Republican lawmakers in Texas have cut the state’s family planning budget by two-thirds, forcing many clinics that focus on women’s health to close across the state.

First Freedom : PBS

This was on last night, I’m hoping there’s a replay coming so I can see it.

FIRST FREEDOM: The Fight for Religious Liberty is the human story of how the Founding Fathers viewed faith, and how they radically broke with the Western tradition of religion-by-law to create a nation in which belief in God is a matter of choice. The film is about the people who imagined a new way of approaching human and civil rights and ultimately transformed a nation and the world. Often misunderstood, sometimes purposely distorted, the religious feelings of America’s founders are approached on the basis of fact. From the most non-conformist to the most devout, the founders might sometimes shock or surprise modern sensibilities regarding religious belief.

I don’t get why once reputable cable television channels devoted to education have become the national version of circus freak shows.

These shows are on cable channels so they get an income from subscribers so ratings should not be a factor but it seems greed knows no bounds.

Again, if there is any one questioning why there has to be tax payer funded govt television programming here it is……..

channel.nationalgeographic.com

I think what really sets me off about it is the exploitation of children. Right now on Doomsday Preppers they have a teenager (must be 15?) who is obsessed with the end of the world who is building improvised weapons (baseball bat with nails) and firing weapons and setting a fire in an abandoned building as practice for keeping warm while living on the run (and nearly kills himself and his 3 pals). Instead of getting this kid help and teaching him about socialization they are feeding his delusions.

We will never know since since Mr Rogers has long since passed. But when President Nixon was trying to cut funding to PBS in 1969, Fred Rogers testified before Congress to prevent such cuts. As much today as it was in 1969, this is an attack on children.

Okay, I may be taking this further than Mitt intended. So let’s go back to his central thrust. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives nearly half a billion dollars a year from taxpayers, which it disburses to PBS stations, who in turn disburse it to Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. I don’t know what Big Bird gets, but, according to Senator Jim DeMint, the president of Sesame Workshop, Gary Knell, received in 2008 a salary of $956,513. In that sense, Big Bird and Senator Harry Reid embody the same mystifying phenomenon: They’ve been in ‘public service’ their entire lives and have somehow wound up as multimillionaires.

Mitt’s decision to strap Big Bird to the roof of his station wagon and drive him to Canada has prompted two counterarguments from Democrats: (1) Half a billion dollars is a mere rounding error in the great sucking maw of the federal budget, so why bother? (2) Everybody loves Sesame Street, so Mitt is making a catastrophic strategic error. On the latter point, whether or not everybody loves Sesame Street, everybody has seen it, and every American under 50 has been weaned on it. So far this century it’s sold nigh on a billion bucks’ worth of merchandising sales (that’s popular toys such as the Subsidize-Me-Elmo doll). If Sesame Street is not commercially viable, then nothing is, and we should just cut to the chase and bail out everything.

Conversely, if this supposed ‘public’ broadcasting brand is capable of standing on its own, then so should it. As for the rest of PBS’s output — the eternal replays of the Peter, Paul & Mary reunion concert, twee Brit sitcoms, Lawrence Welk reruns and therapeutic infomercials — whatever their charms, it is difficult to see why the Brokest Nation in History should be borrowing money from the Chinese Politburo to pay for it. A system by which a Communist party official in Beijing enriches British comedy producers by charging it to American taxpayers with interest is not the most obvious economic model. Yet, as Obama would say, the government did build that.

Read the whole thing.

A great line. Wish he’d have thought of it during the debate.

Onward!

Why do we continue to need publicly funded television like PBS and shows like Sesame Street? Because the for profit version of the same, like The Learning Channel creates shows like “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” and the History Channel has shows on Hitler being in contact with ancient aliens.

That’s why we can’t trust the private sector to produce educational and cultural endeavors.

Fire Romney and save Sesame Street and Big Bird for the sake of our kids.

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Bob Ross remixed by Symphony of Science’s John D. Boswell for PBS Digital Studios.

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