Sunday, November 05, 2006

Army vs. Air Force football: we support those dumb soldierz

From Michelle Malkin, H/T to Texas Hold Em Blogger, more banner goodness from our dumb armed forces:



Not as funny as the first one, but remember, these are dumb college-educated military folk.

Vote YES for Picktown Kids!

We've lived in the Pickerington school district for about nine years. We've endured tax increase after tax increase; many place the blame at the feet of the PLSD school board. Most place the blame on the local city, township and county government for allowing residential growth to proceed without any infrastructure. Now, we're paying the price.

Because a few GREEDY BUILDERS, CORRUPT LOCAL POLITICIANS, and lazy zoning officials have let the school ranks swell at an intolerable rate, our kids are suffering. They're going to school in trailers.

I don't want my kid going to school in a trailer. I already pay a stupid amount of property tax and a one percent school tax. That's not enough. They charge us lab fees in grade school, fees for things that should be paid for by the schools. They charge us for many things that should be paid by those damn taxes.

Our kids deserve better. This is not an operating levy. The school board held extracurricular activities hostage a few years ago to get that money. This is to build two new grade schools, and to add onto existing buildings.

Our kids deserve this. Against every fiscally conservative grain in my body, I plan to vote YES for the kids.

Actually, we weeded the old-school politicians out a couple years ago, but the damage was done. We missed the boat on some major retail construction (i.e. the Walmart in Reynoldsburg - the mayor of Pickerington who opposed building it in Picktown had the gall to attend the grand opening in Reynoldsburg. He's gone. Now he's working for the Builders.), and the snooty residents of picktown are trying to prevent more retail development.

I'm voting FOR the levy 'cause I don't want my kid to go to school in a trailer. She's a good student, hard working, and she deserves better. So do the other kids in Picktown.

How Connect the Dots is going to vote...

Issue 2 - Minimum Wage Increase - NO
Minimum wage laws hurt those they're designed to protect -- the underpaid, underprivileged income earner. Forcing an unearned, unwelcome wage increase on employers will only cause those employers to cut back on jobs.
Also, there are provisions built into the law that would allow your job history to be public information. Not something I want widely published. That information is between me and my employer(s).

Issue 3 - Slot Machines for College - NO
First, my opinion on the currently lottery: gambling is a STUPID TAX. Anyone who buys a lottery ticket hoping to strike it rich is an idiot. That being said, at times I have been an idiot. And I have spent time at Indiana's casinos and in Las Vegas. And what did that get me? I pissed dollars down the drain. It was fun, and exciting, but that money is gone.

The currently lottery was passed to help improve Ohio's faltering school economy. No such thing has happened.

This amendment is designed to help fund higher education, to allow po' folk that can't go to college to have the ability to pay for it. The real reason this issue is on the ballot is to generate dollars for a few corporations that sell gambling. Period. It sure sounds like a good idea, but take a look beneath the surface. Ask yourself, can the buffoons in Ohio government really manage this?

Issue 4: Smoke Less - NO
Not so much.

Issue 5: Smoke Free - YES
See my other post on 4 & 5. Exercise your right to breathe.

NO on 4, YES on 5 -- exercise your right to breathe oxygen!

How do you begin to debate these issues?

Let's start with personal experience.

I don't like tobacco smoke, and I don't want to smell it, whether I'm drinking, eating, dancing, bowling... I don't want to smell it. EVER.

My mother died at age 66 of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (emphysema). My father died at age 63 of strokes caused by arteriosclerosis. BOTH WERE SMOKERS SINCE THEY WERE TEENAGERS.

My two siblings and I share a common ailment: we all have frequent colds and bronchitis. My parents used to smoke around us in the house, in the car, pretty much all the time. And we HATED it. I have no scientific proof, but it sure looks like our lungs were damaged by secondhand smoke.

I hate tobacco smoke in any form. I don't ever want to have to smell it again, but I don't want to move to California or New York to enjoy the benefits of a smoke-free state.

Smoking kills, regardless of which end of the cigarette you're exposed to. By forcing obnoxious, polluting, littering smokers to smoke in their own homes, I'm exercising my right to BREATHE OXYGEN in public.

WIPE OUT THIS SCOURGE. Don't believe RJ Reynolds and the big tobacco lobby. VOTE AGAINST ISSUE 4. A Smoke less Ohio isn't a Smoke FREE Ohio.

Let's put this issue to bed once and for all.

Putting ACORN in perspective

From the northeast Pennsylvania Times Leader (looks like it was picked up from the AP newswire):

Voter fraud charges still tripping up voting rights group
ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS
Associated Press

An advocacy group that registered more than a million voters two years ago is facing new allegations of voter fraud and sloppy work just weeks before crucial midterm elections.

Philadelphia's municipal voter registration office has rejected about 3,000 cards submitted by ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - since April because of missing information or invalid addresses.

Denver County election officials forwarded about 200 cards to the secretary of state's office after finding similar handwriting on signatures.

In Ohio, election officials in three of the state's largest counties have cited problems with hundreds of voter registration cards. ACORN is accused of submitting cards with nonexistent addresses, forged signatures and, in one case, for someone who died seven years ago.

"In my opinion, there's a lot of words but little action in terms of fixing the problem," said Matt Damschroder, elections board director in Franklin County, Ohio.

ACORN, which has about 220,000 members nationally, registered 1.2 million people to vote in 2004 and is running voter registration drives in 17 states this year.

The nonprofit group dispatches workers and volunteers to poor neighborhoods, gas stations, courthouses and other places to sign up new voters.

Although it is nonpartisan, ACORN recruits new voters in heavily Democratic poor and minority neighborhoods. The group says those areas are the most underrepresented in the political process. Republicans are among ACORN's loudest critics, while Democrats largely support its work. In July, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a potential 2008 Democratic presidential candidate, addressed the group's national convention in Columbus.

Democrats hope to regain control of the U.S. House and narrow or erase the GOP majority in the Senate on Nov. 7.

ACORN was accused of fraud in 2004 in Ohio, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina and Virginia, and in 2003 in Missouri.

Prosecution is rare, though, and federal lawsuits against the group were dismissed in Florida. ACORN says it's working to reduce problems, and officials promise to fire any worker found committing fraud.

"We'll continue to personally encourage people to register to vote and exercise their franchise, and we're going to continue to stand up for people's voter rights," said Kevin Whelan, a spokesman for the New Orleans-based group.

Such statements do little to appease critics. Even groups supporting the organization's efforts question why fraud allegations keep cropping up.

"They're sort of their own worst enemy," said Bill Faith, who directs Ohio's largest homeless advocacy group and shares many of ACORN's goals.

"They want low-income people to register to vote but because of the kind of problems that come from their program, it provokes a reaction from the Legislature that actually makes it harder to run such programs," Faith said.

The Denver Election Commission says it's been unsuccessful in working with ACORN to reduce problems with voter registration cards. Colorado officials had investigated similar concerns about the group's registration cards two years ago.

ACORN says it meets regularly with election officials to address concerns.

"We hold our workers to a very high standard, we ensure they make every vote count, and we're going to continue to do that work," said Ben Hanna, head organizer in Colorado.

Ohio prosecutors are looking at almost 400 cards that the Franklin County elections board says included already registered voters or listed the wrong address.

The Franklin elections board is also looking at hundreds of other ACORN cards with alleged irregularities. The Hamilton County board is concerned about errors and missing information on hundreds of ACORN cards, while problems with about a dozen cards were reported in Summit County.

ACORN is continuing its largely successful legal campaign to reduce voting obstacles for the poor.

In September, a federal judge in Ohio threw out a requirement that individuals who register voters - instead of groups - must turn in the completed forms, in a lawsuit brought by ACORN and other voting rights groups.

ACORN won a preliminary victory Thursday in a similar suit against Georgia's voter registration laws. It won a similar case in Washington state this year and in Maryland last year.


What a surprise. Since they back dhimmicrat's agenda, the dems aren't concerned about voter fraud. That's why they want to keep the borders open, letting in a steady stream of illegal replacement voters: to replace the steady stream of black voters they're disenfranchising; and the steady stream of liberal babies they're aborting.

Aha! Just figured it out -- ACORN is based in New Orleans

Like everything else in New Orleans, ACORN is very seedy, very corrupt. Their home address just puts everything in perspective.

I wonder if Ray "Chocolate City" Nagan got elected thanks to their help?

If you'd like to contact them, give them a piece of your mind:

ACORN
1024 Elysian Fields Ave
New Orleans, LA 70117
chieforg@acorn.org
Phone: 504-943-0044
Fax: 504-944-7078

ACORN fraud map

From Rotten acorn, a map detailing widespread ACORN fraud:


Details, state by state:

AR
1998 - A contractor with ACORN-affiliated Project Vote was arrested for falsifying about 400 voter registration cards.

CO
2004 - An ACORN employee admitted to forging signatures and registering three of her friends to vote 40 times.

CO
2005 - Two ex-ACORN employees were convicted in Denver of perjury for submitting false voter registrations.

FL
2004 - A Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesman said ACORN was “singled out” among suspected voter registration groups for a 2004 wage initiative because it was “the common thread” in the agency’s fraud investigations.

MI
2004 - The Detroit Free Press reported that “overzealous or unscrupulous campaign workers in several Michigan counties are under investigation for voter-registration fraud, suspected of attempting to register nonexistent people or forging applications for already-registered voters.” ACORN-affiliate Project Vote was one of two groups suspected of turning in the documents.

MO
2003 - Of 5,379 voter registration cards ACORN submitted in St. Louis, only 2,013 of those appeared to be valid. At least 1,000 are believed to be attempts to register voters illegally.

NC
2004 - North Carolina officials investigated ACORN for submitting fake voter registration cards.

NM
2005
Four ACORN employees submitted as many as 3,000 potentially fraudulent signatures on the group’s Albuquerque ballot initiative. A local sheriff added: “It’s safe to say the forgery was widespread.”

NM
2004 - An ACORN employee registered a 13-year-old boy to vote. Citing this and other examples, New Mexico State Representative Joe Thompson stated that ACORN was “manufacturing voters” throughout New Mexico.

OH
2004 - A grand jury indicted a Columbus ACORN worker for submitting a false signature and false voter registration form. In Franklin County, two ACORN workers submitted what the director of the board of election supervisors called “blatantly false” forms. In Cuyahoga County, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.

MN
2004 - During a traffic stop, police found more than 300 voter registration cards in the trunk of a former ACORN employee, who had violated a legal requirements that registration cards be submitted to the Secretary of State within 10 days of being filled out and signed.

PA
2004 - Reading’s Director of Elections received calls from numerous individuals complaining that ACORN employees deliberately put inaccurate information on their voter registration forms. The Berks County director of elections said voter fraud was “absolutely out of hand,” and added: “Not only do we have unintentional duplication of voter registration but we have blatant duplicate voter registrations.” The Berks County deputy director of elections added that ACORN was under investigation by the Department of Justice.

TX
2004 - ACORN turned in the voter registration form of David Young, who told reporters “The signature is not my signature. It’s not even close.” His social security number and date of birth were also incorrect.

VA
2005 - In 2005, the Virginia State Board of Elections admonished Project Vote and ACORN for turning in a significant number of faulty voter registrations. An audit revealed that 83% of sampled registrations that were rejected for carrying false or questionable information were submitted by Project Vote. Many of these registrations carried social security numbers that exist for other people, listed non-existent or commercial addresses, or were for convicted felons in violation of state and federal election law.
In a letter to ACORN, the State Board of Elections reported that 56% of the voter registration applications ACORN turned in were ineligible. Further, a full 35% were not submitted in a timely manner, as required by law. The State Board of Elections also commented on what appeared to be evidence of intentional voter fraud. "Additionally,” they wrote, “information appears to have been altered on some applications where information given by the applicant in one color ink has been scratched through and re-entered in another color ink. Any alteration of a voter registration application is a Class 5 Felony in accordance with § 24.2-1009 of the Code of Virginia."

WI
2004 - The district attorney’s office investigated seven voter registration applications Project Vote employees filed in the names of people who said the group never contacted them. Former Project Vote employee Robert Marquise Blakely told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had not met with any of the people whose voter registration applications he signed, “an apparent violation of state law,” according to the paper.

Time to end the rotten seed: ACORN

From RottenAcorn.com:

ACORN Is A Bad Seed

Something’s rotten in the state of New Mexico, and Ohio, and Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and Florida, and…

ACORN says it is a community group, but it is really a multi-million-dollar, multinational conglomerate. Its political agenda is driven by a relative handful of anti-corporate activists. ACORN spends millions of dollars to promote economic policies (like raising the minimum wage), but has admitted that it doesn't always want to abide by them. ACORN advocates for workers' rights and runs two unions, but has in the past fought its own employees' efforts to form a union.

ACORN's history makes for pretty interesting reading. The Clinton Administration found that ACORN was misspending government grants designed to help counsel the poor. Although it seeks minimum wage increases in cities and states across the country -- ACORN sued the state of California to get out of paying its own employees the state minimum wage.

ACORN's practices have corrupted our political process as well. It has engaged in questionable election activities for years—stretching back even to the organization's founding years in Arkansas . In recent years, as its political power has increased, so have instances of fraud.

In the past few years, it has been investigated for election fraud in at least a dozen states. Want examples?

In Florida, ACORN employees filed a false voter registration form for 68-year-old former St. Petersburg Democratic mayor Charles Schuh – amazingly, they registered him as a 30-year-old Republican woman. In Ohio, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group. In Colorado, two ex-ACORN employees were convicted of turning in false registrations. The list goes on.

Just last year, in an effort to put a wage initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ACORN employee's forged thousands of fraudulent signatures . The group is involved in initiative efforts in a half-dozen states this year. How many thousands of signatures will they forge to forward their agenda?

It's time to send a message to ACORN. It is time to end the corruption.


Typical liberal elitism: do as I say, not as I do. Use any method to achieve your goal, legal or otherwise.

ACORN = Voter fraud, again and again

Since the election is happening this week, we're focusing on Connecting the Dots on voter registration fraud.

Yet another post on ACORN from EPIonline:

ACORN’s Voter Fraud in Ohio is Part of Larger Pattern

New report shows ACORN has been linked to voter fraud in 12 states including Ohio 8/11/06,

Washington, DC –ACORN’s recent run-in with the Franklin County elections board for allegedly turning in falsified voter registration cards is only the latest in a long-standing pattern of dubious elections practices. ACORN employees have been accused of submitting bogus voter registration cards and forging signatures on ballot initiatives in 12 states since 2004.

In addition to Ohio, ACORN employees have been accused of illegal elections practices in New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Virginia among others. Here are just a few examples of ACORN’s pattern and practice of fraud associated with their campaigns:

Florida—When ACORN led a ballot initiative to raise Florida’s minimum wage in 2004, a Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokesman said ACORN was “singled out” among suspected voter registration groups because it was “the common thread” in the agency’s investigations from one end of the state to the other. One blatant example of voter fraud includes registering 68-year-old Charles Shuh, a former Democratic mayor of St. Petersburg, as a 30-year-old female Republican.

New Mexico—In an effort to put a wage initiative on the ballot in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2005 ACORN employees forged thousands of fraudulent signatures. Following their voter registration drive in 2004, a state Representative stated that ACORN was “manufacturing voters” throughout New Mexico.

Ohio—This is not the first time ACORN has been accused of shady practices in Ohio. In Cuyahoga County in 2004, ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote submitted registration cards that had the highest rate of errors for any voter registration group.

“Once again ACORN is using any means necessary to fool the public into supporting its radical political agenda,” said Mike Flynn, EPI’s director of legislative affairs. “ACORN’s decades of questionable elections practices and outright deceit extending throughout a dozen states prove this group is more about advancing its political agenda than about helping the community.”

To see an example of the fraudulent signatures ACORN submitted for their ballot initiative to raise Albuquerque’s minimum wage or to read the report “Rotten ACORN: America’s Bad Seed,” go to www.RottenACORN.com.


I saw a news article the other day detailing 10,000 arrests for known felons in a number of states by federal officials. If they have the resources to round these guys up, why don't they focus on important issues like voter fraud. I'm just sayin'...

More on ACORN -- from the 4th Estate

From the Opinion Journal, the WSJ opinion page, comes yet another article about ACORN. Hard to believe they would hold THIS opinion:

The Acorn Indictments
A union-backed outfit faces charges of election fraud.
Friday, November 3, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board. But hey, who needs voter ID laws?

We wish this were an aberration, but allegations of fraud have tainted Acorn voter drives across the country. Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.

The good news for anyone who cares about voter integrity is that the Justice Department finally seems poised to connect these dots instead of dismissing such revelations as the work of a few yahoos. After the federal indictments were handed up in Kansas City this week, the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement that "This national investigation is very much ongoing."
Let's hope so. Acorn officials bill themselves as nonpartisan community organizers merely interested in giving a voice to minorities and the poor. In reality, Acorn is a union-backed, multimillion-dollar outfit that uses intimidation and other tactics to push for higher minimum wage mandates and to trash Wal-Mart and other non-union companies.

Operating in at least 38 states (as well as Canada and Mexico), Acorn pushes a highly partisan agenda, and its organizers are best understood as shock troops for the AFL-CIO and even the Democratic Party. As part of the Fannie Mae reform bill, House Democrats pushed an "affordable housing trust fund" designed to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits to subsidize Acorn, among other groups. A version of this trust fund actually passed the Republican House and will surely be on the agenda again next year.

Acorn and its affiliates have pulled some real stunts in recent years. In Ohio in 2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Jive Turkey. During a Congressional hearing in Ohio in the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from several counties in the state explained Acorn's practice of dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap on the submission deadline, even though the forms had been collected months earlier.
"You have to wonder what's the point of that, if not to overwhelm the system and get phony registrations on the voter rolls," says Thor Hearne of the American Center for Voting Rights, who also testified at the hearing. "These were Democratic officials saying that they felt their election system in Ohio was under assault by these kinds of efforts to game the system."

Given this history, it's not surprising that Acorn is so hostile to voter identification laws and other efforts to ensure fairness and accuracy at the polls. In Missouri last month, the state Supreme Court held that a photo ID requirement to vote was overly burdensome and a violation of the state constitution. Acorn was behind the original suit challenging the statute, and it has brought similar challenges in several other states, including Ohio.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that blacks today are almost twice as likely as they were in 2004 to say they have little or no confidence in the voting system. Such a finding would seem like a powerful argument for voter ID laws, which consistently poll well among people of all races and incomes and would increase confidence in the voting process. Of course, voter ID laws would also cut down on fraud, which, judging from the latest indictments, would put a real crimp in Acorn's style.


Just so you know who's behind the suit challenging voter photo ID requirements in Ohio.

ACORN election fraud: more widespread than you think!

From Wisconsin's Texas Hold 'Em Blogger, comes this article about bleeding heart liberal left wing group Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN):

H/T to A.J. Strata at The Strata-Sphere.

Looks like the nuts over at ACORN now have been caught in Pennsylvania again committing election fraud with phony voter registration forms.

From Delaware County in the Keystone State comes this story:

Question: If your last name were Abortion would you name any of your children Alternative? Probably not! So a more pertinent question is this: If you saw the name Alternative Abortion on a voter registration form, complete with an address and a social security number, you’d be suspicious, right?

You’d think somebody was playing a tasteless joke. Or maybe even committing a crime, because that’s what fraudulently filling out a voter registration form is, a crime.

This one is currently under investigation by Delaware County District Attorney’s office, along with hundreds of other suspicious voter registration forms turned into the county voter registration commission.

Not dozens. Not scores. But hundreds!

“If not thousands,” says county Solicitor John McBlain.

So far, the county has found more than 100 people who have told investigators and/or signed affidavits claiming someone wrongly tried to register to vote in their name. Another 542 registration forms were identified as having phony addresses and some 1,200 to 1,300 more also appear to be fraudulent.

What’s most interesting about this is that one organization submitted every single one of the near 2,000 registrations that are suspected or proven frauds.

That group is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, otherwise known as ACORN.


ACORN is not, as it claims, a nonpartisan group involved in improving education and helping communities. ACORN has been involved in minimum wage increase proposals, Wal-Mart bashing, advocating government-run health care and is a leftwing activist group which has been involved in numerous shady activities regarding voter registration all across the country.

Just last week, four ACORN workers were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms in Kansas City, Mo. ACORN people have already been convicted in Colorado and Wisconsin and more are under investigation here and in Ohio.

Late last month, Delaware County Assistant District Attorney Joe Brielmann sent out a press release warning residents to be on the lookout for this sort of fraud and identity theft.

Of the four ACORN workers under investigation by county detectives, two are convicted felons (one a drug dealer, the other a convicted rapist.) Who better to help work for social justice in our communities?

By law, convicted felons cannot vote and cannot register voters. ACORN knows this, yet time and time again we see convicted felons filing phony voter registration cards, registering such names as “Mary Poppins,” “Dick Tracy” and “Jeffrey Dahmer” to vote, all from the same address in the same handwriting with the same signature.

Every time one of those fictitious people votes — or an illegal alien, or a convicted felon, or a dead person, for that matter — it makes my legitimate vote — and yours too — worthless.

If you go out and vote for Candidate A and I go vote for Candidate B, you didn’t render my vote worthless, nor mine yours, because we both legally participated in the process. But if Jose who snuck across the border and got a consular ID illegally from Voces de la Frontera and then used that consular ID to illegally obtain a state driver’s license which was used to illegally register to vote votes for Candidate A, then my vote is meaningless.

Same thing when the cemetery precincts all show up to vote. Same thing when the Racine Correctional Institution precincts, and so on. Notice they all vote Democrat — even the dead Republicans.

It’s high time the Attorney General and the Justice Department look at a federal prosecution of ACORN under any existing laws. This is clearly a nationwide campaign to commit election fraud. ACORN leaders are aware it’s happening and at least tacitly condone it, if not participate in and encourage it.

If the federal government can use RICO to go after protesters at abortion clinics, perhaps RICO might be applied here as well. The election fraudsters are a much bigger threat to our freedom than some protesters at an abortion clinic.

Amen, brother, Amen.

Newest Terror Finance Plan: House Flipping

In the Columbus Dispatch this morning comes a news story about a rash of house 'flipping' -- the practice of borrowing much more than the price of a property, paying off the current owner's mortgage, then pocketing the difference. This has been done forever in inner-city properties. Now, it's moving to the affluent suburbs of Columbus, like Muirfield in Dublin.

What's the big deal? The Dispatch reports that most of the buyers are of middle eastern descent. Not one mention that it could be used to finance terrorism.

Big deals send up red flags
Sales of 14 upscale homes at well-above-market prices raise suspicions of flipping
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Geoff Dutton

The peculiar but tempting offers sometimes came a year or more after homeowners planted for-sale signs in their front yards.

Interested buyers suddenly appeared, proposing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more than the asking price for houses in some of central Ohio’s elite neighborhoods, including Muirfield Village and Tartan Fields.

The catch: the sellers must agree to immediately refund the difference between the asking price and the sale price.

At least 14 such deals worth more than $11 million have closed since spring, and the offers continue.

Rather than celebrate, some suspicious realestate brokers, lawyers and title agents advised sellers to reject the offers and walk away from the deals.

Some called the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, because most of the buyers were Middle Eastern.

"We turned down five of them," said Bryan Wing, executive vice president of CV Perry Builders. "Believe me, in this day and age, we could have used it." Others couldn’t resist.

The elusive buyers who could be located by The Dispatch offered little if any explanation. The real-estate professionals, two of whom have troubled track records, wouldn’t discuss the sales in detail. Bankers holding the mortgages wouldn’t talk, and neither would FBI or Homeland Security officials.

With few people talking, and a limited public paper trail, key details remain a mystery. But some observers fear the worst — that dealmakers might abandon the houses and disappear with the mortgage money, leaving neighbors and lenders to sort out the mess.

I'm not so worried about the rich folk having abandoned houses in their neighborhood. I'm interested to see where the money is going. Hezbollah? Hamas? Al Queda? The Muslim Brotherhood?

I'm sure the FBI will say it's just a coincidence. Move along. Nothing to see here. After all, they've had muslim sensitivity training.

This is a similar story that is appearing over and over again. Middle eastern-descent families move here to make their fortune, then send money back to their country of origin or give it to an islamic charity.

Follow the money. It could be that these people are simply hucksters and con men that have a found a gaping hole in Ohio's mortgage lending laws and are taking advantage of it (like so many others). Or, they could be terror financiers. Only time will tell.

Read the complete story here.