Category: The Opposition

Grover Norquist does real damage to himself in Glenn Beck interview, five years after chalk board incident

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I hope you caught Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV tonight and Beck’s interview with Mr. Open Borders himself Grover Norquist (hat tip: Kelly).  We have a large archive on Norquist the Washington Republican political guru and friend of Karl Rove who many believe (and Beck confirms) has a wide variety of questionable Muslim Brotherhood-connected friends.

Pals, from Frontpage magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/a-disturbing-event-the-american-conservative-union-embraces-an-islamist/

Go here to Blaze TV and look for a replay.  For a sharp Washington-insider Harvard grad, Norquist looked pretty wobbly.  And, Beck had clearly done his homework.

Our interest in Norquist began in 2007 when he was pushing his ‘conservative’ pals (at his famous Wednesday meeting) to support an expanded Iraqi refugee resettlement program.

More recently he lined up a stellar list of Open Borders Republicans to push for more refugees to America generally (presumably looking for cheap labor for his industry clients).  See our report here.  His list of fellow refugee pushers included Jeb Bush.  We only ever saw the ‘big’ news at Human Rights First!

In 2010 Grover disses Glenn Beck’s chalk board gift!

For a laugh…..

I wonder does Glenn Beck know that when he gave his famous chalk board to Grover (Americans for Tax Reform) after Beck’s CPAC speech in 2010 that Grover put it in a closet in his office and obviously made sure a reporter knew about that!

This is from Potomac Tea Party Report dated March 26, 2010 (exactly 5 years ago today!) and it’s a good thing I captured the text of the story from the Washington Examiner, because the linked article is now gone.

Here is a very telling little bit of information from the Washington Examiner yesterday.  Seems that when Glenn Beck gave the keynote speech at CPAC  this past February he gifted his chalk board to Americans for Tax Reform.  But, after making a show of its arrival at ATR’s famous Wednesday meeting, ATR President Grover Norquist has since banished it to a closet.

The Washington Examiner (story no longer available):

Put it in the same category as those cat sweaters your grandmother would get you every Christmas.

Fox News pundit Glenn Beck gifted his infamous chalkboard to the Americans for Tax Reform at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference for use during its Wednesday meetings.

It’s the thought that counts, right?

“Every Wednesday in Washington, all the conservatives meet to decide what they should be doing in the weeks ahead,” David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said to close Beck’s speech. “This is going to be going to the site of the Wednesday meetings to remind us what we should be doing in the weeks ahead, and it will be put to use there.”

And just as Keene said, within days a courier delivered the large chalkboard to the downtown location of Americans for Tax Reform.

But was it actually put to use?

Well, it’s sitting in an audiovisual equipment closet attached to the conference room that hosts about 200 people every week.

[….]

However, the group’s president, Grover Norquist, isn’t exactly a fan of political talk shows.

I guess he still isn’t!

See our complete Grover Norquist archive, here.

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is responsible for the Somali chaos in St. Cloud

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

If you are angry (about the tension in St. Cloud) and want one entity to blame, it is Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, the primary federal refugee resettlement agency working in St. Cloud!

That supposedly ‘Christian’ charitable organization is directly responsible for the high Somali numbers in St. Cloud, and they are jointly responsible for bringing over ten thousand Somalis from around the world to colonize Minnesota towns in the last ten years alone—Catholic Charities and World Relief MN (now Arrive Ministries)*** helped also.  Of course they have brought many more than 10,000 in over two decades and not just Somali Muslims!

Rumor has it that 1,500 new Somalis are going to be resettled by the Lutherans in St. Cloud this year.  (This is part of former Rep. Michele Bachmann’s district!)

Doing well by doing good? Jodi Harpstead is making over $300,000 a year to seed St. Cloud and other Minnesota towns with Somali Muslims.

These three ‘Christian’ phony non-profits (phony Christians!) could stop the US State Department’s further seeding of the state if they just said NO!  We won’t resettle any more Muslim ‘refugees.’   But they don’t!  Why?

Why? Because it is big business (as we learned from Lutherans in New England)!  They dare not challenge their sugar daddy—the federal government!  And, they must be afraid of the growing power of the Islamists and the Islamist front group—Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)—which they are responsible for unleashing on the city of St. Cloud.

So how much money does it take to buy the Lutherans?

Back in 2013 we told you that then Minnesota Lutheran CEO, Mark Peterson, was pulling down a salary of $441,767.

We went to a recent audit linked on their website and here are some numbers we found (audit ending September 30, 2014):

They had total revenue of $103,135,439 and received $91,887,312 from GOVERNMENT FEES AND GRANTS.  (Go here and click on ‘financials’ to see for yourself).

That makes them 89% government funded!  That is a government agency not a charity, and surely not a ‘Christian’ charity!

The progressive ‘religious Left’ is living off of the US taxpayer!

Doing well by doing good?

Salaries and payroll accounted for $57,929,172 of your money—your tax dollars for that one year!

Jodi doesn’t pull down a salary as high as Peterson (LOL! War on women?) her predecessor did, but it is fairly substantial none-the-less as we learned from a recent Form 990.  She was compensated with $280,812 and an additional $42,495 came from related organizations (whatever that is!).

Her second in command, Kenneth Borle, made $202,087 and $33,192 (from related organizations).

They have 8 other employees making over six-figure salaries!

Go here for the others in leadership at Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota responsible for building the aggressive and demanding Muslim population of the state.

And if you are looking for more people to blame for what is happening to Minnesota, here is the Board of Directors (do you know any of them?):

Board of Directors

Greg Vandal, Chair
Nancy Rystrom, Vice Chair
Cathy Norelius, Secretary
Sue Haffield, Treasurer  *
Bishop Thomas Aitken
Dan Anderson
Mike Anderson
Rev. Dr. Eric Barreto
Ann Beatty
Dr. Paul Dovre
Jon Evert
Nicole Griensewic Mickelson
Rev. John Hogenson
Rev. Dr. Rolf Jacobson
Jen Julsrud
John Mattes
Artie Miller
Joanne Negstad
Joan Wandke Nelson
Rev. Mark Skinner
Bishop Ann Svennungsen
Rev. Mari Thorkelson
Lori Wall

The main office of Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota is here (below).  It is time to let them know how you feel, to put the pressure on the organization directly responsible for disrupting St. Cloud. 

Good Lutherans especially need to speak up!

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota
2485 Como Avenue
St. Paul, MN 55108
651.642.5990
800.582.5260

And, according to the US State Department’s handy list of contractors the St. Cloud Lutheran resettlement agency office is here:

LIRS
MN-LIRS-08: Lutheran Social Services Of Minnesota
Address:
22 Wilson Avenue Suite 110
St. Cloud, MN 56302
Phone:
320-251-7700

One more thing!  Tell Rep. Trey Gowdy what he has in store for his community if a refugee resettlement site is established in Spartanburg, SC.

See our complete archive on St. Cloud here.  And, click here, for an enormous archive on Minnesota.  See especially our earliest post (2011), and one of our top posts of all time, when we first learned of the three ‘Christian’ groups swamping Minnesota with Somalis at the behest of the US State Department.

*** An indicator that the heat is on some of these phony Christian organizations is that they are changing their names.  Note that World Relief Minnesota is now Arrive Ministries and Lutheran Social Services of New England is now Ascentria Care Alliance (here).

Alert! Refugee resettlement industry/media pushing Obama to raise the ceiling for this year’s refugees to accommodate Syrians

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We have mentioned this previously, but the pieces began to come together over the last few days when first, David Miliband (head honcho of refugee contractor the International Rescue Committee), penned his Washington Post op-ed on the subject, and then I happened to catch Fareed Zakaria’s guilt-tripping report on the Syrian refugees here at ‘Fareed Zakaria—GPS.‘   Zakaria said the US isn’t doing enough!

All of the players in the refugee industry were counting on a large number of Syrians to enter the US in FY2015 until…..

The FBI sends resettlement industry into a tailspin with Hill testimony!

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria told viewers that the US isn’t doing enough for Syrian refugees and we need to bring more to the US for your already overloaded towns and cities.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (which picks our refugees and has 10,000 mostly Muslim Syrians queued-up for America right now), the US State Department (which was promising we would take 9,000-10,000 this year!), and the federal contractors *** (looking for more paying “clients” aka refugees) basically got kicked in the teeth a few weeks ago when the other partner in the resettlement process—the Department of Homeland Security (FBI) told the House Homeland Security Committee that they can’t properly screen for terrorist connections in the Syrian refugee population because there is no way to gather information on them.

So the flow to America is going to be slow and the numbers no where near the 10,000 and up this year that the contractors were pushing for!

(ISIS has said it will use the refugee stream to get into Europe, so why not the US as well!)

The sob-story lobbying campaign to go around the FBI has begun!

There is a track record of the contractors, open borders advocacy groups, and the media teaming up to circumvent procedures in Washington to get what they want—more refugees than your cities can manage.  (If anyone needs evidence, let me know, we have it all archived here).

Make no mistake, the majority of Syrian refugees the UN has chosen for America are Sunni Muslims!

When Zakaria looked into the camera this past weekend with sad eyes and made his plea for America to take in more Syrians he didn’t tell Americans that the FBI had already said that the numbers would be small for NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS.

I can’t impress on readers enough, you must speak out and tell Washington—tell your elected representatives—that we should not be resettling any more Syrian Muslims! 

If Obama is going to make a move to raise the ceiling, from a total of 70,000 refugees this year to perhaps 100,000 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society is demanding to accommodate Syrians, it will be soon!

One thing you might do, if you are concerned about the Christians, the Yazidis, and other religious minorities is to tell your representatives that we will only take the persecuted minorities (Canada has already said that those will be their priority) and watch the UN rage!  Real Christians will offer to help sponsor them and not expect the US taxpayer to shoulder the entire burden.

***Six of the federal resettlement contractors masquerade as ‘religious’ charities but their refugee work is largely funded from the federal treasury:

Worcester, Massachusetts having problems with refugee overload, contractor gets more grant $$$

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Refugee resettlement contractor CEO Angela Bovill in 2013:  “This is a business!”

This story is one I had hoped to get to before going away last weekend.  Obviously there have been problems in overloaded Worcester and now the resettlement contractor is getting more grant money to help refugees access “services” which is code for welfare and other types of special treatment for this special class of immigrant.

I had to laugh (I know it isn’t funny!), but here we have Obama’s seeding program already being put into action.  And, the buzzword  “integration” is front and center.  This is not a plan for the refugees to “assimilate” better.  The extra grant is now to further smooth the way for refugees to get their services—the ultimate goal of Obama’s integration/colonizing scheme.

From the Telegram earlier this month.  Don’t miss the comments, all critical and some reporting that the city is a “dumping ground.”

WORCESTER — Refugees by the thousands have found a welcoming environment in Worcester, as low-cost housing, public transportation and available jobs provide the required building blocks sought by the U.S. State Department.

But integrating refugees into the community remains a struggle, with gaps in various services, fragmented integration of others and outdated procedures that don’t reflect the current influx, officials said this week.

Armed with a $170,722 grant from the Health Foundation of Central Massachusetts, Ascentria Care Alliance hopes to reshape the integration template.

Pay attention to this next line.  When the bill that was being spearheaded by Senator Ted Kennedy, that ultimately became the Refugee Act of 1980, critics in Congress wanted assurance that the bill would not just be a pipeline of foreign poverty into American cities, so “self-sufficiency” in a brief period of time was promised.  But, you and I both know that ‘refugees’ with little education and job skills are not getting jobs very quickly so with this ‘reshaping template’ contractors and the State Department are trying to get away from the original expectation (to effectively change the law without Congress!) that refugees would be self-sufficient quickly and off the welfare rolls ASAP.

The planning grant, announced this week, will fund a yearlong effort to create a collaborative integration model — one that focuses on resettled refugees’ overall well-being and not just employment and self-sufficiency. [What a bunch of gobbledegook! —ed]

Angela Bovill, CEO of Ascentria Care Alliance. The agency was originally known as Lutheran Social Services of New England. I think they change names just to make it more difficult for the average American to figure out who they are. Or, did they get in some sort of trouble under their old name? underhttp://www.ascentria.org/about-us/faq-about-new-name

“How do we unify services around these people?” said Angela B. Bovill, president and chief executive officer of Ascentria, formerly Lutheran Social Services of New England***, a $59 million human service agency. “There are gaps and fragments and pressures that are not being met.”

Worcester is the largest site for refugee resettlement in Massachusetts, with more than 1,600 refugees resettled in the city in the past five years, including Bhutanese, Burundians, Congolese, Liberians, Iraqis, Russians, Somalis and Vietnamese. Over the past three years, the majority (51 percent) have come from Iraq, with Bhutan second at 28 percent.

The State Department normally provides about eight months of assistance to refugees, with the major emphasis on securing a job and finding a place to live.

But many refugees arrive with many health and social needs because of years spent in crowded refugee camps, separation from families and unfamiliarity with the English language.

Building a framework that assesses and connects the refugee population to those services will be a focus of the planning grant, which usually turns into multiyear support totaling about $2 million.

“This issue has bubbled up a couple of times,” said Janice B. Yost, president of the Health Foundation. “Worcester has the opportunity to be an excellent pilot for the rest of the U.S. to follow.”

The planning grant will build relationships with the city of Worcester, the state Office of Refugees and Immigrants, Community Legal Aid, Family Continuity, the Edward M. Kennedy Community Health Center, Quinsigamond Community College and Worcester Public Schools.

Read it all.

It is probably too late for Worcester as the resettlement agency is well-entrenched and likely now bringing the extended family members of all the first ‘refugees’ they brought in.  But, it is not too late for places like Spartanburg, SC.   Everytown America is a potential resettlement site, so please check out Ten Things your town needs to know!

This is a business—a very complicated business!

We reported on Angela Bovill’s comments in 2013 as she was taking over the reins of then Lutheran Social Services of New England:

Angela Bovill

The Worcester Business Journal interviewed  LSS’s CEO Angela Bovill just this past June and here are a few things she said.

When asked if her previous experience in business helps LSS, she responded:

This is a business. Yes it is a nonprofit, but (in) a nonprofit, it’s even more critical that you understand how to manage it like it needs to be managed. We have 1,600 employees across six states. It’s a very complicated business, so if you don’t have the business background to run it, I’m not sure how you could succeed.

Note to residents of Worcester:  Two “pockets of resistance” have formed in Massachusetts—both Springfield and Lynn mayors are trying to get the spigot closed on the refugee pipeline!

***See our previous posts on problems with Lutheran Social Services New England.

UNHCR has 10,000 Syrian refugees in the pipeline for America, but material support of terrorism bar blocking the way

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Well, what do you know, some international criticism building because the US has not opened its arms (yet!) to mass numbers of Syrian refugees.

But, as I have pointed out on many occasions, Obama’s name is never linked with the criticism as Bush’s was always linked in media blasts every month for probably a year before the Bush Administration opened the spigot for Iraqi refugees (that are now coming in at a rate of over 20,000 a year!).

We have also been pointing out that the refugee resettlement contractors*** have been demanding 12,000-15,000 Syrians a year be admitted. They were getting geared up—finding new towns in which to resettle them—and then a few weeks ago the boom dropped when the FBI testified in the House Homeland Security Committee that there is no way they can properly screen the Syrians.  Of course, there is no way to properly screen the over 800 Somalis entering the US every month now either!

Anne Richard Asst. Secretary of State with UNHCR Antonio Guterres: partners in deciding what third-worlders are coming to your town!

This is interesting news, despite the lifting of the ban on material support, the Obama Administration has yet to apply the lesser screening requirements to Syrians.

By the way, if you saw the record-breaking post on Spartanburg, SC you know that one group World Relief would like to settle in South Carolina is Syrians.

We have resettled around 500 Syrians so far.  Approximately 87% are Muslims.  See where they have been placed in the US in the first three months of FY2015, here.

There is one way to get around this worry over screening Muslims, don’t bring Muslims! 

We could join Canada and say only Christians and other minorities are permitted entry into the US!

By continuing to select Syrians for America, the UN is putting political pressure on our Homeland Security Department to step it up.  There will be much wailing that we couldn’t possibly be so mean as to leave all these people waiting in line!

From The Guardian (emphasis below is mine):

The US is preparing to permanently resettle thousands of the millions of Syrians forced to flee their homes during the country’s four-year civil war. But as the lengthy resettlement process speeds up, some human rights advocates are concerned that certain refugees are being unfairly excluded.  [Once the pipeline is open, and even if the civil war comes to an end, the flow of permanent refugees from Syria will continue for years.—ed]

So far, the US has accepted only tiny numbers of Syrians: 105 in the year to October 2014 and just 36 in the year before that, although it has stepped up admissions with 350 refugees in the past four months.

Last year officials eased the “material support” rule under US immigration law that was designed to prevent terrorist sympathisers from entering the US but instead acted as a dragnet, ensnaring Syrians with no real connection to terrorism. More than a year later, however, advocates say they still have not seen the exemptions applied to Syrian refugee cases.

“What this means is that a lot of people who need protections and who might fall under those ‘material support’ inclusions – by no fault of their own – aren’t getting protection in the US,” said Noah Gottschalk, senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam America. “And that means that a number of people who are among the most vulnerable in the world are being denied protections that they very much need.”

Representatives from a handful of refugee aid groups said they were still waiting for the the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to release guidelines on how to apply the rule change. Until then, they said, Syrian refugees applying for residence in the US were at risk of being denied entry for an act as small as selling sandwiches to rebel fighters.  [This is a straw man argument, what refugee in his right mind is going to report on an application for admission to the US that he/she gave sandwiches to rebels?—ed]

“Our main concern at this stage is the absence of that guidance,” said Anna Greene, the policy and advocacy director for US programmes at the International Rescue Committee (IRC).  [The IRC is a contractor looking for more paying “clients” to resettle.—ed]

For those who don’t believe it, here it is again.  The UN is picking our refugees!

The US State Department has received more than 11,000 resettlement applications from Syrian refugees in recent months, the vast majority of which are referrals from the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).

Quick!  US taxpayers, hide your wallets!

Don’t worry, terrorist men won’t get in because we are only planning to bring economically needy women, children, senior citizens and sick and disabled people!

Richard (Anne Richard, Asst. Secretary of State for PRM) said the US intended to accept thousands of Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016. She said she did not anticipate security being an issue with the Syrians the UNHCR was referring to the US, as the majority were widows, women and children, elderly people and people with debilitating medical conditions.

Read it all.

*** The federal refugee contractors have been lobbying for up to 15,000 Syrians a year for the US.