Military Absentee Ballots Not Counted

Military Absentee Ballots Delivered One Day Late, Would Have Swung Election For Romney

WASHINGTON, DC – Sources confirmed today that hundreds of thousands of military absentee ballots were delivered hours after the deadline for them to be counted, with preliminary counts showing that they would have overturned the vote in several states and brought a victory for Governor Mitt Romney.

Officials say the ballots were delivered late due to problems within the military mail system. Tracking invoices show the ballots sat in a warehouse for a month, then they were accidentally labeled as ammunition and shipped to Afghanistan. At Camp Dwyer, Marine Sergeant John Davis signed for them and was surprised at the contents.

“I told Gunny we got a bunch of ballots instead of ammo,” Davis told investigators earlier today.  “He told me to file a report of improper delivery and that the chain of command would take care of it.  We didn’t hear anything for three weeks.  While we were waiting we came under fire so we dumped a bunch of them in the Hescoes.  We didn’t dig those ones back out.”

After military officials realized the initial error, the ballots were then sent back to the U.S. but suffered a series of setbacks.

Twelve boxes of ballots were dropped overboard during delivery to the USS Kearsarge (LHD-3) in the Persian Gulf, then while the ship sailed to Bahrain, postal clerks allegedly pocketed whatever ballots they wanted.

The remaining absentee ballots were loaded onto a C-130, but the flight was delayed until November 1st so the crew could get tax free pay for the month.  Once the ballots arrived stateside they were promptly mailed to each state’s counting facility, reaching their final destination on November 7th.

“It’s a shame,” Rear Admiral John Dawes said when asked for comment.  “I expected a delay so I ordered that everyone cast their votes eight months ago. It’s really unfortunate that our mail system failed us and directly affected the course of history.”

Upon hearing the news, angry Republicans have begun a demand for a recount, but most military absentee voters have shrugged off the news, with many wondering whether the care packages their families sent six months ago were ever going to show up.

Source: http://www.duffelblog.com/2012/11/military-absentee-ballots-delivered-one-day-late-would-have-swung-election-for-romney/#ixzz2BedkihIM , by Drew,  November 7, 2012,   113 COMMENTS   Follow us: @theduffelblog on Twitter | duffelblog on Facebook

What Constitution ?

November 7, 2012 By Michael Connelly

I have repeatedly stated in speeches and on my radio show that many Americans are woefully unaware of what the Constitution says, and that means that if they don't know how our government works and what rights they have then they won't recognize what they are losing until it is too late. Unfortunately, yesterday's election proved me right.

It appears that a majority of Americans voted to allow Obama and the left wing elitists to continue with their program to destroy our Constitution, our freedoms, our country, and our way of life. I use the word appears since evidence is mounting that there was massive voter fraud around the country and we may never know how many people actually voted for Obama.

However, it is clear that millions of Americans did cast their votes for the "Dictator in Chief." Some of them knew exactly what they were doing because they are committed leftists who have long hated their own country and want to see it destroyed, and want to turn us all into subjects instead to free citizens. On the other hand, the vast majority of those who voted for Obama were just clueless as to what they were doing to themselves and our nation.

I have been disturbed throughout the campaign that no one seemed to be talking about the Constitution and what Obama was doing to it. In previous articles on this blog I have detailed what I consider impeachable offenses committed by Obama and his appointees as well as members of Congress. They all took an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, yet they have repeatedly and openly violated that oath.

Why was this not a major campaign issue? Obama has ignored the balance of powers provisions of the Constitution. He has bypassed Congress and violated Article 2 of the Constitution by not only refusing to enforce laws adopted by Congress, but by making laws on his own by Executive order and agency actions. He has ignored Federal Court decisions, and carried out an unrelenting assault on the basic freedoms of the American people protected by the Bill of Rights. Yet, he has basically been given a free pass by Republicans with only a handful of members of Congress calling him to account for these criminal actions.

As a result, many people voted for America's first dictator, and why not? They have not been taught about the Constitution in school, and have probably never read it, and if they did may not have understood it. Its importance is no longer stressed, and besides, for many voters the Constitution is certainly not as important as the "free stuff" Obama promised them in order to get their votes.

As for those of us that are aware of the disaster of this election and the horrors that will be heaped upon us by this administration, we cannot give up the fight. The phone calls and emails I have been getting today are mainly from people who are depressed and scared, and don't believe there is anything that they can do. I disagree, we can educate and resist.

Education is crucial because as even more bad things begin to happen under the Obama regime, people need to know that these are direct violations of our Constitution. For example, political correctness will get worse and will be further used to stifle freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

People also need to understand that they are not going to know about betrayal and corruption in our government if they rely on the mainstream news media for information. The major networks like NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN are totally controlled by the President and will only provide propaganda favorable to the administration. If people want the truth, they will need to read conservative blogs and listen to conservative talk radio shows. Fox News is also usually reliable when it comes to reporting the truth.

In the long term we must take back our universities and schools from the liberals that use them as political indoctrination centers instead of sources of education. Our children and grand children must be taught about the Constitution and free enterprise system.

By resistance I mean that it is time for the states to stand up for the 10th Amendment and say no to illegal federal mandates that will damage or destroy the economies of the states, or limit the individual freedoms of their citizens. West Virginia for example is in danger of having its coal mining industry destroyed, not by a vote in Congress, but by unilateral and unconstitutional actions of the EPA. The state should invoke the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and refuse to comply with the EPA. Other states should take similar actions.

Individuals must also be willing to defy the Federal government when their individual rights are threatened. That is where I can help. I have recently been appointed the Executive Director of the United States Justice Foundation. This is a legal foundation founded by a good friend, Gary Kreep, who has recently been elected a Judge in San Diego County. I will be taking over the position he is vacating. The USJF specializes in defending the Constitution and we represent people on court at no charge who have their rights threatened, and we also get involved in other major Constitutional litigation.

I will also continue to write this blog and do my radio show on the Constitution. It is now more imperative than ever that we take a unified stand to save our country. As I write this article, I am listening to Amazing Grace being played on the bagpipes. It is a sacred hymn that I have most often heard played at the funerals of our military heroes. They have sacrificed themselves for our freedom and we must be prepared to do what is necessary to defend what they gave their lives for.

From now on when Obama by words or actions says "What Constitution?" our response should be "Our Constitution!" No retreat and No surrender! From now on we take the fight to them on every level, and it will take place on our terms and on our ground. Let the battle begin!

Source: What Constitution ? November 7, 2012, by Michael Connelly, bwcentral.org › Blog

Immigration vs. Jobs

Our current high 20% real unemployment is totally self-inflicted.

U.S. citizens enter the workforce at the rate of 150,000 per month; that’s 1.8 million per year.  That includes new college grads, tech school grads and high school grads.  The U.S. Immigration Service allows legal immigrants to enter the U.S. at the rate of 125,000 per month; that’s 1.5 million per year.  This has been going on for decades. 

Job growth has averaged 155,000 per month.  Enough for new entrants by U,S, citizens, were it not for legal immigrant.  Most jobs were reserved for legal immigrants, crowding out new entrants.

In 1994, Congress passed NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.  Presidential Candidate Ross Perot warned that we would hear that “great sucking sound” as we off-shored our manufacturing jobs.  He was right.  The U.S. off-shored at least 2.61 million jobs since 1994 due only to NAFTA. That doesn’t count jobs lost from vendors and subcontractors or job loss due to recent off-shoring to Asia.

Given out current course to close coal-fired and hydro electric power plants, we will off-shore an additional 56 million jobs over the next 10 to 20 years.  At the same time, the Immigration Service shows signs of increasing legal immigration.  This will guarantee real annual unemployment will grow to 50%.

During the Great Depression, legal immigration dropped to zero. 

Our history shows that the U.S. has increased legal immigration during labor shortages and reduced legal immigration at times of high unemployment.  This changed in the 1970s and since then we have immigrated far more legal and illegal workers than we have jobs for.  The end result has been catastrophic job loss for U.S. citizens.

We need to suspend legal immigration until our real unemployment goes below 3%. 

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader 

The Will of the People

Our government was formed to protect our liberty and property. The authority of government comes from the People through the consent of the governed.  We elect representatives, who we assume will do the will of the People and expect these representatives to put special interest group opinions aside when the will of the people is clear.

We opposed off-shoring our manufacturing in the 1990s. We experienced a “bum’s rush” to the “war on terror”. In the 2000’s, we supported more domestic oil and gas production. We supported enforcing our immigration laws, We objected to overreaching environmental regulations. We opposed the 2008 bail-outs. We clamored for closed borders. We opposed raising the debt ceiling. We objected to Obama-care.  We have protested wasteful spending.  We were ignored.  Now we’re broke

We are experiencing a time when the Will of the People has been tossed aside at every level of government. This is not a coincidence. We got this way, over time, by allowing our elected representatives to thwart the Will of the People and make excuses.  The problems are different at each level of government, but we must fix the processes that allow this to happen.

Agenda 21

The common denominator in our current struggle is U.N. Agenda 21. This is a coordinated plan designed to “fundamentally transform” America into a third world country and end our sovereignty as a nation using the global warming hoax as its excuse. We would become a province of a U.N. global communist government. We will continue down this path until we can end U.N. interference.

Our current elected representatives who are supported by campaign contributions from individuals and groups who support the U.N. and our continued economic decline must be replaced.

The laws that have enabled Agenda 21 implementation need to be repealed.  They exist at every level of government.  We must quit the U.N. and remove all financial support. The U.N.is the enemy

Local Activism

We the People are responsible for restoring the Will of the People to government.  State and local government are being bribed and extorted with federal grants that need to end.  We must make sure that they do.

Local government is also on a tear to increase property values in their cities and counties, but much of what they are doing is implementing Agenda 21 infrastructure.  It has resulted in a war between the automobile drivers and the bikers. Complete streets are costly and car lanes are being reduced.  All spending on this should be tabled until after November 6, 2012.

We will need to restore the Constitution and Amendments (as written) and remove special interests from our political process.

Determining the “will of the people” isn’t that hard.  Voters will support smart spending on government’s core responsibilities: roads, sewers and water. If you add gasoline, electricity and food, we don’t really need anything else.  Voters want these necessities to be plentiful, inexpensive and reliable and they should be controlled by the free market, not choked off by taxes and regulations that drive costs up. 

Polling to determine voter priorities is a good practice and it is easy to set up on a city website.  Cities can run polls to have voters rank road and intersection projects and prices.  

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Muslims Exempt from Obamacare

Post-election quote to Obama voters from Aaron Cantor USAF (ret):

“Obviously you have not read all 2700 pages of the Obama care bill.

Did you know for instance, that the provisions of this bill will allow the IRS to tap into your bank account any time they like?

Let us not forget Dhimmitude, which is the Muslim system of controlling non-Muslim populations conquered through jihad. Specifically, it is the TAXING of non-Muslims in exchange for tolerating their presence AND as a coercive means of converting conquered remnants to Islam.

Obama Care allows the establishment of Dhimmitude and Sharia Muslim diktat in the United States. Muslims are specifically exempted from the government mandate to purchase insurance, and also from the penalty tax for being uninsured. Islam considers insurance to be “gambling”, “risk-taking”, and “usury” and is thus banned. Muslims are specifically granted exemption based on this.

How convenient. So I, as a non-Muslim, will have crippling IRS liens placed against all of my assets, including real estate, cattle, and even accounts receivables, and will face hard prison time because I refuse to buy insurance or pay the penalty tax. Meanwhile, Louis Farrakhan will have no such penalty and will have 100% of his health needs paid for by the defacto government insurance. Non-Muslims will be paying a tax to subsidize Muslims. This is Dhimmitude. “

Source: Eyes On Washington.Com Political Deeds And Misdeeds And By Whom. By Aaron Cantor USAF (Ret) By admin ~ November 6th, 2012 @ 22:16 By Aaron Cantor USAF (ret)

Comments:

I wonder what I would get if I were a Muslim and a union member ?

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader

Wyoming Agenda 21 Codes

Secret agenda at city hall?  by James Chilton  jchilton@wyomingnews.com

 

CHEYENNE -- Most people don't instinctively cringe when they hear of concepts like bike lanes, smart meters and high-speed rail.

But in recent years, a small but vocal contingent of citizens across the country - including here in Cheyenne - has begun to see a sinister side to those very ideas.

To them, terms like "smart growth" are really code for the eventual erosion of private property rights. They fear people in positions of power are colluding - some knowingly, some unwittingly - to convert America into a dystopian society: a land where private property is abolished, where people are forced into prescribed habitation zones, and where all natural resources are under the exclusive control of the government.

And they believe the lynchpin of this grotesque transformation of society is a little-known United Nations document called Agenda 21.

Agenda 21’s origins

In 1992, then-President George H.W. Bush was one of more than 100 heads of state present in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations’ first-ever Conference on Environment and Development.

During the so-called “Earth Summit,” representatives from 178 sovereign governments signed onto Agenda 21, a 300-page, 40-chapter document. The U.N. describes it as “a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations system, governments, and major groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.”

The document was designed to encourage member nations to participate in measures to improve upon a broad swath of issues, including poverty, environmental sustainability, deforestation, preservation of biodiversity, and strengthening the societal role of women, youth and indigenous cultures around the globe.

Following the initial signing of Agenda 21, U.N. member nations twice affirmed their commitment to the agenda’s general goals, once in 2002 and again this year.

“Essentially, it was a document that talks about economic growth, quality of life and environmental protections,” said Patrick Madden, executive director for the United Nations Association of the United States of America. “It was essentially a blueprint (saying), ‘We know the population’s going to grow, our resources are going to become limited, and we need to address it. Here are all of the ideas that were discussed.’”

Madden stressed that Agenda 21 is not a treaty, nor is it legally binding. Rather, he said, it is a set of ideas for how countries can best address issues of future sustainability. Most importantly, he said, it is entirely voluntary, with implementation falling to local governments.

“It was a set of ideas to give countries a chance to talk about planning,” Madden said. “Every country was to take that back and ask, ‘How is this applicable to us?’ Twenty years later, some countries have made tremendous developments, some have done very little.”

Spreading the word

So when did Agenda 21 become a rallying cry echoing through council chambers and town halls around the country?

While the issue has only risen to the forefront in the past few years, Frank Smith said he’s been fighting against it since the beginning.

Smith, a Constitution Party candidate running for a four-year seat on the Laramie County Commission, said he first learned of Agenda 21 through the ultraconservative John Birch Society not long after the initial 1992 Rio conference. But he said he has pored over the document extensively since then and has come to some disturbing conclusions.

“I’ve been keyed into this, really, for 20 years,” Smith said. “It wasn’t until smart meters hit town three years ago that people (here) started to wake up to it.”

Smith said he sees implementation of Agenda 21 as a direct, albeit incremental, attack on private property rights. Using smart meters as an example, he said that while such devices are advertised as giving utility customers greater knowledge of and control over their energy use, they also have the potential of being used to directly control those customers’ access to power in an effort to force conservation upon them.

“New appliances have smart chips in them, and these meters can be shut off at the headquarters,” Smith said. “It also allows people to monitor your electric usage minute by minute. They want to n and this has not been proposed yet n if you’re using electricity between what the peak hours are, they want to surcharge you. It’s another way of controlling things and giving them the ability to spy on you.”

Smith likens Agenda 21 to a straightjacket slowly tightening around the American public, as local governments pass ordinances and laws aimed at putting new regulations and limitations into place.

“Every one of them has a bona fide reason to exist, but they all edge in,” he said. “This is what’s going on with government today. I’m not an anarchist by any stretch of the imagination; I understand you’ve got to avoid a Ford shop going in next to an old folks’ home. But the thing is, it never stops.”

Nowhere, he said, is this more evident in Cheyenne than in the City Council’s adoption of the Unified Development Code.

The UDC

The Unified Development Code, or UDC, was approved unanimously by the Cheyenne City Council on Jan. 23, and went into effect on April 30. Cheyenne Planning Services Director Matt Ashby describes the UDC as a simplification of several previous city codes.

“What that was was the unification of three regulatory documents: the zoning code, the subdivision regulations, and the road and street standards,” Ashby said.

All three previous codes were drawn up at different times, and sometimes conflicted with one another over definitions or regulations. The idea behind the UDC, Ashby said, was to put all three together into one code without any of those contradictions.

“The purpose of unifying them was basically to improve the efficiency of government,” he said. “It reduced the whole document by about a third, eliminating redundancy and correcting inconsistencies.”

Ashby said the UDC is actually meant to make it easier for developers to get through the planning process. It also gives more flexibility to planning staff by allowing them to grant variances to developers that they might otherwise have to spend weeks appealing for.

“It’s providing flexibility for development patterns that previously weren’t allowed,” Ashby said. “We’ve got some things that were really difficult to do under the previous code that we’ve made easier because they meet the community’s vision.”

As an example, Ashby pointed to the historic Avenues neighborhood, which he said couldn’t have been built under the previous codes due to their strict regulations on things such as street widths or lot sizes. Under the UDC, however, he said developers have more leeway to build such neighborhoods, so long as they’re done in a way that makes sense from a planning perspective.

“The change to more of a suburban-type development pattern necessitated new types of rules that were somewhat in conflict with how a neighborhood like the Avenues was designed,” he said. “The approach we took with the Unified Development Code was to take all the different components and calibrate them so that they work together, and that any changes we make to one part of the code wouldn’t throw another part out of balance.”

Since the UDC passed, Ashby said, the number of variance requests from developers has dropped sharply from previous years, since they can now go directly through planning staff.

“So the UDC certainly isn’t stifling commercial development,” Ashby said. “We have found that a number of folks that hadn’t worked in Cheyenne before were able to walk through the code prior to any communication with staff and be about 85 to 90 percent correct (in understanding it). That certainly wasn’t possible before.”

Illusive? Inclusive?

But to Frank Smith, the implications of the UDC are obvious.

“When I saw the UDC in the paper, I thought, ‘Oh, this is cookie cutter,’” he said. “Once it got printed and I started reading it, I said, ‘This is right out of Agenda 21.’”

Smith said the process by which the UDC was adopted is typical of how Agenda 21 is implemented in communities across the country. While such initiatives generally include opportunities for the public to speak on them, he said such efforts are really just theater, meant to give the illusion of inclusive government.

“The basic blueprint is being brought in from the bottom up, rather than the top down,” he said. “Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, this is our plan.’ It’s giving you an illusion of a fair trial, so to speak, but the deck is stacked against you.”

But Tom Mason, director of the Cheyenne Metropolitan Planning Organization, said the UDC is the culmination of more than 20 years of back and forth between the city and its public stakeholders. He said the process dates back to 1989, when the Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce launched Forum 1999, a community effort to determine how the city should grow and develop over the next decade.

The project, Mason said, included professional consultation, as well as telephone, newspaper and even high school surveys of the public to ask how they wanted to see Cheyenne grow and what kinds of amenities they wanted to see in the future.

“It got into community planning, how we wanted to grow, how much we wanted to grow, what was desired for recreation, environmental quality, city services,” Mason said. “Then came Vision 2020, which was done in 2001, 2002; and that got into housing and neighborhoods, growth of the community, downtown, economic development, parks and recreation … there were very large public input processes.”

Mason said many of the priority actions that resulted from Forum 1999 and Vision 2020 were later incorporated into PlanCheyenne, an integrated community master plan that attempts to define the Cheyenne area’s future based on what the people want.

Adopted in 2006, PlanCheyenne was funded, in part, through a metropolitan planning organization grant, federal money provided to cities with 50,000 residents or more to help them develop regional transportation plans that incorporate roads, freight, public transit and bicycle and pedestrian pathways, among others.

“That was the seed money, and with that we were able to develop a land-use and transportation plan,” Mason said. “The city threw in additional money for the parks plan, and the county also threw in additional money.

“We hired a consultant to do the work, and they again used the (public input from) Vision 2020,” Mason added. “There were numerous open houses asking the community to come in and talk to us about the plan.”

But Smith contends that grant money is simply the government’s way of encouraging cities to adopt portions of Agenda 21.

“You’ve got the (Environmental Protection Agency), (Housing and Urban Development) coming into communities to do public projects,” he said. “The idea is to throttle transportation, narrow the streets, get people out of their personal vehicles into mass transit. That may be wonderful in Philadelphia, but here in Wyoming?”

Defusing tensions

Smith’s concerns are not new to Jason Jordan. The American Planning Association’s director for policy and government affairs, Jordan said he’s seen this kind of talk popping up at planning meetings from Tulsa, Okla., to Phoenix, Ariz. during the past two years.

“It was amazing that while folks believe planners are these agents of implementation, the planners themselves had no idea what (Agenda 21) was, by and large,” he said. “Most of them, frankly, find it absurd that this is somehow driving local planning decisions. Planning and all the corresponding components are one of the most quintessentially local implements we have in government.”

But Jordan acknowledged that argument doesn’t convince many of Agenda 21’s detractors. Since fears of Agenda 21 began entering the public sphere around 2010, he said, the APA has worked with planning bodies around the country to try to defuse some of the tension by adjusting how planners frame the narrative.

Jordan said APA surveys have found that the vast majority of the American public still hasn’t heard of Agenda 21. In fact, fully 85 percent don’t know enough about it to say whether they support or oppose it. Of the remainder, only about 6 percent support Agenda 21, while about 8 percent are opposed to it.

But Jordan said that 8 percent can often feel like 80 percent to the city councils and planning commissions who find themselves suddenly confronted with a dozen people at one meeting, all sounding the alarm.

“In many communities, there’s sort of an over-response to the concerns that are raised,” he said. “So we’re trying to get the conversation as local as possible. We want people to talk specifically about what they want their community to look like as a way to pull people out of this destructive and counterproductive thought.”

Jordan said planners see the best results when they drill down into specific proposals. By aggressively engaging the public on specifics, he said, planning bodies can cut through the rhetoric and get to some common ground.

As an example of this sort of engagement, Jordan pointed to Wichita, Kan.

“They were going through a downtown planning process, and they got the critics. Folks who were concerned about the U.N. Agenda 21 business came out and became very disruptive,” he said. “So they sort of rebooted their process.”

Jordan said the planners realized that one of the things that united the public was their desire to keep young people in the community and their belief that a more vibrant downtown was a key to making that happen.

“Once people were able to agree on the underlying core values, then they were able to get past the rhetoric and deal with any individual component of the work,” Jordan said.

In another example, he said, planners in Tulsa reached out to a group of tea party activists n often the biggest opponents of Agenda 21 n who had been disruptive in the past and attempted to directly engage them.

“After a lot of effort of outreach, bringing them to the table, in a way forcing them to say what they believed the community should look like, they found that some of those activists remained engaged in the process and became a part of it,” Jordan said. “Once you are committed to engagement in the process, I think it’s harder to throw stones.”

Repeal the UDC?

For their part, Cheyenne city officials maintain that Agenda 21 has played no role in the development or adoption of the UDC. In fact, Mayor Rick Kaysen said he hadn’t even heard of it until about six months ago.

“The Unified Development Code was not thought up overnight. This is a multi-year review that got to the document that went into place on April 30,” Kaysen said. “People can draw conclusions and opinions, but when the UDC was designed, Agenda 21 was not part of the discussions. We went from Forum 1999 to Vision 2020 to PlanCheyenne with lots of public forums for input.”

Smith and others have been pushing to repeal the UDC in its entirety, but both Kaysen and Ashby believe doing so would be disastrous for the city and send the wrong message to the developers who will have to wrangle with the previous disparate codes.

“The process associated with (repealing the UDC) would really throw the growth of our community into complete chaos as far as not having a predictable way for projects to move from initial conception to actually getting built,” Ashby said. “That impacts business decisions; it impacts people’s everyday lives.”

“We would have to reinstate the three previous codes as they were,” Kaysen added. “We would have lost several years of ground, trying to be responsible from that development standpoint. If we want to stymie development, that’s what we would do.”

Kaysen said he has no qualms with revising the UDC as needed, adding that it was designed with a formal review process built in. Councilwoman Amber Ash, who is running for a four-year seat on the County Commission, has also spoken up in favor of reviewing the code, though she has rebuffed overtures from Smith to address Agenda 21.

“My reasons for revisiting it are not related to Agenda 21. I want to be really clear about that,” Ash said. “Agenda 21 calls for things like gender equality, free primary education, and those are things I’m a proponent of.”

Ash said her concerns over the UDC come from some of the increased costs developers say they’ve have had to face.

“I met with one developer. They’re looking at remodeling or adding four new buildings this coming year, and each one’s going to cost them about $200,000 more to build because of the new requirements under the UDC,” she said. “I think big businesses can absorb those costs, but little small mom-and-pop businesses n those costs can mean the difference between opening a business or not. That’s where I’m coming from.”

Both sides upset

Smith said Ash isn’t too far from his own thinking with regard to how he thinks the UDC n and by extension, Agenda 21 n seeks to shut out competition and relegate power to government and a handful of multinational corporations.

“I think the overarching thing is, societally, with the conglomerates in industry and retail, it’s kind of a centralization of distribution and economy, so your choice is going to be to work for the government, work for a big corporation or go on welfare,” Smith said. “People like me who have been self-employed are going to be out in the cold.”

But Smith said he was also disappointed in Ash for refusing to discuss Agenda 21 in addressing the UDC.

“When we started kicking up a fuss about all of this, Amber Ash came to M. Lee (Hasenauer, a tea party activist and Republican candidate for the County Commission) and I and said, ‘I can get this reopened on City Council if you can get some people to come before City Council,’” Smith said. “But her stipulation was that nobody was to come there and talk about Agenda 21, and I said, ‘No deal.’ Without tying Agenda 21 into the UDC, then we’re picking pieces out of the pepper.”

Smith maintains that full repeal of the UDC is the only acceptable means of thwarting Agenda 21’s encroachment in Cheyenne. But Jordan of the APA contends that the only real way to halt Agenda 21 is to get everyone to understand how municipal planning works and, more importantly, how it doesn’t.

“I have a great deal of respect for anybody who wants to come into the public square and offer up their public opinion. That’s a foundation of good planning, and in no way am I demeaning the participation,” Jordan said.

“What I find very troubling, though, is because they’re afraid of this conspiracy, they’re willing to shut down participation from anyone else in the community. And that, to me, is the real threat to local democracy, to local decision-making.

“We want to get those folks who believe in planning, who believe in working together to build a future for their community to get involved so the local officials don’t feel overwhelmed by one-sided conversation,” he added. “Our hope and our goal is that this isn’t sustainable over time, and as planners get better at doing their job, as supporters of good planning do a better job at speaking to their local officials, that this can turn the temperature down in a productive way.”

Source: Wyoming News, By James Chilton  jchilton@wyomingnews.com

Stealth Islamist Charter Schools Under Investigation

The charter school movement associated with Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen is under federal investigation.

If one believes that the battle for the nation’s soul is occurring, not just in Washington, D.C., but in schools across the nation, the steady advance of Turkish-Gulen Charter Schools may be cause for alarm. Fethullah Gulen is a Turkish Islamic cleric who fled his native country in 1998, after being charged with seeking to overthrow the secular Turkish government. He currently lives in exile at a 28-acre mountain complex in the Pocono Mountains, with more than $25 billion of assets at his command.

The 135 charter schools associated with the Gulen Movement (GM) enroll more than 45,000 students andcomprise the largest charter school network in the United States — all of which are fully funded by American taxpayers. Fethullah Gulen has been underinvestigation by the government since 2011.

That investigation, carried out by FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education, is centered around charter school employees who are allegedly engaged in kicking back part of their salaries to the Muslim movement also known as Hizmet (service to others), founded by Gulen. Gulen initiated his movement in Izmir, a city on Turkey’s Aegean coast,more than 40 years ago, preaching impassioned sermons to his followers, who may now number as many as six million. In Turkey, the Gulen Movement has been accused of pushing for a hardline Islamic state. Despite this reality, government officials investigating the kickback scheme are apparently satisfied that there is no religious agenda being disseminated in America. Their investigation is centered around the hundreds of Turkish teachers, administrators, and other staffers employed under the H1B visa program, who may or may not be misusing taxpayer money.

This would appear to be a stunningly naive approach to the issue. H1B visas allow US employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations on a temporary basis. “Specialty occupations” aredefined as “requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor.” Gulen schools are among the nation’s largest users of the H1B visas. In 2009, they received government approvals for 684 visas. The Harmony School, a Gulen-related institution, has applied for more H1B visas than any educational institution in the country.

GM officials at some of the charter schools that ostensibly specialize in math and science, claim they need to fill teaching spots with Turkish teachers. At the Young Scholars of Central Pennsylvania Charter School in State College, Ruth Hocker, former president of the parents’ group, grew suspicious when certified American teachers began to be replaced by uncertified Turks with limited English-speaking skills who, despite that limitation, commanded higher salaries. Parents pointed out that these uncertified teachers were moved from one charter to another when their “emergency” credentials expired. They also spoke about a pattern of sudden turnovers of Turkish business managers, administrators, and board members.

Similar complaints arose in Texas, where it was revealed that hundreds of Turkish teachers and administrators were also working with H1B visas. In addition, the Harmony School group was using taxpayer money to fund Gulen’s movement via school construction and renovation projects. Despite assertions that the bidding process on those projects was fair, records showed that virtually all of the work has been done by Turkish-owned contractors, according to the New York Times.

 

A former teacher from Turkey revealed an ominous development, reportedly telling the FBI that the Gulen Movement had divided the United States into five regions, with a general manager in each who coordinates the activities of the schools, and related foundations and cultural centers.

All of the above raises the obvious question: if these schools are traditional American charter schools that do nothing more than “follow the state curriculum,” as Tansu Cidav, the acting CEO of the Truebright Science Academy in North Philadelphia contends, why is it necessary to hire foreign teachers and coordinate activities nationwide?

A federal document released in 2011 may provide the answer. It posits that Gulen’s charter schools may in fact be madrassahs, where students are “brain-washed” to serve as proponents of the New Islamic World Order Gulen purportedly seeks to create.

Former Muslim Brotherhood member Walid Shoebat illuminates the bigger picture. Shoebat, who was highly critical of a CBS “60 Minutes” report on Gulen (who refused to be interviewed for the piece), likens the cleric’s movement to the leftist Center for American Progress (CAP) And radical billionaire George Soros. “Both men are extremely wealthy, use that money to surreptitiously spread their ideologies, and like to operate behind the scenes as much as possible,” writes Shoebat.

The American Thinker’s Janet Levy takes it one step further. After noting that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan belongs to the AKP political party founded by Gulen upon his arrival in Pennsylvania, she points out that “Turkey is reverting to its historical Ottoman Empire-inspired Islamic fundamentalism,” even as “it is pursuing a stealth or cultural jihad against the West, in large part through the efforts of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Islamic theologian.”In a 1999 video, Gulen himself spoke of a surreptitious plan for taking over the Turkish government:”You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe …The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it[.]”

The movement is well on its way towards achieving that aim. GM is now active in 140 countries. Aside from its charter school empire, other interests including boarding schools, universities, banks, media companies, newspapers, charities, and think tanks.

 

60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl took the typically leftist, see-no-Islamist-evil approach towards complaints about the Gulen schools advancing an Islamic agenda in America, assuring viewers that he promotes “tolerance, inter-faith dialogue and, above all, he promotes education.” Yet even Stahl was forced to acknowledge that while Gulen “invites conspiracy theories that he’s running Turkey from the Poconos and is bent on global Muslim domination,” his movement “does lack transparency: its funding, hierarchy, and ambitions remain hidden–leading our State Department to wonder in cables between Ankara and Washington if Gulen has an ‘insidious political agenda.’”

This is not the first investigation conducted of Gulen’s empire. In 2008, members of the Netherlands’ Christian Democrat, Labor, and Conservative parties agreed to cut several million euros in government funding for organizations affiliated with Gulen. An investigation ensued when Erik Jan Zürcher, director of the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Social History, along with five former followers who had worked for Gulen, told Dutch television that the Gulen community was moving step-by-step to topple the secular order.

In Pennsylvania, neighbors of Gulen’s fortress retreat complain of hearing automatic gunfire and the drone of a surveillance helicopter that constantly searches for intruders. 100 Turkish guards stand watch over the property as well. If this man and his movement–which continues to expand–have nothing to hide, they have a remarkable way of showing it.

As a Turkish observer speaking to the New Republic noted, “No society would tolerate this big of an organization being this untransparent.” The FBI’s new investigation against Gulen’s organization brings us one step closer to exposing what goes on behind the closed doors of Gulen’s empire.

SOURCE: FPM Right Side News Arnold Ahlert is a former NY Post op-ed columnist currently contributing to JewishWorldReview.com, HumanEvents.com and CanadaFreePress.com. He may be reached at atahlert@comcast.net THURSDAY, 01 NOVEMBER 2012 05:41