By Todd Starnes

A Christian church and school in Florida are devastated after they said Wounded Warrior Project refused to accept their fund raising effort because it was “religious in nature.”

“We were heartbroken,” said Wallace Cooley, pastor of Liberty Baptist Church and Academy in Fort Pierce, Fla.

Cooley said they had already paid a $100 registration fee to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project and were about to launch the campaign when they received an email from the organization.

The church had planned on taking up a special offering on the last Sunday in February and students were collecting money from family and friends.

“We must decline the opportunity to be the beneficiary of your event due to our fundraising event criteria, which doesn’t allow community events to be religious in nature,” read an email from the WWP community events team. “Please note your registration fee will be refunded within the next 7-10 business days.”

WWP said as a nonpartisan organization they cannot accept event fundraising from companies “in which the product or message is religious in nature.”

Pastor Cooley said they were so shocked that the school secretary called Wounded Warrior to make sure there hadn’t been a mistake. He said a WWP representative assured her that “religious” was indeed on their banned list.

“We had to tell our children and parents we can’t give to the Wounded Warrior Project,” Pastor Cooley told Fox News. “We are second-class citizens now because we are people of faith.”

A Wounded Warrior told Fox News they would look into the matter. The organization did not respond to subsequent telephone calls.

The fundraising project was a joint effort by the 400-member church and the 460 students who attend the academy. The pastor said he first learned about WWP by watching Fox News Channel.

The email the church received from Wounded Warrior

“We appreciate the freedoms we enjoy in this country and the fact that our soldiers have fought for freedom of religion,” he said. “We teach patriotism in our school.”

The pastor said they expected to raise as much as $50,000 for the veterans.

“We are not a wealthy congregation,” he said. “But they are generous. We could tell as we began to talk to our people that it stirred their hearts.”

He said the idea of giving sacrificially to help someone else struck a chord with students in the academy.

Ted and Cherilyn Mein have two young daughters who attend the school. She said the girls were simply devastated by the news that the fundraising effort had been cancelled.

“Our school is all about patriotism,” she told Fox News. “We teach that our country was founded for religious freedom – and then to find out that we couldn’t even support the Wounded Warriors because we are Christians – it was hard to explain it to them.”

Kindergarten teacher Tanya Sue Albritton posted a note on the Wounded Warrior Project Facebook page recounting what she had to tell her class.

“They were very sad,” Albritton wrote. “One little girl wanted to know, ‘Why can’t we share with the soldiers?’”

“I was at a loss as to what I should tell her because I don’t understand it myself,” she wrote. “Well, WWP, why can’t we share with the soldiers?”

Cooley broke the news to his congregation in what he called “one of the saddest letters I have ever had to write.”

“We are very disappointed that we, as a religious organization, are being discriminated against,” he wrote to parents. “But they are a private organization and have and should have the freedom to make their own rules.”

On the flip side, the pastor told parents that “we also have the right to make our choice as to where our support goes.”

Becky Sharp teaches sixth grade at Liberty Baptist Academy. She posted a message on the Wounded Warrior Facebook page noting here extreme disappointment. She said her students had already raised $400 – many of the boys and girls donated their lunch money.

“I am deeply disappointed that an organization such as yours would reject money from American citizens who want to thank their soldiers for what they have done,” she wrote.

Parents like the Meins are now struggling with how to explain to their children what happened.

“I can’t say that I’ve found a good way to explain it to my children yet,” she said.

The pastor said they have already returned donations that had been collected and will be looking for another veterans group to help.

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Dear ———–,

President
Ohio Liberty Council
1-800-846-4630 Ext 104
tom.zawistowski@ohiolibertycouncil.org

The Richmond Tea Party group is blasting the IRS for allegedly failing to grant tax exempt status to the pro-limited government organization. “The Internal Revenue Service has served Richmond Tea Party (RTP) with unreasonable requests to obtain a tax-exempt status, fitting the pattern of the Federal Government’s forcing liberty groups to spend inordinate time and money complying with their demands during this critical 2012 election year,” RTP claims in a press release.

According to the Richmond Tea Party, here’s the process that led to the “unreasonable documentation requests” from the IRS:

On December 28, 2009, RTP applied to become a 501(c)(4) organization. After nearly ten months, the IRS finally responded with a letter (dated September 17, 2010), requesting detailed documentation to satisfy 17 questions, giving RTP only a two-week window in which to finish. (As the response was curiously due on the opening day of the inaugural Virginia Tea Party Convention, for which RTP was a central organizer, we requested and received a two-week extension.) We fully complied, providing over 500 pages of documentation. We received no response for over a year. Eventually the IRS sent a letter dated January 9, 2012, thanking us for our “complete and thorough responses” from the first request, but then asking us to answer 12 additional questions in 53 separate parts, including the totally inappropriate request for a full list of our donors and volunteers. We were given the same two-week timeframe for completion. It should be noted that this most recent letter was issued on the same day that the IRS issued a new 45-section bulletin regarding applications for tax-exempt status.

The IRS did not immediately respond to THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s request for comment.

As the Congressional committee charged with reining in the deficit nears its deadline for coming up with a way to cut it by at least $1.2 trillion over 10 years, the Tea Party — or at least, a small group aiming to represent the Tea Party — is presenting its own ideas.

The group, the Tea Party Debt Commission, has been soliciting ideas from Tea Party supporters over the past several months, and will release its final recommendations on Thursday, at a hearing on Capitol Hill convened for it by conservative senators and House members.

When it was formed, its organizers said that the commission would prove that the Tea Party, which tends to like the idea of cutting deficits rather than actual cuts, could in fact come up with a specific plan – one with far more ambitious goals than the joint Congressional committee that is supposed to release its recommendations next week.

The Tea Party budget, as the group calls it, claims to balance the budget in four years, and reduce federal spending by $9.7 trillion over the next 10 years, all while making permanent the Bush-era tax cuts.

If this sounds too good to be true, many will argue it is. Some nonpartisan voices, such as the Congressional Budget Office, have disputed the cost savings that the report estimates for things like repealing the health care legislation passed in 2010, which the Tea Party refers to as ObamaCare.

Among the group’s recommendations are things that have long been favorites of conservatives and/or libertarians — it’s a little bit Ronald Reagan, a little bit Ron Paul.

It would, for instance, eliminate four cabinet agencies – the two that Rick Perry remembered (Education and Commerce) as well as Energy and Housing and Urban Development. It would get rid of a host of other programs and agencies, including Legal Services, the Small Business Administration, the AmeriCorps volunteer program and the National Endowment for the Arts.

It casts a wary eye at the Federal Reserve, too, suggesting it should be eliminated. The report also endorses the idea of “competing currencies,” where people could opt out of using federal reserve notes and conduct business in gold-backed notes and precious metal coins instead.

Not surprisingly, it would also repeal the health care legislation “in toto.” The commission’s report argues that this would save more than $1 trillion over 10 years. But the Congressional Budget Office has said that repealing the act would increase the deficit by $210 billion in that time.

Another of the commission’s ideas is to “end all foreign aid to countries that don’t support us,” which it acknowledges is subjective. Commissioners began with the assumption of ending all foreign aid, but then decided that countries like Israel might be deserving of it. It also argues to reduce the number of troops deployed for “certain” overseas military operations to 45,000 by 2015, but does not define which military operations it would end.

The commission also sets up a budgeting-by-popularity-contest feature, where taxpayers could earmark 10 percent of their tax payments each year to three federal agencies of their choice. The money would be a bonus for agencies that people like (though none would get more than a 10 percent top up).

But cuts to foreign aid and even eliminating entire departments are just nibbling around the edges of deficit reduction. The fastest-growing share of the budget is in mandatory entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. With those programs, the Tea Party budget would allow all new Medicare beneficiaries to enroll in the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. And it would turn Medicaid into a block grant program – states would get a certain amount of money to spend, forcing them to come up with ways to cut costs.

The commission also argues for allowing workers born after 1981 to invest half of their payroll taxes in a private account, an approach it calls the Galveston or Chilean plan — after a county in Texas and the country in South America, both of which allow similar private accounts.

Rick Perry and Herman Cain have endorsed similar plans on the campaign trail. But the plan in Galveston has actually cost more than Social Security, with the higher cost being borne by the county’s taxpayers. And workers do not rely solely on these plans for retirement income: they are also enrolled in pension and 401(k)-type programs.

Some of the commission’s other recommendations are also subject to debate. Arguing to “scrap the tax code,” it says that “massive over-regulation is killing this economy.” But a survey by the National Federation of Small Business, which has joined Republicans and Tea Party supporters in fighting the health care legislation, says that the “single biggest problem” facing its members is low sales, not government regulation. And Labor Department data shows that government regulation has accounted for less than 1 percent of layoffs in the last three quarters.

The commission was formed and largely run by FreedomWorks, the Tea Party incubator led by Dick Armey, the former Republican leader in the House. FreedomWorks named the commissioners, who are a dozen Tea Party activists from across the country, and organized field hearings across the country to take testimony. It also sponsored a Web site where people could choose between different potential cuts to the budget.

Many of the final recommendations, especially those around energy policy and private savings accounts for health care, are ones that FreedomWorks was pushing even before the advent of the Tea Party movement in 2009.

The hearing to be held Thursday afternoon is being convened by several Tea Party-inclined legislators, including Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Representatives Joe Walsh of Illinois, Steve King of Iowa and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

Adam Brandon, a spokesman for FreedomWorks, said that while the commission has no power, it hopes that lawmakers will incorporate its recommendations into legislation.

If you’ve been following the news this week, you’d get the impression that America is a scandal-plagued nation. Scandals to the right of us, scandals to the left of us.

Take your pick. There’s the media assault on GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, the deadly “Fast and Furious” federal gun-running case, the Solyndra solar loan fiasco, the collapse of MF Global, led by former Democratic N.J. Gov. Jon Corzine and, of course, the deeply disturbing allegations of child sexual abuse at Penn State.

But the real scandal isn’t any one of those. It’s how journalists pick and choose which controversies to play up and which to play down. They are so inconsistent, you’d think they studied ethics at Penn State under Joe Paterno.

Heck, maybe he studied under them.

Take the allegations against Cain. We are watching ABC’s George Stephanopoulos attack Herman Cain on how he deals with women. This is the same George Stephanopoulos who worked for Bill Clinton and did his best to undermine attacks against him. Remember, Clinton was charged with a variety of women-unfriendly incidents including rape. Yes, rape. Not that the networks made a big deal of it at the time.

Here’s Stephanopoulos, on page 267 of his autobiography “All Too Human,” “Most important, I wanted to keep reports of Paula [Jones’] press conference off television … It wasn’t a hard sell.” His book goes on to say how he tried to discredit her. Yes, this openly Democratic operative is a “newsman” now.

Don’t believe it for a second. The different between “journalist” and Democratic Party operative is often non-existent.

It shows in everything they do. We aren’t even two weeks into CainFest 2011 and the broadcast networks have done 117 stories on him. One-hundred and seventeen? That’s more than a small war would get.

Actually, it’s 58 times more than a small war has gotten. Obama ordered troops into Uganda in October, before the Cain allegations came out. CBS and NBC have each mentioned it once since then. ABC hasn’t mentioned it at all.

But the networks don’t care about American soldiers at risk. They are more concerned that Obama’s presidency is at risk.

That’s the only explanation for how they’ve covered, or not covered, the “Fast and Furious” scandal. You’ve had to look hard to find consistent coverage of this corrupt government program that cost the life of at least one law enforcement officer. Allegedly the goal was to track U.S. guns to drug cartels and arrest gun runners.

But the program was poorly run and it cost the life of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. A good leader would take responsibility for that. A moral leader would have called the family to talk to them or meet with them in person. Attorney General Eric Holder didn’t do either. All he did do was lie to Congress about it.

According to Holder, the program was furiously “flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution.” That skips any blame for when he told Congress he had heard of the program only weeks before. Now we know that’s just not true. In any other city than Washington, D.C., what Holder did was a boldfaced lie.

Not that you’d know it from most network news. While CBS’s Sharyl Attkisson has shown her top-flight skills as a journalist, and been abused by the Obama administration for it, her competing networks have abandoned their responsibility to their viewers. Both NBC and ABC skipped the House Republican roasting Holder received on Capitol Hill.

It’s been much the same in the Solyndra scandal. There only ABC has shown any semblance of journalistic skill covering Obama’s failed green program. It’s a $500-million scandal involving an Obama fundraiser, a solar panel company that had a dot.com era idea on how to make a profit (none) and it’s gotten nowhere near the media coverage a Republican scandal might have gotten. (Just ask Herman Cain.)

A recent Media Research Center analysis found “just 15 stories mentioning the Solyndra scandal since its August 31 bankruptcy filing.” For those who find math difficult – like many journalists – that’s about one eighth of the stories the Cain controversy has gotten.

But hey, Solyndra wasn’t run by a former governor considered as a possible Treasury Secretary and hailed by news outlets as an economic expert. That would be a real scandal. Or not, if he had the infamous “D” after his name.

The former governor is Jon Corzine, who has the reverse Midas touch. He’s run Goldman Sachs, New Jersey and, most recently, MF Global, which just collapsed amidst a $2-billion bankruptcy. MF Global fell apart in what CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called a “mini Ponzi scheme.”

But not one story on ABC, CBS or NBC has mentioned that Corzine is a Democrat, was considered an Obama adviser and possible pick for a top spot in his administration.

Every time there’s a controversial story, media types are making these choices. They love the Occupy Wall Street crowd, so they play up the good from those protests, despite rapes, vandalism, arson, assaults on police and more. But they hate the Tea Parties, so everything they do is somehow nefarious.

It’s time the media covered their own scandals. They have plenty.

via canadafreepress.com