Christians are the new Negro

I did not become a Christian so I would have to fight for my constitutional freedoms all over again.

Growing up in Alabama being black, knowing how that felt and the way I was treated in an all-white world of power and control, I had to fight for equal rights under the Constitution. How ironic now as a Christian to have those same thoughts and feelings again and to have to try and wrestle control of my constitutional rights from the secular community.

Pastor Kenneth L. Hutcherson

Many reading this may not understand where I came up with this concept of calling Christians "the new Negro."

The reason is because there are undeniable similarities. Jim Crow laws were passed to keep me from having my constitutional rights and my rights under the Declaration of Independence of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even though the Constitution gave me those freedoms, man was smart enough to be able to keep me from living those freedoms by saying I was "separate but equal."

Today, my constitutional right of freedom of religion is being eroded again by laws such as the Hate Crimes Bill and repeated attacks by the politically correct crowd. Threats that came along as a result of an African American wanting to get out from under Jim Crow laws were formidable and scary and designed to keep African Americans quiet. The same thing is happening to Christians today.

Another way secular society is trying to control Christians is by the fallacy of the separation of church and state. That establishment clause was intended to protect the church from the state, not to keep the church from participating in the state. Christians' ignorance of the meaning of the establishment clause has allowed us to be controlled just like the African Americans were in the 1950s and '60s.

Many may question why I'm writing this article because they can't see the fight in our society and world concerning the overt attack on Judeo-Christian values.

If you don't believe one could be attacked for their stand on Judeo-Christian beliefs alone, take the case of Miss California, Carrie Prejean. Look at her refusal to compromise her Christian values. She has been vilified, demonized and lost her title simply because of her constitutional right to freedom of religion. What is so encouraging is that she will not compromise; she will not give up her values and would rather please God than take what the world has to offer her.

Sarah Palin is another example.

The politically correct crowd has a very difficult time dealing with Sarah because of who she is. Mrs. Palin is a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-traditional marriage, pro-hunting, white, conservative, Christian male who happened to have been born a woman! The politically correct crowd knows exactly what to do with a white male with those attributes, but a woman?

She is the perfect picture of the politically correct woman – strong, beautiful, able to both buy and fry the bacon, take care of the family, run an entire state and still take care of her baby. But because of who she is, and because she does not subscribe to politically correct thinking, she has been attacked for no other reason than her Judeo-Christian values, just as African Americans were attacked for no other reason than their skin color.

If you still don't think Christians are being attacked for our beliefs, consider Pastor Ake Green in Sweden and Pastor Stephen Boisson in Canada and many other men of God around the world who have been jailed and had their non-profit status threatened because they dare to call homosexuality a sin. The sad commentary is many Christians have backed off our God-given responsibility to tell the truth because secular society has deemed the truth "political." Marriage is a church issue, pornography is a church issue, homosexuality is a church issue, and divorce is a church issue. The problem is, as soon as the secular elites named them political, the evangelical church – especially the white evangelical church – retreated and held up the cowardly white flag.

If you don't think Christians have become the new Negro, just look at Christmas! We are no longer able to celebrate Christmas in schools. Even though as taxpayers, our tax dollars help pay for our broken educational system, we are forced to celebrate winter break and the fabulous "holiday tree!"

How about the wonderful greeting, "Happy Holidays!"? Department stores are afraid to put up signs with the word "Christmas" on them. Don't mistakenly think this is anything new. Secular society began taking Christ out of Christmas when they started calling it "Xmas" – and we let it happen.

In my wonderful state of Washington just last year, Gov. Christine Gregoire and the state legislators allowed an Atheist Manifesto to be put up right next to the Nativity scene of our Lord Jesus Christ! I have to say straightforward: the state of Washington is the armpit of the United States, and our lovely legislators are supplying the odiferous scent to the armpit.

Because 2008 was such a disaster, this year there will be no Christmas or religious displays in the Capitol rotunda, period. Oh, except they will put up a huge holiday tree.

Can anybody tell me where common sense is? Everyone in the world knows it's a Christmas tree. This nonsense is all in the name of tolerance toward whom? It's certainly not toward those of us who hold strong Judeo-Christian values. As Christians, it's an attack on what we hold dear. But just like the Negroes, Christians should understand they are not equal under the Constitution's right to freedom of religion.

The only difference between Christians and African Americans is that Christians put up with this intolerance while standing behind the false disguise of humility and love. We are obsessed with showing the world our love when our primary job is to tell them the truth. The Bible does not say, "Sensitivity shall set you free." It says, "The truth shall set you free." Are we not the truth-tellers?

When are we as believers, like the African Americans that came before us, going to say, enough is enough? No more "separate but equal!" Our battle cry is "We are the salt of the earth, onward Christian soldiers and to God be the glory! For in unity we will stand and we will not be stopped!

Dr. Kenneth L. Hutcherson is the senior pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland, Washington. He is also a former NFL linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys and Seattle Seahawks

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N.Y. Times edits truth of Climategate

The respective investigations into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 and into climate change have something very specific in common beyond the corruption of results for political ends.

 

That is the role of the New York Times, in particular Times' environment reporter Andrew Revkin, in enabling that corruption.

 

In both cases, Revkin and the Times would pick sides in a scientific controversy, cozy up to the side picked, champion its counterfeit data, and marginalize the opposition.

 

As to "Climategate," the e-mails hacked from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit show Revkin very much an active participant in the information flow.

 

What they reveal is an insecure reporter working hard to ingratiate himself with the world's most influential global-warming advocates.

 

In one relatively benign e-mail to "dear all," for instance, Revkin addresses a specific "bone of contention with a lot of the anti-greenhouse-limits folks."

 

Although the issue is too dense to explore here, Revkin concludes his e-mail with his trademark sycophancy: "hoping to show a bit of how that works.thanks for any insights. and i encourage you to comment and provide links etc with the current post to add context etc."

 

Incredibly, after Climategate broke, the Times' editors allowed Revkin to continue covering the scandal even though he himself was central to the story.

 

His subsequent reporting has drawn intense heat from critics, especially since his instinct has been to cover for his friends.

 

"The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument," Revkin wrote at the scandal's outset.

 

Under pressure, Revkin has since begun to raise at least a few questions about the scandal and the science behind it.

 

His friends, however, have no tolerance even for Revkin's most gentle questions. And they know his weakness: the reporter's fear of being cut off from his sources.

 

Revkin's particular vulnerability came to light in a recent warning that the University of Illinois' Michael Schlesinger e-mailed to Revkin and unthinkingly copied to, among others, the American Enterprise Institute's Steven Hayward.

 

"The vibe that I am getting from here, there and everywhere," wrote Schlessinger to Revkin, "is that your reportage is very worrisome to most climate scientists."

 

"Of course, your blog is your blog," Schlessinger continued, "But, I sense that you are about to experience the 'Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included."

 

If Revkin's reporting on the TWA Flight 800 investigation in 1996-97 is any indication, Schlessinger need not fear that Revkin will risk being cut off.

 

In the way of background, On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded only 12 minutes out of JFK along the south shore of Long Island. Revkin was one of two or three lead reporters on the story.

 

To control the information flow, the FBI shared all of its new revelations only with the Times' reporters. This strategy forced all the other media to look to the Times, but it also increased the dependence of Revkin and his colleagues on the FBI.

 

The reporting during the first month after the crash was cautious but honest. On Aug. 14, the Times' Don Van Natta would report that the center fuel tank had caught fire well after the plane had been blown apart, "a finding that deals a serious blow to the already remote possibility that a mechanical accident caused the crash."

 

Van Natta's conclusion had to have sent shock waves through the White House: "Now that investigators say they think the center fuel tank did not explode, they say the only good explanations remaining are that a bomb or a missile brought down the plane."

 

Likely under pressure, the FBI immediately shifted its story line, and Revkin got the call to deliver its message. On Aug. 17, he wrote the Times' first article on the crash's many eyewitnesses.

 

Out of the hundreds available, Revkin interviewed just one. The FBI had served up this particular witness because he had seen only the tail end of the drama. What he saw, Revkin wrote, "substantially weakened support for the idea that a missile downed the plane."

 

Revkin tracked fully with the FBI's spin, claiming that the witness's account of a quick white flash well before the large fireball has "bolstered the idea that a bomb, and not an exploding fuel tank, triggered the disintegration of the airplane."

 

By this time, no fewer than 270 eyewitnesses had given formal reports to the FBI describing an object rising off the surface and striking the doomed plane.

 

Astonishingly, Revkin and his colleagues would not report a single interview with any one of them at any time.

 

For all its misdirection, the FBI seems to have been struggling against the White House throughout August. On Aug. 23, the Times broke a headline story with the FBI's help, top right: "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800."

 

This article stole the thunder from Clinton's election-driven approval of welfare reform in that same day's paper and threatened to undermine the peace and prosperity message of next week's Democratic convention.

 

The terrorism message could not stand. The Clinton administration decided to manufacture a cause for the crash, and when it did, the reliable Revkin was given the nod once more.

 

On Sept. 19, the Times published his bellwether article, "Fuel Tank Crucial To All Crash Theories." Flushing all previous evidence down the memory hole, the NTSB was now planning "tests intended to show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical failure alone."

 

All such tests would prove fruitless, but by Nov. 1996, the Times would be dismissing explanations other than a spontaneously exploding fuel tank as "conspiracy theories."

 

More than a year later, it was Revkin who got the assignment to rap up the Times' reporting on this fully corrupted investigation.

 

The headline of his Nov. 14, 1997 article said as much about the reporting as it did the investigation, "A Bold Start Stretched To 16 Fruitless Months."

 

The "respectable" conservative media bought into the Times' misreporting on TWA Flight 800. Here is hoping that Climategate will shock them out of their complacency.

 

Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue.

 

 

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Planned Parenthood advises: 'That's not a baby'

Undercover video shows workers 'giving misinformation to women'

A team of activists whose undercover videos revealed Planned Parenthood employees advising patients to lie to a judge and ignoring apparent cases of statutory rape has launched a project to uncover lies told to the patients.

The new Rosa Acuna Project led by Lila Rose at Live Action.org  unveiled today its first undercover video revealing counselors and an abortionist in Wisconsin apparently misleading a potential patient.

The video, according to Live Action, reveals "clinic staff, including the abortion doctor, lying to two young women about fetal development":

In the video, two women ask an abortion business counselor if a pregnant woman's 10-week-old unborn child has a heartbeat. The counselor informs them it is "heart tones."

"Heartbeat is when the fetus is active in the uterus – can survive – which is about 17 or 18 weeks," she says.

However, Live Action said embryologists confirm that the heartbeat of an unborn child begins at about three weeks.

Along with breaking mandatory informed consent laws in certain states, Rose told WND misinformation provided by physicians can cause women to make poor choices.

"When a woman is coming in there and is asking questions about her unborn child, then she is lied to, you're talking about a life and death matter," Rose said. "Whether the child will be alive or will be dead is an incredibly important decision."

She said women have reported that such decisions are most important they have made in their lives.

Lila Rose

"These supposed health providers are callously and willfully giving misinformation to women," she said.

On the video, the counselor states, "A fetus is what's in the uterus right now. That is not a baby."

The abortionist, identified only by his last name, Polhaska, says, "It's not a baby at this stage or anything like that."

He says that "women die having babies" and an abortion is "much safer than having a baby."

The North Gillett Street Planned Parenthood in Appleton, where the video was made, could not be reached for comment. The telephone system did not allow an opportunity for a caller to leave a message, and the system then disconnected the call.

The video follows by just a few weeks the decision by Abby Johnson to quit her position as director of the Planned Parenthood branch in Bryan, Texas, and become a pro-life activist after viewing an ultrasound of a 13-week-old unborn baby being aborted in her clinic.

In an interview, she told of the Planned Parenthood's orientation towards abortion as a revenue generator.

"They don't want to talk about when your baby has a heartbeat," she said. "They don't want to give the woman information that could give her a connection with her baby."

Rose, a 21-year-old UCLA student and president of Live Action, said medical lies and manipulative counseling are routine at Planned Parenthood, the nation's largest abortion business.

"They will do or say anything in order to sell more abortions to more women, whether it is covering up sexual abuse or lying to women about medical facts," said Rose. "Our team has visited dozens of Planned Parenthood clinics undercover. Planned Parenthood, while claiming to support patient self-determination, operates with an 'abortion-first mentality.'"

The video is the first in the "Rosa Acuna Project," a multi-state undercover project about abortion counseling. The organization expects to release more videos in coming weeks.

Live Action's earlier videos revealed Planned Parenthood branches willing to conceal sexual abuse and accept donations intended to abort a black child. The videos resulted in several demands to investigate the organization as well as the dismissal of employees.

"Planned Parenthood is a billion-dollar organization with nearly $350 million of government funding, and stands to gain hundreds of millions more from national health care," said Rose. "Do we really want to subsidize an organization that gives women in need atrocious misinformation and predatory abortion practices?"

Planned Parenthood has had other issues with delivering information to patients. In South Dakota, it has fought a years-long battle over a state law requiring the organization to tell potential abortion customers that the procedure will "terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being."

U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier ruled that Planned Parenthood must follow a 2005 state law requiring the language. Earlier, Planned Parenthood had substituted its own language instead of delivering the information specified by the state.

The dispute went as high as the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the state can "use its regulatory authority to require a physician to provide truthful, non-misleading information relevant to a patient's decision to have an abortion."

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Holdren's guru: Dispose of 'excess children' like puppies

Science chief acknowledges Brown as inspiration for career in ecology

 

Geochemist Harrison Brown, a member of the Manhattan Project who supervised the production of plutonium, advocated world government in the 1950s to impose mandatory controls over population growth, carried out, if necessary, through sterilization and forced abortions.

 

White House science czar John Holdren openly acknowledges Brown's writings influenced his decision to devote his career to the science of ecology.

 

Holdren has echoed Brown's call for global government by advocating the United States should surrender sovereignty to a "Planetary Regime" armed with sufficient military power to enforce population limits on nations as a means of preventing a wide range of perceived dangers from global eco-disasters involving Earth's natural resources, climate, atmosphere and oceans.

 

On page 260 of his 1954 book "The Challenge of Man's Future," Brown concluded "population stabilization and a world composed of completely independent sovereign states are incompatible."

 

Writing that "population stabilization" is a goal "with which a world government must necessarily concern itself," Brown advised that "maximum and permissible population levels" for all regions of the world could be calculated by world government authorities using the rule that "individual regions of the world should be self-sufficient both agriculturally and industrially."

 

Brown even contemplates infanticide as a permissible solution to overpopulation in extreme situations, writing that "if we cared little for human emotions and were willing to introduce a procedure which most of us would consider to be reprehensible in the extreme, all excess children could be disposed of much as excess puppies and kittens are disposed of at the present time."

 

That Brown considers such a reprehensible reality a possibility is made clear on page 261, when he writes: "And let us hope further that human beings will never again be forced to resort to infanticide in order to avoid excessive population pressure."

 

'Pulsating mass of maggots'

 

Imagining a world population growing out of control to as many as 200 billion people, Brown suggested on page 221 "a substantial fraction of humanity" was reproducing as if "it would not rest content until the earth is covered completely and to a considerable depth with a writhing mass of human beings, much as a dead cow is covered with a pulsating mass of maggots."

 

Believing that there are "physical limitations of some sort which will determine the maximum number of human beings who can live on the earth's surface," Brown argued on page 236 that "there can be no escaping the fact that if starvation is to be eliminated, if the average child who is born is to stand a reasonable chance of living out the normal life span with which he is endowed at birth, family sizes must be limited."

 

He continues to specify that the limitations in birth "must arise from the utilization of contraceptive techniques or abortions or a combination of the two practices."

 

Brown openly endorsed putting morals aside.

 

"The conclusion is inescapable," he continued on page 236. "We can avoid talking about it, moralists may try to convince us to the contrary, laws may be passed forbidding us to talk about it, fear of pressure groups may prevent political leaders from discussion the subject, but the conclusion cannot be denied on any rational basis."

 

As far as Brown was concerned, government-mandated population control was necessary to prevent overpopulation.

 

"Either population-control measures must be both widely and wisely used, or we must reconcile ourselves to a world where starvation is everywhere, where life expectancy at birth is less than 30 years, where infants stand a better chance of dying than living during the first year following birth, where women are little more than machines for breeding, pumping child after child into an inhospitable world, spending the greater part of their adult lives in a state of pregnancy."

 

Ultimately, Brown resolves preventing overpopulation justifies government limiting human freedom, at least with regard to reproduction.

 

On page 255, Brown announces "it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of human liberty can be made compatible."

 

How many births should be permitted?

 

On page 262, Brown proposes a rule government officials can utilize to mandate birth control measures.

 

"Let us suppose that in a given year the birth rate exceeds the death rate by a certain amount, thus resulting in a population increase," he postulates. "During the following year the number of permitted inseminations is decreased and the number of permitted abortions is increased, in such a way that the birth rate is lowered by the requisite amount."

 

Next, Brown insists that in a year in which the death rate exceeds the birth rate, "the number of permitted inseminations would be increased while the number of abortions would be decreased."

 

Brown formulates his rule as follows: "The number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous."

 

Combining this rule with his desire to implement eugenics, Brown writes on the next page, "A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates."

 

Brown openly acknowledged population control requires government limitation of human freedom.

 

"Precise control of population can never be made completely compatible with the concept of a free society; on the other hand, neither can the automobile, the machine gun, or the atomic bomb," he wrote on pages 263-264.

 

"Whenever several persons live together in a small area, rules of behavior are necessary. Just as we have rules designed to keep us from killing one another with our automobiles, so there must be rules that keep us from killing one another with our fluctuating breeding habits an with our lack of attention to the soundness of our individual genetic stock."

 

Holdren follows mentor's lead

 

Holdren's call for a planetary regime dates to the 1970s college textbook "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment" that he co-authored with Malthusian population alarmist Paul R. Ehrlich and Ehrlich's wife, Anne. The authors argued involuntary birth-control measures, including forced sterilization, may be necessary and morally acceptable under extreme conditions, such as widespread famine brought about by "climate change."

 

Just as Brown had called for world government to control overpopulation to prevent eco-disasters, Holdren's call for a planetary regime was similarly motivated by ecological concerns.

 

On page 943, the authors recommended the creation of a "Planetary Regime" created to act as an "international superagency for population, resources, and environment."

 

Holdren clearly specified the Planetary Regime would be charged with global population control.

 

On page 943, Holdren continued: "The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries' shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime should have some power to enforce the agreed limits."

 

Holdren credits Brown with inspiring him in high school

 

Holdren openly acknowledges his intellectual debt to Brown's 1954 book "The Challenge of Man's Future."

 

In 1986, Holdren co-edited a scientific reader, "Earth and the Human Future: Essays in Honor of Harrison Brown."

 

In one of his introductory essays in the book, Holdren acknowledged he read Brown's "The Challenge of Man's Future" when he was in high school and that the book had a profound effect on his intellectual development.

 

Holdren acknowledged Brown's book transformed his thinking about the world and "about the sort of career I wanted to pursue."

 

As recently as 2007, Holdren gave a speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which his last footnote included Brown as one of the "several late mentors" to whom Holdren was thankful for "insight and inspiration."

 

In the first slide of this presentation, Holdren acknowledged, "My pre-occupation with the great problems at the intersection of science and technology with the human condition – and with the interconnectedness of these problems with each other – began when I read 'The Challenge of Man's Future' in high school. I later worked with Harrison Brown at Caltech."

 

 

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Climategate: Gore falsifies the record

Al Gore has studied the Climategate emails with his typically rigorous eye and dismissed them as mere piffle:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

A: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it’s sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven’t read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus.

And in case you think that was a mere slip of the tongue:

Q: There is a sense in these e-mails, though, that data was hidden and hoarded, which is the opposite of the case you make [in your book] about having an open and fair debate.

A: I think it’s been taken wildly out of context. The discussion you’re referring to was about two papers that two of these scientists felt shouldn’t be accepted as part of the IPCC report. Both of them, in fact, were included, referenced, and discussed. So an e-mail exchange more than 10 years ago including somebody’s opinion that a particular study isn’t any good is one thing, but the fact that the study ended up being included and discussed anyway is a more powerful comment on what the result of the scientific process really is.

In fact, thrice denied:

These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.

In fact, as Watts Up With That shows, one Climategate email was from just two months ago. The most recent was sent on November 12 - just a month ago. The emails which have Tom Wigley seeming (to me) to choke on the deceit are all from this year. Phil Jones’ infamous email urging other Climategate scientists to delete emails is from last year.

How closely did Gore read these emails? Did he actually read any at all? Was he lying or just terribly mistaken? What else has he got wrong?

(Thanks to readers Sinclair and Peter.)

UPDATE

Reader Barry:

Actually the e-mail archives are named by Unix timestamp, ranging from Thu, 07 Mar 1996 14:41:07 GMT through to Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:17:44 GMT. This is a strong indicator they are extracted from an enterprise archive, probably by the FOIA Compliance Officer and not hacked from individual’s workstations.

UPDATE 2

Could those carefully vetted journalists who are allowed an audience with the Great Green Guru please - for once - confront him with his exaggerations, distortions, fake evidence and absurd predictions? I’ve done this myself over this issue, and can guarantee you will get a far funnier and more interesting reaction than another of his sermons. You may also get something rather closer to the truth.

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ACORN Document Dump: Citibank Jeopardizes Customers for ACORN

What does the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai and ACORN have in common?  Both of them have some bankers on Wall Street worried.  When brokers and traders returned to work after the Thanksgiving Holiday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average went on a wild rollercoaster ride dropping as much as 233 points during the trading session due to an announcement that Dubai would be rescheduling the repayment of $3.5 billion in bonds.  This unexpected announcement was not what Wall Street wanted to hear on Black Friday when retail sales were already down by 8% compared to the prior year and Cyber Monday sales were less than robust with individual online purchases being 2% less than they were last year.  All of this at a time when brokers, traders and economists across the country are watching to see if cash strapped consumers are going to bailout retailers from what is shaping up to be a dismal retail Christmas season.

It is understandable why Wall Street would be concerned about Dubai.  Why would they be concerned about ACORN?  On October 24, 2009, Biggovernment.com revealed that the San Diego office of ACORN dumped thousands of documents into a dumpster in advance of an investigation into the organizations activities by California Attorney General Jerry Brown.  I retrieved the documents from a shared public dumpster located behind the local ACORN office.  The documents that were retrieved filled the back of my Suburban.  Much of what was retrieved was truly trash, items such as banana peels, coffee grounds and marketing materials. After sorting through the documents, though, the 20,000 documents that were retained included sensitive personal information, financial records and documents outlining the internal and political workings of ACORN.  One of the documents obtained by Biggovernment.com shows that ACORN had business relationships with 28 major financial institutions for the purpose of assisting homeowners whose mortgages were in foreclosure.

ACORN – Citibank Flyer _Redacted_ –

Citigroup was one of the 28 financial institutions with which ACORN had a business relationship.  ACORN operated a Citi Outreach program where employees of ACORN were provided personal information for Citigroup’s customers and would make contact with borrowers who fell behind on their mortgage payments.  The objective of the program was to get homeowners to contact ACORN Housing Corporation (AHC).  Testimony provided to members of two congressional committees, the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee and the House Judiciary Committee, revealed that ACORN used the Citi Outreach program, as well as a program operated on behalf of Bank of America, as a membership recruiting tool where homeowners where expected to pay monthly membership dues to ACORN prior to receiving assistance.  Testimony provided by Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee turned whistle-blower, sated that ACORN had quotas for membership recruitment.  Documents provided to Biggovernment.com show that regardless of whether the homeowner was assisted or not, ACORN was paid by Citigroup as long as a current phone number was obtained.  The document also shows that ACORN employees were well aware of the need to keep these documents and records private due to state and federal privacy laws.  The document reads, “People on this list have their privacy protected.  Keep the lists private.”

ACORN – Citibank Outreach _Redacted_ –

The reason Wall Street lawyers and board rooms are concerned about ACORN beyond the current political and public relations drawbacks, ACORN’s actions of throwing sensitive private information into a public dumpster containing bank customer records begs the question, is a class action lawsuit in the offing?  One document obtained by Biggovernment.com shows Citibank customers names, addresses and mortgage loan numbers were illegally disclosed, not to mention the very fact that these individuals are on this list reveals their credit worthiness since they are in a default status with regards to paying their mortgage loans.

ACORN – Citibank Customer _Redacted_ –

Wall Street certainly has enough to worry about with a weak U.S. economy and uncertainty in global financial markets.  But thanks to ACORN, there is now more to worry about.  Citibank’s cavalier treatment of its customers sensitive, personal and financial information is potentially a serious breach of state and federal law. As the depth of the San Diego ACORN office data breach becomes more clear, Citigroup and possibly more banks, will have to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of low-income homeowners lining up to take advantage of what is truly to be a cash bonanza for the poor.  Be assured that there will be many law firms willing to help “spread the wealth” to these economically disadvantaged individuals whose personal information was treated with careless disregard.

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5 Americans were in Pakistan for jihad, officials say

The five young American men detained in Pakistan were seeking jihad, or holy war, and were planning a big attack when arrested, local authorities in central Punjab charged Thursday.

 

Usman Anwar, the chief of police in the town of Sargodha, told McClatchy that the five men, all from the Washington area, were seeking a link to an ultra-radical jihad group, possibly al Qaida.

 

"It's above Jaish. It's something more serious than that," Anwar said in a telephone interview, referring to Jaish-e-Mohammad, the group that's been implicated in the 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.

 

News of the arrest in Sargodha, in central Punjab province, will fuel concerns that Pakistan is a magnetic draw for extremists across the world. The men were reported missing last month by their families back home. This was the third recent case of an alleged terrorist plot involving U.S. citizens that's linked to Pakistan.

 

The five men were taken into custody last Saturday or earlier, after arriving in Pakistan on Nov. 30, officials said. Three are of Pakistani origin, one of Egyptian parentage and one of Yemeni origin. One of the men, whom police named as Umar Farouq, has ties to Sargodha, and they were staying in a family home there. The men are thought to be in their 20s, and one is a dental student from Howard University.

 

"They came to Pakistan for the specific purpose of doing jihad. Sargodha was a safe place for them, so that's why they came here," Anwar said. "They wanted to go to heaven, perhaps."

 

Police seized literature and a computer with a hard disk full of material, he said. News reports said that one of the men had made a video, apparently intended for his family, in which he said he'd left home to defend Islam.

 

While international attention has focused on Pakistani and Afghan Taliban groups in the northwest of Pakistan, Punjab, in the east of the country, houses older Pakistani militant groups, some of which have developed close links with al Qaida. Jaish-e-Mohammad is based in the town of Bahawalpur, in the south of Punjab.

 

Sargodha is home to a Pakistani air force base that's associated with the country's nuclear program and has twice been the target of attacks by extremists, but police think that the presence of the men in the town may have been coincidental.

 

"One of the possibilities (is the air force base) but I really don't think so. The attack was something more acute and bigger," Anwar said.

 

The police chief said that the men claimed they came to Pakistan because "they were about to look for a girl, to get married."

 

Pakistani law enforcement officers had tracked the men from the moment they arrived at Karachi international airport, and all carried U.S. passports, a Pakistani official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity as he wasn't authorized to discuss the case with journalists, told McClatchy on Wednesday.

 

They traveled to the city of Hyderabad, returned to Karachi — the hub of commerce in Pakistan — and then went to Lahore, Punjab's provincial capital, where they spent five days before going to Sargodha, he said.

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