in Mazgaon—probably the second IED left behind.

23:10 Two explosions at Napean Sea Road in south Mumbai.

23:30 Explosion at Dhobi Talao.

November 27, 2008

00:30 Gunfire after a police van was hijacked at Dhobi Talao.

01:00 Immense blast in the Taj Hotel, possibly caused by two grenades.

02:00 Army arrives at the Taj Hotel.

03:00 Large fire breaks out at the Taj Hotel.

09:15 Army arrives at Oberoi Hotel, storm hotel.

09:15 Security forces engage in first attempt to retake the Taj Hotel.

10:30 Security forces engage in room-to-room searches at the Taj Hotel.

17:30 NSG forces arrive at Nariman House. Helicopters begin surveillance.

November 28, 2008

07:30 NSG forces storm Nariman House.

11:00 Hostage siege ends at the Hotel Oberoi, hostages released.

11:00 NSG forces report that they have cleared the new section of the Taj Hotel.

13:00 Indian security forces report 30 people dead in one Taj Hotel hall.

18:00 Operations reported to have ceased at Nariman House. However, NDTV reports that one floor still has not been cleared.

19:45 All NSG forces emerge from Nariman House, stating that no one was found alive.

November 29, 2008

04:30 Gunfire and explosions heard at the Taj Hotel.

07:30 Fire breaks out on the lower floors of the Taj Hotel.

08:50 Taj Hotel hostage siege declared over, according to Indian police.

By moving constantly, the shooters eluded commandos for 60 hours. Explosions, demands to release imprisoned Muslim fighters in exchange for hostages and detailed knowledge of buildings and streets all contributed to the tactical team’s ability to sow confusion and continue moving. The attackers only attacked in areas where the security was nonexistent or very light. They used cell phones, Satellite phones and Blackberries; handlers in Pakistan provided tactical advice and urged the young men not to be taken alive and to continue killing because the prestige of Islam was at stake.

By identifying goals that exceeded anything that had occurred prior to the attack, the planners boosted LeT’s ability to recruit jihadists within India and worldwide; the organization also gained prestige within the culture of terrorism, thus grasping parity with al Qaeda. The planners, almost certainly affiliated with elements of the Pakistani government also were attempting to destabilize the Pakistani civilian government’s relationship with the United States and other countries, including India itself. The Indian government demonstrated a complete lack of ability to protect its citizens.

Even though it had recently created an elite anti-terror force and intelligence personnel intercepted “chatter” pertaining to an imminent attack, the information was not disseminated from the central security agencies to the local police and coast guard at least in a manner that local security forces took any effective action.

The local Anti-Terrorism Squad was inadequately trained to seal off multiple attacks designed to create exactly the kind of confusion experienced by the first responders. Local army personnel took five hours to arrive. The elite National Security Guard, India’s most elite strike force, did not arrive for almost 10 hours. Counterterrorism experts allow 30-60 minutes from the time an incident commences but the NSG (or Black Cat Commandos) headquartered in Delhi had no aircraft and so the 200 commandos had to patch together air transportation in a helter-skelter manner.

Police officers were often seen hiding behind buildings with their heads down. Helmets and vests were substandard and many officers carried British .303 bolt-action rifles from the 50s. Most Indian officers are only provided with 50 rounds of ammunition per year with which to practice because of corruption and a colonial mentality that deems weapons to be dangerous even in the hands of law enforcement officers.

According to a TimesOnline article, Outgunned Mumbai police hampered by First World War weapons, Dec. 3, 2008:

Most of the police involved were carrying .303s or self-loading rifles like those adopted by the British Army in the 1950s.

Some officers said that they were not given enough weapons training because of a shortage of ammunition and shooting ranges. In theory, all officers shoot 50 rounds a year in training. In practice, senior officers get their full quota with small arms.

“The rest is all bunkum,” Mr Pereira said. “It’s target practice with a .303 rifle. I wouldn’t call it suitable knowledge of weapons and their uses in urban policing.”

All those interviewed said that the issue was not money: the Government allocated £154 million for modernising the police in 2007-08 alone. The problem, they said, lay with the Home Ministry’s procurement system, which is dominated by corrupt bureaucrats and politicians rather than technical experts.

“It’s a cartel,” Mr Singh said. “The Government is spending millions, but the police isn’t getting the equipment it needs.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5276283.ece

Thus, India’s strict gun laws severely hampered the ability of citizens and law enforcement to protect themselves from the armed attacks.

The low-tech nature of the equipment, the drawn out horror of a paralyzed city and the prestige garnered by mass carnage ensures that such an attack is being planned in the U.S. Are we ready?