I want to have a page with my menu that pulls external urls and places it
within some type of container on the same page. Is this possible? Every tut
or example on the web that I seem to find can load urls either in a _blank or
_top using the navigatetourl. I want to keep everything on one page.

Flex doesn't load HTML pages. To do that, you'd have to use something like the HTMLComponent at http://drumbeatinsight.com/htmlcomponent