A Texas lawmaker is calling for a congressional investigation of the Houston National Cemetery after he went undercover and determined that cemetery officials are still preventing Christian prayers at the funerals of military veterans.
“The Obama administration continues to try to prevent the word ‘God’ from being used at the funerals of our heroes,” said. Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas).
“It’s unacceptable and I’m going to put a stop to it as fast as humanly possible,” Culberson told Fox News Radio. He attended a burial service at the cemetery undercover on July 8, when he says he witnessed volunteer members of the honor guard from the Veterans of Foreign Wars being prohibited from using any references to God.
“The Obama administration had told the nation and me they were not interfering with the prayer said over the graves of veterans,” he said. “And I went undercover to personally verify that claim.” VA officials have strongly denied they’ve banned any religious speech – and have offered support for Arleen Ocasio, the cemetery’s director.
“The idea that invoking the name of God or Jesus is banned at VA national cemeteries is blatantly false,” said VA Press Secretary Josh Taylor in a written statement to Fox News Radio. “The truth is, VA’s policy protects veterans’ families’ rights to pray however they choose at our national cemeteries.”
The current issue of The Economist contains a must read special report on the future of the news industry. While there is little in the way of groundbreaking news developments in the report, The Economist’s series of articles provides a condensed overview of the current and future states of the news media. Find a list of the articles here and read the rest at BigGovernment.com.
Under GOP pressure, the Federal Communications Commission has agreed to strike from its books an outdated yet still controversial regulation of political speech on the airwaves known as the Fairness Doctrine.
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a letter to a House Republican leader this week that the agency’s effort to identify and eliminate “antiquated and outmoded rules that unnecessarily burden business, stifle investment and innovation, or confuse consumers and licensees” will include a recommendation to delete the Fairness Doctrine.
“I fully support deleting the Fairness Doctrine and related provisions from the Code of Federal Regulations, so that there can be no mistake that what has been a dead letter is truly dead,” Genachowski wrote to Rep. Fred. Upton, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. “I look forward to effectuating this change when acting on the staff’s recommendations and anticipate that the process can be completed in the near future.”
“Guns Save Lives, Educate Your Kids” Officially Censored
Glimmer of hope after meeting evaporates as city refuses to budge
It’s official. Gun safety has been censored.
After rounds of meetings and phone calls, the city of Phoenix, perhaps prophetically on Election Day, Tue., Nov. 2, passed final judgment and decided that censorship of our bus-stop advertisements would remain final. “Educate Your Kids” with the big red “Guns Save Lives” heart, which they tore down more than a week ago, were deemed unacceptable and would stay down. They blamed CBS Outdoor with the “error” for having put them up.
WorldNetDaily columnist Jeff Knox describes it perfectly –
http://www.wnd.com/index.php/index.php?pageId=223245
We have a few options:
1. Tuck our tails between our legs, admit defeat, and promote the cause of gun safety, education and marksmanship elsewhere, denying cash-strapped Phoenix of revenue;
2. Write new ads in the hope that the city will approve of our words — but without clear guidelines on what the city will accept, and leaving us subject to their arbitrary case-by-case decision making, with unknown delays between our submission and their decrees;
3. Sue the bastages.
This is hardly a surprise but, this morning (as previously announced), the lame duck Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously voted to move forward with censoring the internet via the COICA bill (S. 3804)- despite a bunch of law professors explaining to them how this law is a clear violation of the First Amendment. What’s really amazing is that many of the same Senators have been speaking out against internet censorship in other countries, yet they happily vote to approve it here because it’s seen as a way to make many of their largest campaign contributors happy. There’s very little chance that the bill will actually get passed by the end of the term but, in the meantime, we figured it might be useful to highlight the 19 Senators who voted to censor the internet this morning:
From: Greater Phoenix Tea Party Patriots – Discussion Forum
Original Comment:
T-shirt thing irritates me!
Posted by Tom and Red on October 28, 2010 at 3:13pm in West Valley Tea Party Patriots
This whole t-shirt thing irritates me! Why not just act like a grownup and not wear it. The entire issue just brings criticism and adds fuel to the fire on the left giving them something negative to run on the nightly news or in the liberal press. Who needs it? Just my opinion?
Mike Davis’s response:
Yes, we should bury our heads in the sand when they come after our liberties. Turn and run when they turn their eyes on our principles, scurry back under the refrigerator when they turn the light on!
Sounds like what I signed up for when I became part of the Tea Party Movement.
Due to my proximity to the Goldwater Institute and that I ran a non-endorsing Tea Party, and I had not voted yet, I was picked to be the stand-in Plaintiff at the Tea Party T-Shirt court case. (The actual Plaintiff behaved like you advocate at the last minute )
We discovered a lot in court that day!
We learned that:
Helen Purcell and Karen Osborne run the County elections with a very uninformed, biased approach.
We learned that the County Recorder thinks that ALL Unions are NOT politically active and are never in the news for activities of a political nature.
We also learned that:
Denair appears to be one of those few Republican pockets sewn into the left-wing straight-jacket that is Kalifornistan, but that obviously doesn’t mean it’s immune from the crazy:
DENAIR – 13-year-old Cody Alicea rides with an American flag on the back of his bike. He says he does this to be patriotic and to honor veterans, like his own grandfather, Robert. He’s had the flag on his bike for two months but Monday, was asked told to take it down.
A school official at Denair Middle School told Cody some students had been complaining about the flag and it was no longer allowed on school property.
[...]
Cody’s grandfather says the school was concerned about racial tensions or uprisings because of the flag. He feels if there was really a problem it should have been brought up two months ago, not during Veterans week.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 21, 2010
Contact: Felicity Bower, 602-996-4020
Full contact info at end
50 Ads Removed Without Notice
Firearms industry message torn down
Click “Billboards” here to see the message banned by city of Phoenix
http://www.trainmeaz.com
The city of Phoenix, in an apparently arbitrary move and without formal legal process, has forced CBS Outdoors to tear down 50 illuminated bus-shelter billboards under contract to promote gun safety training for children and their parents.
The posters were placed by TrainMeAZ.com, a commercial joint-educational effort of the firearms industry in Arizona, and had been up all over the Phoenix metro area for a little over one week before the city acted.
Fox News has re-signed Juan Williams to an expanded role with the network in a multi-year deal, Roger Ailes, chairman and chief executive officer of Fox News, announced Thursday after National Public Radio fired Williams for his comments on the O’Reilly Factor Monday night, when he said it makes him nervous to fly on airplanes with devout Muslims.
Williams, who will guest host The O’Reilly Factor on Friday night, appeared with O’Reilly on the show Thursday night.
“They take something totally out of context,” Williams said Thursday night, adding that his point was that Americans must come to grips with their prejudices.
“I have always thought of journalism, in a way, as a priesthood. you honor it you protect it,” he said, before criticizing his former employer. “These people don’t have ay sense of righteousness, of what’s right here. They’re self righteous.”
