Scenic Pakistani valley falls to Taliban militants

By NAHAL TOOSI

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Taliban militants are beheading and burning their way through Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley, and residents say the insurgents now control most of the mountainous region outside the lawless tribal areas where jihadists thrive.

The deteriorating situation in the former tourist haven comes despite an army offensive that began in 2007 and an attempted peace deal. It is especially worrisome to Pakistani officials because the valley lies away from the areas where al-Qaida and Taliban militants have traditionally operated and where the military is staging a separate offensive.

"You can't imagine how bad it is," said Muzaffar ul-Mulk, a federal lawmaker whose home in Swat was attacked by bomb-toting assailants in mid-December, weeks after he left. "It's worse day by day."

The Taliban activity in northwest Pakistan also comes as the country shifts forces east to the Indian border because of tensions over last month's terrorist attacks in Mumbai, potentially giving insurgents more space to maneuver along the Afghan frontier.

Militants began preying on Swat's lush mountain ranges about two years ago, and it is now too dangerous for foreign and Pakistani journalists to visit. Interviews with residents, lawmakers and officials who have fled the region paint a dire picture.

A suicide blast killed 40 people Sunday at a polling station in Buner, an area bordering Swat that had been relatively peaceful. The attack underscored fears that even so-called "settled" regions presumptively under government control are increasingly unsafe.

The 3,500-square-mile Swat Valley lies less than 100 miles from the capital, Islamabad.

A senior government official said he feared there could be a spillover effect if the government lost control of Swat and allowed the insurgency to infect other areas. Like nearly everyone interviewed, the official requested anonymity for fear of reprisal by militants.

Officials estimate that up to a third of Swat's 1.5 million people have left the area. Salah-ud-Din, who oversees relief efforts in Swat for the International Committee of the Red Cross, estimated that 80 percent of the valley is now under Taliban control.

Swat's militants are led by Maulana Fazlullah, a cleric who rose to prominence through radio broadcasts demanding the imposition of a harsh brand of Islamic law. His appeal tapped into widespread frustration with the area's inefficient judicial system.

Most of the insurgents are easy to spot with long hair, beards, rifles, camouflage vests and running shoes. They number at most 2,000, according to people who were interviewed.

In some places, just a handful of insurgents can control a village. They rule by fear: beheading government sympathizers, blowing up bridges and demanding women wear all-encompassing burqas.

They have also set up a parallel administration with courts, taxes, patrols and checkpoints, according to lawmakers and officials. And they are suspected of burning scores of girls' schools.

In mid-December, Taliban fighters killed a young member of a Sufi-influenced Muslim group who had tried to raise a militia against them. The militants later dug up Pir Samiullah's corpse and hung it for two days in a village square — partly to prove to his followers that he was not a superhuman saint, a security official said on condition of anonymity.

A lawmaker and the senior Swat government official said business and landowners had been told to give two-thirds of their income to the militants. Some local media reported last week that the militants have pronounced a ban on female education effective in mid-January.

Several people interviewed said the regional government made a mistake in May when it struck a peace deal with the militants. The agreement fell apart within two months but let the insurgents regroup.

The Swat insurgency also includes Afghan and other fighters from outside the valley, security officials said.

Any movement of Pakistani troops from the Swat Valley and tribal areas to the Indian border will concern the United States and other Western countries, which want Pakistan to focus on the al-Qaida threat near Afghanistan.

On Friday, Pakistani intelligence officials said thousands of troops were being shifted toward the border with India, which blames Pakistani militants for terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month that killed 164 people. But there has been no sign yet of a major buildup near India.

"The terrorists' aim in Mumbai was precisely this — to get the Pakistani army to withdraw from the western border and mount operations on the east," said Ahmed Rashid, a journalist and author who has written extensively about militancy in the region.

"The terrorists are not going to be sitting still. They are not going to be adhering to any sort of cease-fire while the army takes on the Indian threat. They are going to occupy the vacuum the army will create."

Residents and officials from the Swat Valley were critical of the army offensive there, saying troops appeared to be confined to their posts and often killed civilians when firing artillery at suspected militant targets.

The military has deployed some 100,000 troops through the northwest.

A government official familiar with security issues estimated that some 10,000 paramilitary and army troops had killed 300 to 400 militants in Swat since 2007, while about 130 troops were killed. Authorities have not released details of civilian casualties, and it was unclear if they were even being tallied.

The official, who insisted on anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, disputed assertions that militants had overrun the valley, but said a spotty supply line was hampering operations. He said the army had to man some Swat police stations because the police force there had been decimated by desertions and militant killings.

A Swat militant boasted that "we are doing our activities wherever we want, and the army is confined to their living places."

"They cannot move independently like us," said the man, who was reached over the phone and gave his name as Muzaffarul Haq. He claimed the Swat militants had no al-Qaida or foreign connections, but that they supported all groups that shared the goal of imposing Islamic law.

"With the grace of Allah, there is no dearth of funds, weapons or rations," he said. "Our women are providing cooked food for those who are struggling in Allah's path. Our children are getting prepared for jihad."

___

Associated Press writers Zarar Khan in Islamabad and Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.

Are Americans safe from U.S. mosques?

(Compiler's note: A must read)

By Art Moore

Detroit mosque

When the five Muslims convicted this month of plotting to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix were charged, the New Jersey mosque where four of the men worshipped reacted to negative publicity by holding an "emergency town hall meeting" to calm neighbors and persuade Americans that Islam poses no threat.

But having investigated the Islamic Center of South Jersey one year ago, Middle East expert and former Air Force special agent Dave Gaubatz insists not only is the mosque a threat to national security, it represents a pattern that has prompted him to launch a massive project to systematically classify every known mosque in the U.S.

Mapping Shariah in America: Knowing the Enemy seeks by the end of next year to document in a rigorous, scientific fashion the controversial premise that the more a mosque or community of Muslims adheres to Shariah, or Islamic law, the greater its threat to U.S. national security.

"That's exactly, that's what the data are showing," Gaubatz told WND, who has charted about 100 of the estimated 2,300 mosques his team has identified across the country. "The more adherent you are to Shariah, the more likely you are going to find the material to back that up at the mosque."

No one else is doing this work in the United States – not the FBI, not the police, not the Department of Homeland Security. You can support the work of the Mapping Sharia Project here.

For the observant Muslim, Islamic law is an all-encompassing system that dictates every aspect of life, from food and clothing to the duty to participate in making the religion dominant over the entire world.

At the Islamic Center of South Jersey in Palmyra, where three of the Muslims in the Fort Dix case regularly worshipped and a fourth prayed a few times, Gaubatz found a strict, Shariah-adherent leadership that eagerly distributed jihadist materials supportive of seminal Shariah proponents such as Sayid Abul Maududi, the founder of the radical Pakistani party Jamaat-e-Islami, and Syed Qutb, whose ideas shaped al-Qaida

"What is being overlooked in the Fort Dix case is where the suspects worshipped," he said. "Were they Shariah adherent? Who is the imam, what materials were at the mosque? They came up with the idea to attack Fort Dix for some reason. How and why?"

Using a sophisticated matrix developed by Gaubatz and his colleagues, including a former jihadist, the Jersey mosque was ranked an 8, with 10 being the greatest threat and 1 the lowest.

In the study, Gaubatz and his team – which includes people of different faiths and nationalities, including Muslims – employ 62 different factors to assess a mosque's compliance to Shariah.

Dave Gaubatz with Iraqi child

"We don't rely on talking to anyone about anything, because if we did, you're going to get some people giving you half-answers and some not answering at all," he said.

The focus is on the observed facts, he said, such as how many of the women wear a hijab, how many wear Western-style clothing and the type of threads in an imam's garment.

The team recognizes the distinctions between the Shiite branch of Islam and the four primary schools of thought within the Sunni branch. But Gaubatz says those factors are not scored in the study. The premise is that all streams and sects of Islam recognize a form of Shariah. His primary concern, for the purpose of assessing the threat to the U.S., is the mosque's degree of adherence.

Of interest to most Americans, of course, is the threat of violent jihad. But Gaubatz notes there are two other forms of jihad at work in the U.S. to advance Islam, the pen and the tongue.

"We focus too much on why we haven't had an attack since 2001 in the United States, because the pen and the tongue right now are winning here," Gaubatz said. "Why would you go for number three, the physical jihad, if you're already achieving goals one and two?

Strict adherence

The significance of the Mapping Shariah project is underscored in the conflicting message to the public by a trustee at the Islamic Center of South Jersey, Ismail Badat, who insisted Muslims in the U.S. promote only peace.

Badat said the purpose of the emergency town hall meeting in the wake of the Fort Dix charges in May 2007 was "to clarify for our American friends and neighbors the fundamental beliefs, teachings and practices of Islam, and to make it clear that Muslims here, who are also Americans, do not in any way sanction the forms of violent and offensive behavior which have recently attained prominence in the media."

But Gaubatz found evidence to the contrary not only at the New Jersey mosque but at mosques related to other high-profile cases.

He personally conducted the mapping of the mosque tied to the Muslim who went on a shooting rampage at Salt Lake City's Trolley Square mall last year, and he found it ranked high on his scale.

In Blacksburg, Va., Gaubatz met the imam who was asked to pray at the nationally televised service for slain students at Virginia Tech last year and discovered he leads a Shariah-compliant mosque that backs the genocidal Islamist regime in Sudan.

The imam clearly did not like Virginia Tech, Gaubatz said, and handed him material by Maududi and the Saudi regime, which spends billions of dollars spreading the strict Wahhibist interpretation of Islam around the world.

"He said, if I want to be pure Muslim, and a true Muslim, study these. Look at these," Gaubatz said.

Gaubatz and his team gave its highest rating, a 10, to the Brooklyn mosque of Imam Siraj Wahhaj.

Wahhaj, a former board member of the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, "is in my opinion the most dangerous person in the U.S. in regards to our national security," Gaubatz said.

He has documented Wahhaj declaring in a lecture, "Muslims in America are the most strategically placed Muslims in the world. The U.S. government can't bomb them."

Gaubatz said his week-long assessment of Wahhaj's mosque also uncovered violent material calling for the death of law enforcement officers and instructing Muslims who commit a crime how to go underground.

Wahhaj also has called for recruiting gang members to help carry out jihad.

"Give them Islam, then send them back to the streets with UZIs," the imam said, according to Gaubatz.

Gaubatz contends many Islamic groups and organizations take on a legal and peaceful veneer in English-speaking settings but often preach quietly in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu "a very violent and anti-American jihad."

Virtually all Islamic leaders in the U.S. have been particularly careful since the 9/11 attacks about what they say publicly, Gaubatz said. But many Shariah-compliant mosques and schools distribute materials supporting or calling for violent jihad. In a widely distributed DVD, for example, an Islamic scholar in the U.S., Ahmad Sakr, declares in a pre-2001 sermon, "Do not follow the laws of the U.S. Constitution, do not follow the congressmen and other U.S. leaders, they will all go to hell, follow Shariah law."

Gaubatz pointed out Wahhaj sells old, pre-2001 lectures.

"He says nothing off-line in any of his lectures now," said Gaubatz. "But he says if you want to understand pure Islam, to do the right thing, this is what you do, you take from this one (lecture) and this one and this one – and they are all prior to 2001."

Gaubatz has spent a considerable amount of his time investigating CAIR, which has enjoyed access to the White House, the State Department, Homeland Security and other branches of government despite evidence of its ties to Hamas and other radical groups.

Gaubatz noted CAIR has a campaign to put Shariah-promoting materials into American libraries.

"I've gone to several hundred public libraries and this material is in there," he said. "People don't realize what it is until you start looking at the author, and it came from Saudi Arabia, sent to CAIR. And CAIR is putting it into our public libraries."

As WND reported, Gaubatz publicly served CAIR leaders in November with legal notice of a lawsuit on behalf of Muslims who claim the group victimized them in a fraud scheme involving a lawyer who is unqualified to practice.

Gaubatz, a U.S. State Department-trained Arabic linguist and counter-terrorism specialist, has more than two decades of experience in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq. He was deployed to Nasiriyah, Iraq, in 2003, where he collected intelligence on weapons of mass destruction and espionage.

The mapping project's administrator and legal adviser, David Yerushalmi, is an expert on Islamic law and its intersection with Islamic terrorism and national security. He also serves as general counsel and policy adviser to the Center for Security Policy, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank headed by Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan-administration official.

The mapping project is sponsored by a group formally established by Yerushalmi in January 2006, the Society of Americans for National Existence, or SANE.

Robert J. Loewenberg, the project's senior police director, is the founder and president of the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies, a Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem-based think tank specializing in geo-strategic, security and political analysis on Western relations with the Middle and Near East, and the former Soviet Union.

Minimizing the threat

Gaubatz points out federal authorities have attempted to track financial transactions between U.S. Muslims and foreign terrorist entities, but he says there is no evidence that a systematic study like Mapping Shariah has been carried out.

His website explains: "If we do not know the organizational structures of these organizations and who provides the religious and political instruction, we will never have a satisfactory picture of the threat from jihad."

Already, according to Gaubatz, his team has received positive feedback from local law enforcement authorities. The ultimate aim, he said, is to "assist law enforcement in focusing their manpower and resources to the areas with the highest ratings."

FBI agents on the ground have been positive, he said, but once the information "gets up the chain, then it just disappears."

"There's no action taken. It becomes political," Gaubatz said.

Gaubatz said his group has been told by many sympathetic Muslims that to minimize the threat of another attack, authorities should ask foreigners seeking entry into the U.S. if they agree with Shariah.

"If they agree, according to the Muslims who have told us this, then they should probably not even be given entry here," he said.

"It's so easy. You can't agree with Shariah law and say that you are peaceful," Gaubatz continued. "You can't do it. Now there are Muslims in the United States who do. They say, we don't agree with Shariah law, we don't want Shariah law. But then, to the pure Muslim, they are not Muslim."

Some Muslims want to reform Islam, he said, and retain only peaceful elements.

"That's fine, but then you are not pure Muslim," Gaubatz said.

Similar to Christianity or Judaism, he argued, you can decide to adhere to some of the Ten Commandments and reject others, and form a religion based on that belief, but it's not Christianity or Judaism.

"What we are looking at is pure Islam," he said. "That's where you have strict adherence to all factors of Shariah."

The plan

Gaubatz and his team have completed the first two phases of the project: to identify all of the known mosques, Islamic day schools, political organizations and social clubs in the U.S., and to conduct a pilot to test field protocols, methodology and assumptions.

Phase Three is to identify the strain of Shariah taught or preached at each locale and the adherence to Shariah by the leadership and the members. Phase Four will incorporate the data into a central data base and apply link and data analysis technology, which permits a thorough analysis of interrelationships. Phase Five is an annual data update and re-analysis.

Gaubatz said nobody really knows exactly where all the mosques are, because some move from month to month, and the majority are in residential areas, in homes. The contact number often is the cellphone of the person who happens to be leading at the time.

No one else is doing this work in the United States – not the FBI, not the police, not the Department of Homeland Security. You can support the work of the Mapping Sharia Project here.

Holiday Sales Drop to Force Bankruptcies, Closings (Update4)

Dec. 29 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. retailers face a wave of store closings, bankruptcies and takeovers starting next month as holiday sales are shaping up to be the worst in 40 years.

Retailers may close 73,000 stores in the first half of 2009, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers. Talbots Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp. are among chains shuttering underperforming locations. ....

As if Things Weren't Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.

By ANDREW OSBORN

MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

Igor Panarin

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."

Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.

Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.

The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.

Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.

For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.

The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.

Learning from Japan: Infrastructure Spending Won't Boost the Economy

(Compiler's note -- source a friend: Exerpts here—complete paper below, with source.

Although the benefits of a costly, infrastructure-focused stimulus package based on massive gov­ernment spending may be intuitively attractive, past evidence suggests that the impact of govern­ment spending programs that are intended to encourage economic growth is very modest and unlikely to enhance recovery or deter recession. As noted above, the Japanese government imple­mented such a program during the 1990s, and the consequence was two decades of economic stagna­tion. Less ambitious infrastructure stimulus pro­grams have been implemented in the United States over the past few decades, and numerous indepen­dent and government studies have concluded that these programs had little impact on economic activity or jobs.

It is worth remembering that the New Deal of the 1930s substantially and permanently increased the scope of the federal government as Congress and the President attempted to spend their way out of the Depression. After the stock market collapse in 1929, the Hoover Administration increased federal spending by 47 percent over the following three years. As a result, federal spending increased from 3.4 percent of GDP in 1930 to 6.9 percent in 1932 and reached 9.8 percent by 1940. That same year-- 10 years into the Great Depression--America's unemployment rate stood at 14.6 percent.

It is important to recognize that our infrastruc­ture and the continued investment in it are impor­tant underpinnings of future economic growth and sustained prosperity. But it is equally important to recognize that the long-term nature of these bene­fits to cost-effective mobility and quality services, and the need to choose carefully among competing options and technologies, suggests that a stimulus scheme based on spending is ill-suited to the short-term stimulus needs that are of concern to policy­makers. Given current congressional practices, any stimulus package approved by Congress is certain to contain a host of projects that have nothing to do with prosperity and everything to do with political influence and current fashion.

Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.)

by Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D.

As the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate and has now entered a recession of uncertain magnitude, many in Congress, the media, and the business com­munity are pushing for a bold federally funded stimu­lus package that they claim will create jobs, raise incomes, and put the economy back on its path of positive economic growth. Not surprisingly, much of this advocacy stems from a nostalgic embrace of Pres­ident Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, imple­mented in the early 1930s in a failed effort to end the Great Depression that had its origin in the stock mar­ket collapse of October 1929.

Related to this sentimental longing for New Deal authenticity is the revival of the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, who postulated in his 1935 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that "There is room...to promote investment and, at the same time, to promote consumption, not merely to the level which with the existing propensity to con­sume would correspond to the increased investment, but to a higher level still."[1] Subsequent generations of elected officials throughout the world took this obser­vation as a license to raid their treasuries, and no country could be sorrier for endorsing a primitive ver­sion of Keynes's teachings than the Japanese--who squandered vast sums of national wealth in a vain attempt at stimulus that cost them the chance to lead the world in economic growth and prosperity.[2]

New Deal Back in Vogue

Here in America, federal officials and lobbyists have raced back in time to embrace their own retro-Keynesian kitsch by passing H.R. 7110, the Job Cre­ation and Unemployment Relief Act of 2008, in September. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that this bill will cost $58.2 billion between 2009 and 2013.

More recently, President-elect Barack Obama announced his intention to propose a stimulus package composed of spending increases and tax reductions that may total between $500 billion and $1 trillion and that will include a substantial amount of money for infrastructure, an inexact term that includes the physical assets upon which everyone depends: telephone poles, school buildings, roads, electric wires, power-generation plants, waste-water treatment facilities, grist mills, reservoirs, etc. This focus stems in part from a belief that much of our infrastructure has deteri­orated and that a substantial investment in it is essential to long-term growth and prosper­ity while also providing jobs and profits in the present.

Not surprisingly, trade associations that repre­sent road, rail, and transit builders and operators have been aggressive in their advocacy of more infrastructure spending, promising tens of thou­sands of new jobs and vastly improved service in the future. The media have also joined in; The New York Times's Paul Krugman was one of many to make this case for more infrastructure spending when he urged recently that "[f]iscal expansion will be even better for America's future if a large part of the expansion takes the form of public investment--of building roads, repairing bridges and developing new technologies, all of which make the nation richer in the long run."[3]

Little Impact on Jobs or Growth

As The Heritage Foundation has noted in earlier reports, past infrastructure spending--especially related to transportation--has little to show in terms of countercyclical stimulus or job creation.[4] Much of this lackluster impact stems from the long lag time involved in getting such spending pro­grams up and running, as well as the propensity of the state and local governments to substitute federal money for already-committed state and local money in order to shift such funds to other purposes.[5]

In this regard, trade associations like the Ameri­can Association of State Highway and Transporta­tion Officials, which contend that there are more than 3,000 transportation projects ready to get started within 30 to 180 days, are most likely refer­ring to projects that are already funded. In this time of need, no sensible state government would waste the considerable costs associated with planning, permitting, engineering, and management in get­ting projects "ready to go" unless there were funds already available to start--and complete--them.

In making his pitch for more spending, Mr. Krugman perhaps anticipates that critics of his spending scheme might cite the example of Japan, whose reliance on bold infrastructure spending in the early 1990s led to the squandering of so much money on so many wasteful projects that the coun­try soon slipped from one the world's most prosper­ous nations to the status of a middling also-ran that has yet to recover from its mistake. Krugman attempts to create a parallel to New Deal timidity by arguing that "[i]n 1996-97 the Japanese govern­ment tried to balance its budget, cutting spending and raising taxes. And again the recession that fol­lowed led to a steep fall in private investment."

The Japanese Experience

In fact, Japanese fiscal policy during the 1990s was flamboyantly unrestrained, and during that decade no other advanced industrialized country had expanded government spending by nearly as much. Starting in 1991, government spending (outlays) in Japan accounted for just 31.6 percent of the nation's GDP--one of the lowest among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).[6] That year also marked the high watermark of Japanese pros­perity: In 1991, Japan's per capita gross national income (as adjusted for purchasing power parity) reached 86 percent of the U.S. gross national per capita income, compared to the 66 percent Japan had reached in 1970--a remarkable achievement that only tax- and budget-cutting Ireland has achieved since then.

As the decade of the 1990s wore on, many other countries--especially in Europe--were paring back government spending to spur growth, but Japan was doing just the opposite. By 2000, its government outlays had jumped to 38.3 percent of GDP, while Canada had reduced its government's share from 52.3 percent in 1991 to 41.1 percent, and the United Kingdom had gone from 44 percent to 37.5 percent, to cite just a few of the many developed nations that were actively shrinking government over that period to bolster their private sectors.

While Krugman is correct in noting that Japan cut back spending in 1997 (to 35.1 percent from a 36.4 percent share of GDP), it soon shot up to around 38 percent, where it remains today. As a 2001 Heritage Foundation report noted, a substan­tial portion of Japan's stimulus spending was focused on infrastructure:[7]

Beginning in 1991-1992, Japan adopted the spending approach now advocated by many in the U.S. Congress when it embarked on a massive nationwide program of infrastruc­ture investment. Between 1992 and 2000, Japan implemented 10 separate spending stimulus packages in which public infra­structure investment was a major compo­nent. Excluding the 2000 program, for which final costs are not yet available, addi­tional spending on the infrastructure com­ponent alone amounted to 30.4 trillion yen, or $254 billion at the current exchange rate.

Cutting spending seems not to have deterred prosperity in most of the European countries that have done so since 1990, while the relative prosper­ity of the Japanese has been on the decline as gov­ernment spending has advanced. After peaking at 86 percent of U.S. income in 1991 and 1992, Japa­nese income continually fell behind the U.S., and by 2000, Japan's per capita gross national income had fallen to 73.7 percent of that of the U.S. despite the increased spending stimulus in Japan during the 1990s and into the 2000s. This decline in relative performance reflects the fact that the Japanese econ­omy grew at an annual rate of only 0.6 percent between 1992 and 2007. In 1991, only the United States, Austria, and Switzerland had higher per cap­ita incomes than Japan. By 2006 (the most recent OECD numbers), Japan's per capita income was surpassed by Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Sweden, and the U.S.[8]

Conclusion

Although the benefits of a costly, infrastructure-focused stimulus package based on massive gov­ernment spending may be intuitively attractive, past evidence suggests that the impact of govern­ment spending programs that are intended to encourage economic growth is very modest and unlikely to enhance recovery or deter recession. As noted above, the Japanese government imple­mented such a program during the 1990s, and the consequence was two decades of economic stagna­tion. Less ambitious infrastructure stimulus pro­grams have been implemented in the United States over the past few decades, and numerous indepen­dent and government studies have concluded that these programs had little impact on economic activity or jobs.

It is worth remembering that the New Deal of the 1930s substantially and permanently increased the scope of the federal government as Congress and the President attempted to spend their way out of the Depression. After the stock market collapse in 1929, the Hoover Administration increased federal spending by 47 percent over the following three years. As a result, federal spending increased from 3.4 percent of GDP in 1930 to 6.9 percent in 1932 and reached 9.8 percent by 1940. That same year-- 10 years into the Great Depression--America's unemployment rate stood at 14.6 percent.

It is important to recognize that our infrastruc­ture and the continued investment in it are impor­tant underpinnings of future economic growth and sustained prosperity. But it is equally important to recognize that the long-term nature of these bene­fits to cost-effective mobility and quality services, and the need to choose carefully among competing options and technologies, suggests that a stimulus scheme based on spending is ill-suited to the short-term stimulus needs that are of concern to policy­makers. Given current congressional practices, any stimulus package approved by Congress is certain to contain a host of projects that have nothing to do with prosperity and everything to do with political influence and current fashion.

Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., is Herbert and Joyce Morgan Senior Research Fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

---

[1]John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: A Harbinger Book, 1964 edition), p. 325.

[2]Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., "Lessons on How NOT to Stimulate the Economy," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1495, October 22, 2001, pp. 3-6, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/BG1495.cfm. See also Amity Shlaes, "The Perils of a Cement Tsunami," The Washington Post, December 10, 2008, p. A25. at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/12/09/AR2008120902785.html.

[3]Paul Krugman, "Deficits and the Future," The New York Times, December 1, 2008, at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/opinion
/01krugman.html?pagewanted=print(December 16, 2008).

[4]Ronald D. Utt, Ph.D., "More Transportation Spending: False Promises of Prosperity and Job Creation," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 2121, April 2, 2008, at http://www.heritage.org/Research/budget/bg2121.cfm.

[5]Ibid., pp. 6-7.

[6]All subsequent data on incomes are from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Factbook 2008: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics--ISBN-92-64-04054-4, "Macroeconomic Trends--Gross Domestic product (GDP)" and "National Income Per Capita (U.S. dollars, current prices and PPPS)," while data on government spending shares come from OECD Economic Outlook 77, Annex Table 25: General Government Outlays.

[7]Utt, "Lessons on How NOT to Stimulate the Economy," p. 3.

[8]Luxembourg and Norway are excluded from these calculations because of anomalous economic factors that distort their data relative to those of other advanced nations.

Keeping Marines Off the Beach

by Norman Polmar

As the new administration takes office, the defense budget will come under extensive scrutiny. A recent editorial in The New York Times entitled "How to Pay for a 21st-Century Military" calls for a halt to the F-22 Raptor fighter, the DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer, SSN 688 Virginia-class submarines, and MV-22 Osprey programs, among others.

Some "big dollar" programs could be cut, in part to demonstrate the seriousness of the Obama administration to reform the U.S. military establishment. But there will be many programs at risk that have less visibility. One of the leading candidates for cancellation is the long-gestating Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), the advanced "amtrac" that has been under development for almost two decades.

The Marine Corps now has ten of the EFVs -- that designation being assigned in 2003 to replace the more prosaic but useful AAAV -- Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle, which in turn replaced the LVT -- Landing vehicle Tracked -- designation in 1982.

The EFV can carry 17 Marines on land or sea, at a speed up to 45 mph on land and about 25 knots at sea. The EFV’s range is 325 miles on land and 65 nautical miles at sea.

But those specifications are the "rub." How does the EFV fit into the Marines Corps concept of Operational Maneuver From The Sea (OMFTS)? That concept calls for launching an assault from 25 to 100 nautical miles from the objective -- which may be an inland location, such as an airfield, capital, or military base. Recent studies by the Defense Science Board (DSB) and Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) call for amphibious ships to stand offshore at least 50 miles because of the threat of land-launched cruise missiles (as struck the Israeli frigate Hanit operating off the Lebanese coast in 2006).

Thus, launching an assault from 25 or more nautical miles offshore would see the assault troops flown in by MV-22 tilt-rotor STOVL aircraft and CH-46E and CH-53E helicopters, the former at more than 300 mph and the helicopters at more than 100 mph. And, of course, they could land troops on an inland objective.

Follow-up equipment that was not air landed would be brought ashore by Air Cushion Landing Craft (ACLC), with a new design being developed, and the few remaining LCU landing craft.

Where does the EFV fit in? It cannot be launched from more than about 30 miles offshore because of its limited waterborne range if it is to return to the launching ship; it could be launched farther out if it is to then climb ashore and operate as a personnel carrier. And, even at 30 miles the transit time would be more than an hour, or longer if the seas are rough. If too rough, of course, the EFVs could not be employed.

After the EFVs "hit the beach" they must then travel to the objective. At that point the troops will have been "in the box" for at least an hour. Once ashore, an EFV operating as a personnel carrier has the benefit of a relatively heavy gun armament -- a 30-mm cannon and 7.62-mm machine gun. But it will lack support from armored vehicles -- tanks or even the Marines’ valued LAV (Light Armored Vehicle) -- making the EFV particularly vulnerable to the widely proliferated anti-tank weapons found in the Third World.

The official cost of the EFV is $10 million per vehicle, with several hundred planned to replace the existing AAV-7 series. The total EFV force will not be fielded until at least 2020.

With some "bugs" still to be worked out after two decades of development and the high cost per vehicle, coupled with the operational limitations or at least questions about how the EFV fits into the OMFTS concept, the EFV must be considered a highly visible target for administration budget cutters.

Help Track Muslim Jihadists INSIDE the U.S.

(Compiler's note: A must read article)

From WorldNetDaily

.... Below you will find a special message from our dedicated friends at the Mapping Sharia Project.

An Islamic cleric recently proclaimed that suicide bombings against U.S. troops in Iraq were justified.

It might not surprise you to learn that these were the words of some fanatic Al Qaeda leader hiding in a cave in Pakistan, or a mullah indoctrinating students at a madrassa in Syria. But this was said by an imam in Texas.

That's right, this incendiary statement—advocating the killing of our soldiers—was made right here on American soil. And this Texas imam is hardly alone.

Across the United States, foreign-born clerics are using mosques as staging grounds to advocate violence against non-Muslims and the spread of Sharia, or Islamic law. While presenting themselves as pious spiritual leaders, Islamofascist scholars trained in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan are flooding onto our shores and inciting a young generation of American Muslims to plot the downfall of the Constitution and the rise of law based on the violent teachings of the Koran.

It's not too late to stop this surge of radical Islam on American shores. But in order to stop it, authorities need to know which organizations are advocating treason in our midst.

This is where the Mapping Sharia Project comes in.

While political correctness and red tape often prevent law enforcement from investigating groups allegedly supporting terrorist causes, our operatives are able to collect this important information from the most obvious source—the imams themselves.

At the Mapping Sharia Project, we send our trained field researchers in to meet with imams and learn their views directly from them. So far, we have visited over 200 Islamic centers across the country, and conducted legal interviews with these foreign scholars to learn firsthand what they're advocating.

In order to continue our efforts to document which organizations are advocating violence against non-Muslims, we need your help.

The Mapping Sharia Project is an independent organization that receives no government support. We depend on the support of concerned citizens like you to sustain the manpower and resources required to send our trained researchers out into the field to document how radical Islam is taking root in America.

Consider just a few examples that Mapping Sharia Project researchers have recently uncovered:

* In New York, Islamic leaders advocating putting weapons into the hands of gang members after they have been taught Islam.

* In Virginia, an Islamic leader near Virginia Tech informed our researcher he advocates Sharia law in the U.S., similar to Sudan. He also argued in favor of slaying anyone who does not adhere to "pure Islam."

* In Florida, Islamic leaders support killing non-Muslims and even Muslims who do not agree with their ideology of Sharia.

* In Texas, clerics informed our researchers how illegal funding is obtained in the U.S. and then transferred to foreign organizations in support of terrorist organizations.

Foreign clerics are sowing the seeds of radical Islam here in America. The War on Terror is not a foreign war being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Islamofascists have brought the battle to our own backyard. We need to know what they're planning.

The work being done by the concerned citizens at Mapping Sharia Project is critical for national security. We need your help to keep up our efforts to document the foreign nationals who have entered our country to preach hatred and convert young Americans to their evil cause.

The march of radical Islam can be stopped, but only if we know where it is going. Please help the Mapping Sharia Project continue its efforts to defend liberty.

Click Here to help the Mapping Sharia Project by making a contribution today.

P.S. "The Mapping Sharia Project is performing a critical mission," says Joseph Farah, editor and founder of WorldNetDaily.com. "With foreign-born jihadists on American soil preaching violence and seeking to undermine the Constitution, Mapping Sharia plays an invaluable role in identifying potentially dangerous organizations accused of terrorist ties. No one else is doing this work—not the FBI, not the police, not the Department of Homeland Security. So it's up to those of us who recognize the dangers to support the Mapping Shariah Project."

Over 60 per cent of Britain's Muslim schools have extremist links, says draft report

(Compiler's note: Must read -- We frequently refer you to what is happening in Great Britain because there we have a road map of what is coming to the United States, if we fail to act or choose to act as Great Britain has acted over the past 30 years. Seldom in life do we get the opportunity to see so clearly what does not work so that we can avoid replicating what does not work.

The bottom line is that Britain’s approach to dealing with the threat of radical Islam, no matter how well-intentioned, is proving to be an abject failure. Britain’s politically correct attempts to appease and accommodate Islamic militancy, in the hopes of mitigating radicalism and terrorism, are not only failing to mitigate those threats, they are accelerating them.

For instance, two different polls released over the past few years reveal that Britain’s Muslim population is increasingly clamoring for the imposition of Shariah law – which is now officially recognized in numerous cities across the country. These polls also reveal that second-generation Muslims, the children of the immigrants who came to Britain, are likely to be more radical than their parents.

The latest evidence of the failure of Britain’s approach is revealed in the commentary below.

As dangerous as Islamic terrorism is, to focus on that threat to the exclusion of the many ways that “cultural jihad” is being advanced in the West and here in America, is in itself dangerous. What will America be like in 30 years if we have 2,000 Islamic schools and madrassas in this country, a majority of which have links to extremists, teach extremist doctrines, and isolate their students from the world at large?

This is what the chilling study referred to below has found in Britain. This is cultural jihad at work. We are watching the transformation of Britain take place before our very eyes.

If we fail to act…or if we choose to act as Britain has…we are next.)

By Damian Thompson

Britain's Muslim schools have been sharply criticised in a controversial draft report commissioned by a leading think tank which suggests that over 60 per cent of them are linked to potentially dangerous Islamic fundamentalists.

An early version of the report, entitled When Worlds Collide, alleges that of the 133 Muslim primary and secondary schools it surveyed, 82 (61.6 per cent) have connections or direct affiliations to fundamentalists. The 133 schools are in the private sector but supposedly subject to Ofsted inspection.

The report also claims that some of these schools teach "repugnant" beliefs about the wickedness of Western society and Jews.

The claims in the report, written by Denis MacEoin in response to a commission from Civitas, will provoke ritual cries of "Islamophobia" from the Muslim Council of Britain and fellow travellers such as Koran Armstrong. MacEoin has been careful to back up his claims with evidence - in particular, screen captures of links to Islamic hate-mongers, including supporters of Al-Qaeda.

Civitas, however, is not prepared to endorse MacEoin's 61.6 per cent figure, which will not appear in the published version of When Worlds Collide. A spokesman for Civitas explains: "We want to concentrate on claims that are absolutely robust, rather than complicated material, some of it in Arabic, that might unjustly damage someone's reputation."

Perhaps the most alarming finding of the draft I've seen is that so many of these schools (including ones with no connections to political extremism) are bricking up their pupils behind a wall of Koranic injunctions and Sharia law.

The schools known as Darul Ulooms, which base their curriculum on a seventeenth-century Indian teaching system, include very few secular subjects, claims the report. It says: "Their aim is not to prepare pupils for life in the wider world, but to give them the tools for a more limited existence inside the Muslim enclaves."

The consequences for bright Muslim British girls are absolutely dire. Lively intellects are being destroyed and brilliant careers cut off before they can begin. To quote the report again: “Every year, an incalculable number of Muslim teenagers and young women are lost to the wider world that informs their citizenship.”

The numbers are increasing fast, and there is confusion over how many schools exist. The growth of non-Muslim schools, says MacEoin, is “hugely overshadowed by a rapidly growing sector of Muslim institutions. These now number 127 [sic] full-time schools and an estimated 700 part-time madrassas for intense religious instruction [and that doesn’t include the Darul Uloom seminaries] … Many recreate in the UK the style and content of schooling that can be found in Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.” Great.

And all this is happening with the implicit consent of the Government, Ofsted – and Christian leaders, who bang on about the threat to “faith schools” (and, in the case of R. Williams, the virtues of Sharia) while shielding their eyes from the evidence that many Muslim faith schools are poisonously anti-Christian.

I've seen many of the extremely damaging screen grabs on which MacEoin bases his claims. Memo to the Muslim Council of Britain: start lining up irate spokesmen now.

CIA Obstruction Stopped FBI from Uncovering 9/11

by Jane with The Jawa Report

Lawrence Wright is the author of The Looming Towers. This excellent article in the New Yorker focuses on the failure of the CIA to coordinate with the FBI in the USS Cole investigation, which lead to a failure to uncover the plans for 9/11.

Outside the scope of the article is the fact that all the Yemenis mentioned (and a dozen not mentioned) are free in Yemen including those convicted in Yemen of the Cole bombing. The exceptions are Nasheri, "Khalled" bin Attash and others who are in Gitmo. These Yemenis were in the inner core of bin Laden's group. Mostly everyone at the Malaysia meeting, where both the Cole and 9/11 were planned, are dead or in jail except for the Yemenis who were in Yemeni custody.

Although they are given benign descriptions in the MSM (and by the leftards) like Abu Jindal "driver" or al-Quso "failed photographer", these are persons involved in large-scale lethal al-Qaeda attacks against the US: the embassies, the Cole and 9/11. Factoring in the passage of a few years and protestations of rehabilitiation, statistically they continue to have a high likelihood of recidivism.

The New Yorker article is certainly worth a read.

Eligibility remains focus of Supremes' conferences

from WorldNetDaily

A second conference has been posted on the docket for the U.S. Supreme Court over the issue of Barack Obama's eligibility to occupy the White House, this one scheduled a week after Congress is to review the Electoral College vote tabulation.

The latest issue posted is a request for an injunction on the election results pending the resolution of a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by attorney Philip J. Berg, a case that is docketed for a similar conference among the justices on Jan. 9.

Berg's original case raises questions about Obama's eligibility and his injunction request first was filed early in December. It was submitted to and rejected by two different justices before it came before Justice Antonin Scalia on Dec. 18. Then just before Christmas the docket was updated to reflect that the motion had been "distributed for conference of January 16, 2009."

On Berg's Obama Crimes.org website, he said Congress is scheduled to hear the Electoral College results on Jan. 8. Then on Jan. 9 there's the conference scheduled on Berg's case itself, with the injunction issue to be addressed a week later.

WND has reported Berg's case, one of the first legal challenges to Obama's eligibility to reach the Supreme Court, alleges he cannot constitutionally be inaugurated.

"I know that Mr. Obama is not a constitutionally qualified natural born citizen and is ineligible to assume the office of president of the United States," Berg said in a statement on his ObamaCrimes.com website.

"Obama knows he is not 'natural born' as he knows where he was born and he knows he was adopted in Indonesia; Obama is an attorney, Harvard Law grad who taught Constitutional law; Obama knows his candidacy is the largest 'hoax' attempted on the citizens of the United States in over 200 years; Obama places our Constitution in a 'crisis' situation; and Obama is in a situation where he can be blackmailed by leaders around the world who know Obama is not qualified," Berg's statement continued.

"The Supreme Court has listed the case of Berg vs. Obama for 'conference' on January 9," the website said.

"I am appalled that the main stream media continues to ignore this issue as we are headed to a 'Constitution Crisis,'" Berg wrote. "There is nothing more important than our U.S. Constitution and it must be enforced. I am concerned that our courts have not yet decided to look into the merits of our allegations."

WND previously reported on a case brought by Cort Wrotnowski. It fell by the wayside when the justices heard about it in conference but refused to give it a further hearing. That was the same fate handed to a case brought by Leo Donofrio. Both challenged Obama on essentially the same issue: allegations that dual citizenship based on a father who was a British subject and a mother who was an American minor disqualified him for office.

Where's the proof Barack Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution? If you still want to see it, join more than 190,000 others and sign up now!

The high court previously turned down a request from Berg to stop the Electoral College from selecting the 44th president until Obama documents his eligibility for the office.

As WND has reported, more than a dozen lawsuits have been filed over Obama's eligibility to assume the office of the president, many have been dismissed, while others remain pending.

The cases, in various ways, have alleged Obama does not meet the "natural born citizen" clause of the U.S. Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, which reads, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."

Some of the legal challenges have alleged Obama was not born in Hawaii, as he insists, but in Kenya. Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.

Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. Such cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.

Several details of Obama's past have added twists to the question of his eligibility and citizenship, including his family's move to Indonesia when he was a child, his travel to Pakistan in the '80s when such travel was forbidden to American citizens and conflicting reports from Obama's family about his place of birth.

A partial listing and status update for several of the cases surrounding Obama's eligibility to serve as president is below:

• Philip J. Berg, a Pennsylvania Democrat, demanded that the courts verify Obama's original birth certificate and other documents proving his American citizenship. Supreme Court conferences on the case and its motions are scheduled Jan. 9 and 16.
  


• Leo Donofrio of New Jersey filed a lawsuit claiming Obama's dual citizenship disqualified him from serving as president. His case was considered in conference by the U.S. Supreme Court but denied a full hearing.


• Cort Wrotnowski filed suit against Connecticut's secretary of state, making a similar argument to Donofrio. His case was considered in conference by the U.S. Supreme Court, but was denied a full hearing.


• Former presidential candidate Alan Keyes headlines a list of people filing a suit in California, in a case handled by the United States Justice Foundation, that asks the secretary of state to refuse to allow the state's 55 Electoral College votes to be cast in the 2008 presidential election until Obama verifies his eligibility to hold the office. The case is pending, and lawyers are seeking the public's support.


• Chicago attorney Andy Martin sought legal action requiring Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle to release Obama's vital statistics record. The case was dismissed by Hawaii Circuit Court Judge Bert Ayabe.
  
  
• Lt. Col. Donald Sullivan sought a temporary restraining order to stop the Electoral College vote in North Carolina until Barack Obama's eligibility could be confirmed, alleging doubt about Obama's citizenship. His case was denied.
  
  
• In Ohio, David M. Neal sued to force the secretary of state to request documents from the Federal Elections Commission, the Democratic National Committee, the Ohio Democratic Party and Obama to show the presidential candidate was born in Hawaii. The case was denied.
  
  
• In Washington state, Steven Marquis sued the secretary of state seeking a determination on Obama's citizenship. The case was denied.
  
  
• In Georgia, Rev. Tom Terry asked the state Supreme Court to authenticate Obama's birth certificate. His request for an injuction against Georgia's secretary of state was denied by Georgia Superior Court Judge Jerry W. Baxter.


• California attorney Orly Taitz also has brought a complaint alleging Obama is not a "natural born" citizen and has written an open letter to the Supreme Court asking for the issue to be resolved.

Last month, WND reported the worries over a "constitutional crisis" that could be looming over the issue of Obama's citizenship.

"Should Senator Obama be discovered, after he takes office, to be ineligible for the Office of President of the United States of America and, thereby, his election declared void," argues the Alan Keyes case pending in California, "Americans will suffer irreparable harm in that (a) usurper will be sitting as the President of the United States, and none of the treaties, laws, or executive orders signed by him will be valid or legal."

With such high stakes potentially at risk, WND earlier launched a letter campaign to contact Electoral College members and urge them to review the controversy.

That followed a campaign that sent more than 60,000 letters by overnight delivery to the U.S. Supreme Court when one case contesting Obama's eligibility for the Oval Office was pending.

A separate petition, already signed by more than 190,000 also is ongoing asking authorities in the election to seek proof Obama was born in the U.S. or that he fulfills the "natural-born American" clause in the Constitution.

WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi had gone to both Kenya and Hawaii prior to the election to investigate issues surrounding Obama's birth. But his research and discoveries only raised more questions.

The biggest question was why, if a Hawaii birth certificate exists as his campaign has stated, Obama hasn't simply ordered it made available to settle the rumors. The image his campaign posted online has been rejected by critics since it is a "certification of live birth," not a birth certificate, and under Hawaii law at the time such certifications were given to parents of children born outside the state.

The governor's office in Hawaii said there is a valid certificate but rejected requests for access and left ambiguous its origin: Does the certificate on file with the Department of Health indicate a Hawaii birth or was it generated after the Obama family registered a Kenyan birth in Hawaii?

Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro, has named two different Hawaii hospitals where Obama could have been born. There have been other allegations that Obama actually was born in Kenya during a time when his father was a British subject. At one point a Kenyan ambassador said Obama's birthplace in Kenya already was being recognized.