HOUSE # 1:
A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas.In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern "snow belt,"either. It's in the South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifyingtanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HT: Mommy Life

The Feds have tied a charity in Dearborn, MI with Hizballah.

In a 2005 filing with the Internal Revenue Service, the Goodwill Charitable Organization said it helps the poor, not specifying whether the help is given at home or abroad.

But the Treasury Department said the group -- which has no connection with Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit -- is the Dearborn arm of the Iranian Martyrs Foundation, a group with offices in Lebanon and elsewhere that the U.S. government said funds the designated terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad and aids Palestinian suicide bombers and their families.

I guess it makes sense in a twisted sort of way - with the male earners in a family have murdered innocents and killed themselves in the process, the family would be left without a "breadwinner" - they'd be poor.

The Detroit area has one of the most concentrated population of Muslim in the United States.

I wrote about this a year ago (I linked to two news stories; one is no longer available, the other second one - from Ohio - is available. Hashem Sayed, Osma Sabhi Abulhassan, and Ali Houssaiky were in Ohio (at two different times) with many cell phones and (the second two) thousands of dollars. All three of these men were from Dearborn, MI.

According to the story, "The [the phones] are digital for detonating car bombs and they have a particular digital frequency and that's what they're using them for," said Sheriff Larry Mincks.

Mincks says the men also had instructions on how to obtain private flights and airplane passenger information.