Wednesday, November 17, 2010

YouCut Winner (Loser)- Defunding NPR

The other day I wrote about the GOP YouCut site where Americans get to vote on what the GOP will try to cut from government spending. They offer issues, visitors vote and the winner or loser, depending on how you look at it, is the funding the GOP will bring up in the House of Representatives to cut funding for.

This week, the chosen funding is NPR.

Fox reports.

The winning proposal in this week's online contest, in which Americans vote for the items they want slashed from the federal budget, was to terminate federal funding to NPR. That proposal received 63 percent of the vote, the highest percentage for a proposal since the program began in May.

House Republicans will bring that proposal to the floor Thursday for an up-or-down vote.

"When NPR executives made the decision to unfairly terminate Juan Williams and to then disparage him afterwards, the bias of their organization was exposed," House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and Doug Lamborn, who authored a bill this year to defund NPR's parent company, said in a joint statement.

"Make no mistake, it is not the role of government to tell news organizations how to operate. What is avoidable, however, is providing taxpayer funds to news organizations that promote a partisan point of view," they said.

"Eliminating taxpayer funding for NPR is precisely the kind of commonsense cut that we have to begin making it we want to fundamentally alter the way business is conducted in Washington," they said.

With Democrats still in charge of the House until the end of the year, the proposal is certain to fail. Lamborn's legislation to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) , introduced in June, hasn't made it out of committee.

But when Republicans assume power in January, they are expected to go after NPR's federal funding with a vengeance


Go get em GOP.