JBER CO orders Chaplain to remove religious message

Tod Starnes of Fox News reported today that COL Brian P. Duffy, the base commander of Joint Base Elmendorf-Ft. Richardson, Alaska, ordered chaplain LTCOL Kenneth Reyes to remove a message titled "No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains gave all in WWII" in a column he had written for the "Chaplain’s Corner" on the base website. The reason: "out of respect for those who considered its title offensive . . . " The column was removed within five hours after publication.

As reported by Breitbart’s Ken Klukowski, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) had contacted COL Duffy about what they described as Reyes’ ". . . use of bigoted, religious supremacist phrase" meaning "no atheists in foxholes" attributed to Catholic Father William Cummings at Bataan during WWII.

In 1954, during a speech, then President Dwight D. Eisenhower confirmed Father Cumming’s comment: " "I am delighted that our veterans are sponsoring a movement to increase our awareness of God in our daily lives. In battle, they learned a great truth that there are no atheists in the foxholes."

Allegedly, 41 airmen at JBER complained about the title to Chaplain Reyes’s column, leading to the attack by the MRFF. COL Duffy has "profusely" apologized to the MRFF for what the MRFF described as LTCOL Reyes’s "anti-secular diatribe."

MRFF is now demanding that LTCOL be punished: "Faith based hate, is hate all the same . . . LTCOL Reyes must be appropriately punished."

MRFF is atheist activist Mikey Weinstein’s creation. Weinstein has been emphatic in his hatred of Christianity. He has deemed Christians "fundamentalist monsters" who seek to impose a reign of "theocratic terror" and the gospel as "spirtual rape". He has stated publically that Christians are enemies of the Constitution and their beliefs constitute sedition and treason. This is the man that SECDEF Hodges has met with and with whom the Obama DOD has consulted with over the last four years who has further stated that there is no legal bar to suppressing religious free speech in the military.

Congress has responded with a bill providing free practice of religion in the military. The Obama Administration is diametrically opposed to such legislation.

This is an incredible assault on the 1^st Amendment and upon the faith of the majority of the troops who serve this country. LTCOL Reyes column is accessed by all who served at JBER and any who may visit the site from anywhere in the world. To believe that the title is an affront when the title plainly states it is about chaplains, military religious leaders, is simply outrageous. Apparently, COL Duffy has little understanding of the 1^st Amendment.

The current Chaplain’s corner has a piece on keeping one’s financial house in order by Army CPT James Duran: http://www.jber.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123355549

COL Brian Duffy should be sacked and transferred to Shemya Is. where his primary duty should be to stand at attention each morning, noon, and at 1700 and to shout the Bill of Rights in his best command voice to the world. Then, he should be given a brush and a bucket and told to remove the sea gull excrement from the rocks. A sentence of six months of such duty would be appropriate. This man absolutely does not understand his soldiers nor his responsibilities as base commander. He is a puppet who puts his political masters above his oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Atheists and homosexuals are the root of this malignancy in our military. This is the outcome of the liberal experiment: "sit down and shut up, if you believe in God, are a patriot, are believe in heterosexual marriage and family, believe in the sanctity of life and of the unborn, and believe that our national borders should be inviolate, that our sovereignty and our culture are to be respected.

For more information:

http://www.jber.af.mil/index.asp

http://radio.foxnews.com/toddstarnes/top-stories/chaplain-ordered-to-remove-religious-essay-from-military-website.html

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/07/24/Military-Censors-Christian-Chaplain-Atheists-Call-for-Punishment

http://www.frcblog.com/

Veterans' Day--Give thanks to our heroes

I am certain that I join Gov. Sean Parnell in expressing the thanks of my family to those serving and those who have served this great country. They are the thin red line that keeps us free and the barbarians from the proverbial gates/

We have vets who have done four tours of one year each, with sailors, Marines and airmen who have done equal time doing six months tours in country. The toll on them and their families is incredible and little appreciated by all too many.

I have seen the scars and wounds some of these young men bear from IEDs and VBEDs. They are simply incredible in the strong, positive manner in which they carry on in the face of their challenge in this life.

We owe them all a debt of gratitude that those safe and warm, who have never really been inconvenienced by this war, or any war, cannot appreciate, because of our inability to fully relate to their sacrifice.

The heat, sand, dust, rain, cold, snow, the itching from sweat, being rubbed raw by straps and equipment, blisters, lack of sleep, aching muscles, stink of unwashed bodies, insects, putting up with equipment and gear that is war weary, that fear in the pit of your stomach, and the adrenaline surge of the fight that cannot be imagined by those safe and warm back in the world of the good old U.S.A.—except where the gangbangers play and induce fear. The horror and sense of loss of one of your own who has fallen.

These guys and gals fight for their own, their sense of honor and duty will not let them fail their buddies. They go back in harms way time and again for their friends and comrades, not to cop out, not to let them down; to be there for them.

Then, there are the families. Those who are now Gold Star families who lost their loved one. Their sacrifice ongoing. That pain will never diminish. And, those whose loved one is damaged physically beyond our current medical technology to fix, and those damaged mentally from what they’ve seen and done. The families of those who go again and again in harms way who live that not knowing every day and who worry, but who themselves soldier on for their loved one.

Then, there is the damage to the families, those who divorce for whatever reason; too long away, one day too many of not knowing, of feeling that the unit comes first over the family, on and on. We know that situation all too well.

The greatest generation is not dead. They are wearing the uniform of the Untied States military. The best and greatest military fielded by any nation at any time in any age.

Our children have heroes as role models. All they have to do is to look up at the aircraft protecting our skies and hauling needed supplies to the troops; the grey ships on the world’s seas, and the bright red and white Coasties in our coastal waters and around the world; to look as far their next door neighbor with the “high and tight” haircut who stands tall in uniform; to the young man or woman in the wheel chair or in a hospital bed in a VA hospital; or to just look as far as mommy and/or daddy, brother, son, daughter, uncle, aunt, grandma and grandpa and great grandma and great grandpa.

That old man who shuffles along with bent back might have been a young Marine witness to Tarawa’s and Saipan’s horrors, a young Ranger or Paratrooper who survived D-Day when too many of their comrades did not, did the attack to the rear from the frozen Chosin; the old woman who might have been a nurse or a mechanic, or a pilot flying aircraft to the war theaters all over the world; or the grandma who was a nurse when the VC breached the wire and got as far as the field hospital. You don’t know until you ask.

Thank a vet and those in uniform for their service and sacrifice. Remember not to forget to tell them to thank their families on your behalf for their sacrifice, too.

May God bless our service men and women and our vets and protect those in harms way in far off lands.

National Energy Policy

Like Winnie the Pooh, who ignores the obvious, the United States of America is slowly declining into straits that would be familiar to the second and third world.

It is recognized that there is growing pressure on the power grids of America. In California the highest power demand ever was recorded at 5.3 gigawatts as a result of the recent high temperatures. 20 small California communities suffered rolling blackouts as power was shuffled to keep Los Angeles residents’ air conditioners functioning.

Fuel prices continue to skyrocket, which will result in accelerated inflation until demand, speculation, and supply stabilize.

Unlike, Europe and Japan, our gas prices have more to do with the lack of refining capacity than government taxes. The U.S. national tax on motor fuels is 24 cents per gallon for diesel and 18 cents per gallon for gasoline. E.U. taxes are a minimum of $.42 EU per liter. This is amounts to a rough equivalent of $1.68 per U.S. gallon for taxes in the EU.

For those who believe motor fuels costs in the U.S. should be as high as it is Europe or Japan, that means increasing taxes on motor fuels by up to at least 5-8 times over the current level of taxation.

There is a potential answer to this energy dilemma that you will not hear about in the main stream media. The United States Air Force is working to wean the USAF off of fuel refined from foreign oil to support domestic training and operations.

The USAF is building a pilot refinery to convert coal to fuel and another to convert bio sources to fuel. Were these refineries to be proposed on private lands, they would be opposed by the nimby crowd and the eco freaks. Law suits would blossom in the courts as prolific as dandelions in a Spring lawn. Fortunately, the USAF showed some intelligence in its planning and provided for the location of these facilities on its own military reservations.

The largest landholder in the U.S. is government at every level.

Military reservations can become a haven for new refineries and new power plants.

It would be logical for the military to provide for its own needs by reducing dependence and competition with the civilian market for fuel sources.

Coal fired power plants can be built, new coal to fuel conversion plants can built, and new nuke power plants can be built on government lands. Either on military reservations exclusively, or upon government lands away from population centers, but within the surface transportation infrastructure and within the electrical power grid infrastructure.


To meet the needs of the U.S. in general, the use of other government lands could provide locations for the refining and power generation infrastructure necessary for the civilian market.

What it would take to ensure the success of such an initiative to prevent the U.S. from degenerating into a third rate power, is a mandate from the President authorizing the various branches of the U.S. military to utilize military lands for the installation of power plants and refineries in order to become independent of foreign oil using the USAF model. That is the first step.

The next step is for the President to declare a national emergency and to prioritize increased energy generation capacity and fuel refining capacity to resolve the looming energy crisis. The President could do this by authorizing the utilization of government lands to be leased to power companies and leased to companies desiring to build large scale refineries and fuel conversion facilities. Lands that would be reasonably situated, lands that would not require decades of impact studies before construction could begin.

The courts have been the tool of those who desire the U.S. to be less. By making this a national emergency/defense issue, the courts would no longer play spoiler.

The cost of fuel is high in the United States for one basic reason. Refining capacity in the U.S. has been artificially limited by those in this country who put their own interests above that of the nation. There is plenty of oil. Oil supply is not the underlying problem.

There is no doubt that between developing coal to fuel conversion capacity, tar sands development, increasing nuclear power generation capacity, lifting the ban on oil and gas drilling off the coast of the U.S., opening ANWR to oil and gas development, and constructing a natural gas pipeline to bring Alaska’s natural gas to market in the U.S., that the United States would eventually be in the enviable position to virtually eliminate foreign oil and natural gas dependence.

Nuclear power generation would free natural gas for home heating, fuel cell, and other uses, by reducing the need for natural gas for power generation.

To remove the need for foreign oil would also reduce rising tensions in the world over the supply of that oil.

Increasing power generation capacity reduces the cost of power, and should favorably impact the economics associated with hydrogen generation, and electric automobiles. Reducing cost of power should accelerate the introduction of these alternatives.

Seems to me, the nimbys and the eco freaks would figure this out.

I am not advocating money. Just a means to provide the land upon which to build the infrastructure to keep this country from becoming less and less by reducing the opportunity for sabotage through the courts of needed new refineries and power plants.

The USAF has shown the way.