Author Archives: Denise Simon

2016: Happy New Year to FoundersCode Supporters

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It has been a real distinct privilege writing and posting stories for supporters and subscribers of FoundersCode.com. Please accept my heartfelt gratitude to all of you who share Constitutional principles and share the stories posted on this site.

It has been a year full of ups and downs but each conservative American should be proud that we collectively have come together to learn, rally and support the good causes for the restoration of America.

2015 was a hard slog to get through and 2016 appears to be yet another year in front of us that could resemble a tempest.

Consider,  when we mobilize on those causes we can positively affect, we will come to know blessings, achievements and good will in every day ahead of us.

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO THE READERS OF THIS WEBSITE, SEE YOU AGAIN IN A NEW BEGINNING, 2016.

Cheyenne Mtn: Pentagon Went Pro-Active, EMP

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Given the recent missile tests by Iran and North Korea, there is cause for attention, further, Russia is never out of the equation. Paying attention to offensive measures and completion dates is an indication of the Pentagon having clues, seeing violations of agreements and resolutions and adversarial military build up of advanced technology.

Pentagon Moves More Communications Gear into Cheyenne Mountain

Largely abandoned a decade ago, the iconic Cold War bunker is getting an upgrade.

In April of 2015: The Pentagon is beefing up its communications setup inside a hollowed-out section of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains less than a decade after it had largely abandoned the site.

The gear is being moved into Cheyenne Mountain to protect it from electromagnetic pulses, said Adm. William Gortney, commander of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD.

“[T]here is a lot of movement to put capability into Cheyenne Mountain and to be able to communicate in there,” Gortney said Tuesday during a news briefing at the Pentagon.

Electromagnetic pulses, or EMPs, can occur naturally or by manmade devices such as nuclear weapons. For years, the Pentagon has been working on building weapons that could fry the electronic equipment of an enemy during battle.

“Because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain is built, it’s EMP-hardened,” Gortney said. “It wasn’t really designed to be that way, but the way it was constructed makes it that way.”

Being able to communicate during an EMP attack is important, Gortney said.

“My primary concern was: ‘Are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody that wants to move in there?’ … but we do have that capability,” he said.

Last week, the Pentagon awarded defense firm Raytheon a $700-million contract to install new equipment inside the mountain. The company said the contract, which runs through 2020, will “support threat warnings and assessments for the North American Aerospace Defense Command Cheyenne Mountain Complex.”

The Pentagon’s March 30 contract announcement said Raytheon will provide sustainment services and products supporting the Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment (ITW/AA) and Space Support Contract covered systems. “The program provides ITW/AA authorities accurate, timely and unambiguous warning and attack assessment of air, missile and space threats,” it said.

Since 2013, the Pentagon has awarded contracts worth more than $850 million for work related to Cheyenne Mountain.

The Colorado complex is the embodiment of the Cold War, an era when bunkers were built far and wide to protect people and infrastructure. Cheyenne Mountain was the mother of these fallout shelters, a command center buried deep to withstand a Soviet nuclear bombardment. The complex was locked down during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Air Force Space Command runs the mountain and maintains sleeping quarters, fresh water and a power station that would be used during an attack.

Almost a decade ago, NORAD pulled most of its staff out of Cheyenne Mountain and moved its command center into the basement of a headquarters building at nearby Peterson Air Force Base. Since then, Cheyenne Mountain has served as a back-up site.

Now the Cheyenne Mountain staff is set to grow again. Still, the command center at Peterson will remain operational, Gortney said.

In June 2013, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gave a speech in front of the mammoth blastproof doors on the roadway leading into the mountain.

“These facilities and the entire complex of NORAD and NORTHCOM represent the nerve center of defense for North America,” he said at the time.

***

MissileThreat: The U.S. has no ballistic-missile early-warning radars or ground-based interceptors facing south and would be blind to a nuclear warhead orbited as a satellite from a southern trajectory. The missile defense plans were oriented during the Cold War for a northern strike from the Soviet Union, and they have not been adapted for the changing threats.

The Pentagon was wise to move Norad communications back into Cheyenne Mountain and to take measures elsewhere to survive an EMP attack. But how are the American people to survive? In the event of a yearlong nationwide blackout, tens of millions of Americans would perish from starvation and societal chaos, according to members of the Congressional EMP Commission, which published its last unclassified report in 2008.

Yet President Obama has not acted on the EMP Commission’s draft executive order to protect national infrastructure that is essential to provide for the common defense. Hardening the national electric grid would cost a few billion dollars, a trivial amount compared with the loss of electricity and lives following an EMP attack. The U.S. also should deploy one of its existing transportable radars in the Philippines to help the ground-based interceptors at California’s Vandenberg Air Force defend the country against an attack from the south.

Congress also has failed to act on the plans of its own EMP commission to protect the electric grid and other civilian infrastructure that depends on a viable electric grid—such as communications, transportation, banking—that are essential to the economy. In recent years, the GRID Act, the Shield Act, and the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act have gained bipartisan and even unanimous support in the House, yet they died in the Senate.

States are not waiting for Washington to act. Maine and Virginia have enacted legislation and undertaken serious studies to consider how to deal with an EMP attack. Florida’s governor and emergency manager are considering executive action to harden their portion of the grid. Colorado legislators are holding hearings on legislation to protect their citizens. Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Indiana, Idaho and New York have initiatives in various stages to deal with an EMP attack.

Muslim Brotherhood in U.S. Gets Millions in Grants

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The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States document is here.

The House Intelligence Committee Testimony on the Muslim Brotherhood is here.

Mosque Linked To Muslim Brotherhood Has Received Millions In Federal Grants

DailyCaller: A Kansas City mosque owned by an Islamic umbrella organization with deep ties to the U.S. arm of the Muslim Brotherhood has received millions of dollars in federal grants over the past several years, according to a federal spending database.

The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has received $2,739,891 from the Department of Agriculture since 2010, a Daily Caller analysis has found. The money largely went to the mosque’s Crescent Clinic to provide services through the Women, Infant and Children nutrition program, known as WIC.

The most recent federal payment — in the amount of $327,436 — was handed out Oct. 1.

Property records show the mosque is owned by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which acts as a financial holding company for Islamic organizations. It offers sharia-compliant financial products to Muslim investors, operates Islamic schools and owns more than 300 other mosques throughout the U.S.

Founded in 1973 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Muslim Students Association, NAIT’s most controversial connection is to the 2007 and 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror financing cases. Along with other Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations like the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), NAIT was named a co-conspirator in the federal case but was not indicted.

At the Holy Land Foundation trial, evidence was presented that ISNA diverted funds from the accounts it held with NAIT to institutions linked to Hamas and to Mousa Abu Marzook, a senior Hamas leader.

Federal prosecutors introduced evidence in the case that “established that ISNA and NAIT were among those organizations created by the U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of checks drawn from ISNA’s account and deposited in the Holy Land Foundation’s account with NAIT were made payable to “the Palestinian Mujahadeen,” which is the original name for Hamas’ military wing.

While Hamas was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government in 1997 and is considered the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the larger Muslim Brotherhood is not itself designated as a terrorist group.

NAIT has other ties to the Holy Land Foundation case. Its newly-appointed executive director, Salah Obeidallah, was a founding member and former president of the Islamic Center of Passaic County in Paterson, N.J.

In the 1990s, the imam at that mosque was Mohammad El-Mezain, a founding member of the Holy Land Foundation who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for helping fund Hamas. Obeidallah has said that he was not aware of El-Mezain’s terror funding activities.

In being owned by NAIT, the Kansas City organization is in company with numerous mosques with ties to known terrorists, terror sympathizers and fundamentalist Islamists.

Purportedly backed by money from Saudi Arabia and supporting a fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism, NAIT holds the deed to the Islamic Society of Boston, which operates the mosque attended by Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the so-called Boston Marathon bombers.

It also controls the Islamic Center of San Diego, which was attended by Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two al-Qaeda members who helped fly American Flight 77 into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

According to a 2002 Newsweek investigation, members of the San Diego mosque helped the two terrorists obtain housing, driver’s licences and social security numbers. They claimed not to have known about the men’s terror plans.

NAIT also owns the Dar Al-Hijrah mosque in Fairfax Co., Va. — a known hotbed of terrorist activity. Al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki served as imam at that location in 2001 and 2002. He was killed by an American drone in Yemen in 2011.

The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has its own loose links to terrorist activities. The mosque made news earlier this year when it held the funeral for Nadir Soofi, one of the two jihadis who attempted to pull off a terrorist attack in Garland, Tex. Soofi, who was 34, and his accomplice, 30-year-old Elton Simpson, opened fire outside of an art exhibit featuring cartoons of Muhammad, but were killed by a security guard.

Both Soofi and Simpson attended the Islamic Community Center in Phoenix, which land deeds show is owned by NAIT.

That particular mosque posted $100,000 bond for Simpson following his 2010 arrest for lying to FBI agents about his plans to travel to Somalia to join a terrorist group. Simpson was given three years probation in that case.

The Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City has also hosted Imam Khalid Yasin, an American-born convert to Islam, who has publicly supported sharia law and claimed that homosexuals should receive the death penalty.

As a May 2010 Yahoo! message board post shows, Yasin visited the Islamic Center of Greater Kansas City and other area mosques that month to hold a series of lectures and workshops about Islam.

That was nearly two years after Yasin touted the virtues of sharia law and capital punishment in a speech at a British mosque. Full article here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghanistan is a Growing Festering War, Again

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WASHINGTON —Afghanistan’s security situation is so tenuous that the top U.S. commander there wants to keep as many U.S. troops there as possible through 2016 to boost beleaguered Afghan soldiers and may seek additional American forces to assist them.

Army Gen. John Campbell said in an interview with USA TODAY that maintaining the current force of 9,800 U.S. troops to train Afghan forces and conduct counter-terrorism raids is vital, and that the scheduled reduction to 5,500 by Jan. 1, 2017, should be put off as long as possible.

“My intent would be to keep as much as I could for as long as I could,” Campbell said by telephone from Kabul. “At some point it becomes physics. I’m going to have to get them out.”

News from Afghanistan in 2015, when American troops ended their daily combat mission after 14 years, has been grim. Taliban insurgents stormed the northern provincial capital of Kunduz in October and were pushed out after fierce fighting that included an inadvertent attack by a U.S. warplane on hospital that killed 42 civilians. In the south, Taliban insurgents have battered Afghan troops in Helmand province; an al-Qaeda training camp was also discovered there and destroyed. Islamic State fighters have set up outposts in the east. Last week, six U.S. airmen were killed by a suicide bomber outside Bagram Air Base.

The Pentagon’s own quarterly assessment of security in Afghanistan this month noted that in “the second half of 2015, the overall security situation in Afghanistan deteriorated with an increase in effective insurgent attacks and higher (Afghan security force) and Taliban casualties.”

Campbell will be Washington soon to brief senior leaders on the security situation in Afghanistan and troop levels required for their missions. He declined to offer specifics on his recommendations, saying they were classified. More here from USAToday.

Report: Russia Signals Readiness to Ease UN Sanctions Against Taliban

A senior Russian diplomat reportedly said Moscow is ready “to show flexibility” on possibly easing United Nations Security Council sanctions imposed on Afghanistan’s Taliban, which has intensified attacks against U.S. service members and American-trained Afghan security forces.

Breitbart: The Taliban recently claimed responsibility for killing six U.S. troops, and the group has been behind a record number of casualties incurred by the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), which includes army, police, and militia units.

“He appeared to be suggesting that major powers should consider an accommodation with the Taliban to stop the spread of rival Islamic State [ISIS/ISIL] militants, deemed a much bigger, international menace by the West,” Reuters reports, referring to Zamir Kabulov, a department chief at Russia’s Foreign Ministry and President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy on Afghanistan.

“We are ready to approach in a flexible way the issues of a possible easing of the regime of sanctions under Security Council Resolution 1988 on the Taliban, if this does not contradict Afghanistan’s national interests,” the Tass news agency quoted Kabulov as saying, according to Reuters.

“No one is talking today about achieving a victory by military means over the Taliban, while the implementation of the national reconciliation policy would in practice mean their return to power,” he added.

Kabulov noted that Russia supports the U.S.-backed Afghanistan government police aimed at achieving national reconciliation.

In 2011, the UN Security Council Resolution 1988 was passed, designating the Taliban insurgency as a threat to international peace and imposing a freezing of assets, bans on travel, and other restrictions on individuals deemed to be associated with the terrorist group.

Although the Taliban branch in Pakistan—Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP)—is listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States, the Afghan Taliban is not. TTP is also known to carry out attacks on the Afghanistan side of the country’s border with Pakistan.

ISIS terrorists, which have seized swaths of Iraq and Syria, have established a presence in eastern Afghanistan and have been engaged in turf battles with the Taliban, which has labeled ISIS as “barbaric” in the Afghan territory it has captured.

Last week, Kabulov said that Russian interests in Afghanistan “objectively coincide” with those of the Taliban movement in the fight against ISIS.

He noted that Russia had established communication channels to exchange information on ISIS with the Taliban.

“Moscow, currently conducting a bombing campaign in Syria it says is aimed at Islamic State forces, has been concerned about the possible spread of Islamic State from Afghanistan into neighboring ex-Soviet states like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan,” points out Reuters.

U.S. Gen. John Campbell, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and the Pentagon have acknowledged that ISIS is growing in Afghanistan.

“Groups associated with Islamic State have made growing inroads in Afghanistan, attracting fighters and support away from disenchanted members of the Taliban,” reports Reuters.

“They have been battling government forces and the Taliban in a challenge for supremacy of the Islamist insurgency, and its rise has caused alarm outside Afghanistan, with U.S. commanders citing the movement as a reason to delay troop withdrawals,” it adds.

Militants from the ethnic Uzbek minority in Afghanistan have been linked to the Islamic State.

Russian is reportedly helping to strengthen the Afghan security forces.

In September, a United Nations report revealed that ISIS is actively recruiting supporters in nearly three-quarters (25) of the country’s 34 provinces.

Kabulov estimated in October that there were nearly 3,500 ISIS-linked jihadists in Afghanistan, adding that the number was growing.

Gen. Campbell recently said that between 1,000 to 3,000 ISIS-linked militants were operating in Afghanistan.

 

2016 A Tidal Wave of New Regulations

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What’s Next on Gun Control: Obama and the Loophole

The White House will likely go around Congress and require background checks for all “in the business” of selling firearms.

Bloomberg: The next shoe to drop on gun control may come by mid-January, when President Barack Obama is expected to issue an executive order requiring everyone “in the business” of selling firearms to perform background checks.

Wait a second, you might be saying. Doesn’t federal law already oblige gun retailers to do computerized criminal checks via the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s data base? Yes and no.

Yes, when it comes to federally licensed dealers. But no, when you’re talking about people who lack federal licenses and sell guns from their personal collections.

The problem is that an awful lot of firearms are sold in the latter fashion by individuals who aren’t technically gun retailers but who sell weapons at weekend gun shows or from their homes. Forthcoming research by the Harvard School of Public Health estimates that 40 percent of all gun transfers occur without background checks (that’s the so-called gun show loophole). Presumably the background-check gap permits some criminals and mentally disabled people to buy guns who otherwise might be stopped.

Following another a year of shooting massacres of Americans, Obama has let it be known from his holiday retreat in Hawaii, through unidentified advisers, that soon after New Years Day he plans to follow through on plans to expand the definition of who’s “in the business” of selling firearms—and who’s thus required to perform background checks. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, among others, has strongly backed this idea, and now Obama appears ready to make its implementation one of the first major acts of his final year in office.

Another fan of expanded background checks: Michael Bloomberg, owner of Bloomberg LP and founder of Everytown for Gun Safety, the nation’s leading nonprofit advocating tougher regulation of firearms. Bloomberg visited Obama at the White House last week to discuss gun-safety strategies.

The timing of the expected Obama move on background checks guarantees it will receive a hostile reaction from gun-rights advocates, thousands of whom will gather next month in Las Vegas for the firearm industry’s annual Shooting, Hunting & Outdoor Trade Show, known as SHOT.

An ironic twist is that many of the attendees at SHOT each year are federally licensed bricks-and-mortar gun dealers who sometimes concede privately that they have no real problem with all gun sellers being forced to do background checks. These full-time retailers resent competition from casual unlicensed sellers at gun shows.

But the National Rifle Association’s orthodoxy—that any additional gun control is merely a first step toward bans and confiscation—holds sway in the firearms world, making outward expressions of support among gun sellers for Obama’s proposal unlikely. While the enormous gathering in Las Vegas isn’t technically an NRA event, the group’s strong anti-Obama stance will almost certainly be evident there, and a fresh proposal to stiffen regulation may have the effect of pouring gasoline on a fire already burning hot.

There will probably be calls to challenge Obama’s authority to broaden the background check mandate without congressional involvement. Lawsuits and objections from pro-gun Republicans on Capitol Hill will likely follow, as has happened with other efforts by the administration to use executive authority in the environmental arena.

Another sure thing: Texas Senator Ted Cruz and other Republican presidential candidates will condemn the Obama proposal. In other words, the Great American Gun Debate will continue in 2016.

The Hill: President Obama is preparing to unleash a wave of new regulations in 2016 as he looks to shore up his legacy on public protection issues during his final year in office.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Labor are all expected to finalize major federal rules that critics say are long overdue. The regulations include a final rule from the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law that will force companies to compare the paychecks of their top executives with company performance, final rules for cigars and electronic cigarettes proposed well over a year ago, and a final regulation to protect constructions workers from deadly silica dust.

Here’s a look at the top regulations expected to come from the administration in 2016.

Pay for performance

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is expected to finalize its “pay for performance” rule that will require publicly traded corporations to disclose how much their top executives are paid and compare that to the companies’ overall financial performance.

The agency, which first proposed the rule in May, set an October 2016 deadline for the final rule last month. The SEC contends it will allow shareholders to make more informed decisions when electing directors.

Arbitration

Regulatory experts are expecting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to propose new rules in 2016 to protect consumers’ right to file or join a class-action lawsuit against a financial company.

More and more companies are adding arbitration clauses to contracts that prevent consumers from resolving a dispute through the court system. Instead, the language, which can often be found in credit card and cellphone contracts, typically states that disputes about a product can only be resolved by privately appointed individuals or arbitrators.

Dodd-Frank directed the CFPB to do a study of arbitration agreements and issue a report of its findings to Congress. After the agency completed the report in March, it announced plans to proceed with a rulemaking.

E-cigarettes

Industry and health groups may not agree on the rules, but both are exasperated by the delay in first-ever regulations from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for cigars and electronic cigarettes.

Health groups were frantic in the days leading up to the release of the $1.1 trillion government spending deal earlier this month, fearing that industry had successfully lobbied for a change that would have exempted many e-cigarette and cigar products from the restrictions.

Industry groups, however, came up empty-handed and will now wait to see if attempts to lobby the White House for last-minute changes paid off. Those organizations are most concerned about a provision in the proposed rule that would require all products that hit store shelves after Feb. 15, 2007, to apply retroactively for approval, a process that companies say would put them out of business.

The FDA originally said the final rules would be out last summer but changed the deadline to November. The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is reviewing the final rule, was still meeting with industry and health groups last week.

Silica dust

The Department of Labor is in the process of finalizing a years-in-the-making rule to protect workers from silica dust.

Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO’s safety and health director, said the labor group has been awaiting the rule since 1997. Exposure to silica dust, common at construction worksites and shipyards, can cause an irreversible lung disease known as silicosis.

The Labor Department sent the final rule to the OMB last week for final review, a process that can take up to 90 days.

“I’m sure they will give it a thorough review and it’ll be issued sometime, we hope, in the first quarter of the year,” Seminario said.

Workplace injuries

The DOL is gearing up for a busy year, with plans to also finalize a rule that will require employers to report and keep records of workplace injuries and illnesses. Seminario said the draft of the final rule went to OMB in October. Labor groups are hoping to see a final rule in the first quarter.

Overtime pay

Perhaps the most sweeping action to in the new year will be a final rule to extend overtime pay to nearly 5 millions white-collar workers. The Labor Department proposed the rule in June as a result of an executive order President Obama issued in May. Under the rule, any worker earning up to $50,000 annually would be eligible for overtime.

Department spokesman Jason Surbey said the agency is reviewing the more than 270,000 comments it received.

“We’re on track to issue a final rule by July 2016, with an effective date sometime after that,” he said.

Predatory lending

The CFPB is planning a February rollout of its proposed rules to crack down on predatory payday lenders.

The agency released a framework for the rules in March that considered forcing lenders to ensure a borrower’s ability to repay a loan, limiting short-term credits to 45 days or less and establishing a 60-day “cooling-off” period for borrowers who take out three loans in a row.

Payday lenders have already balked at the rules, calling them unnecessary and damaging for consumers who have nowhere else to turn for their short-term lending needs.

Food safety

The FDA is expected to issue final requirements in March for the sanitary transportation of animal and human food.

The rules, which were are mandated by the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, establish requirements for shippers, carriers and receivers to use sanitary practices to ensure that that food does not become contaminated when being transported. The final rules were originally expected to be released in April 2015.

Financial advisers 


The Labor Department is also expected to issue a final rule in 2016 that would require financial advisers to disclose more information to their clients about the compensation they receive. 

In October, under mounting pressure from business groups, Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the department planned to make some changes to the contentious regulations — commonly called the “fiduciary rule” — but would not detail what those changes would be.

Methane

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to finalize new rules to limit methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. The rule would require drillers to use new technologies to track and block both accidental and purposeful leaks when producing and transmitting oil and gas. The EPA has set a June deadline for the release of this final rule.