Massachusetts Representative Ed Markey held a little press conference where he explained how evil Republicans want to shoot, field dress, and serve Bigbird for Sunday dinner, or something like that.

The House GOP leaders have announced intentions to slice funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the continuing resolution, resulting in the elimination of programming for the over 170 million people that use public media each month.

But Markey, along with Democratic Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Nita Lowey, Sam Farr, Paul Tonko, and Bill Owens plan to unveil an amendment to a spending measure that will refund educational programs like
“Sesame Street” and “Arthur,” as well as funding for National Public Radio and local broadcast networks.

“The GOP should be less preoccupied with silencing cookie monster and more focused on reviving the economy,” said Lowey, who in 1995 invited Bert and Ernie to testify on Capitol Hill when Republicans tried to eliminate public media funding under then-Speaker Newt Gingrich. “How long will it take for some people to learn that people want Congress to focus on creating jobs, not laying off Bert and Ernie.”
Lawmakers said rural parts of the U.S. are likely to be hit hardest by the cuts, where programming is more expensive to fund.

This, from the Daily Caller’s story on the event, is particularly telling.

The members warned that ending government funding to public broadcasting would eliminate the programs, and that the market could not be trusted to provide quality broadcasting for children or news content for adults.

Sure, we can’t trust the market to provide quality programing. Look what happened to Air America!

Two arguments made by the left seem especially silly. One is that public broadcasting only receives 2% of it’s funding from the government. Well, if that’s the case then they should easily be able to replace that piddling amount with a check from George Soros, or another 10-minutes-of-content-20-minutes-of-begging fund raiser. The second point they try to make is that eliminating $430 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be a drop in the bucket of the federal budget. That’s true, but hardly a reason not to do it. It’s going to take a lot of drops to drain that bucket.

South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint posted this:

The Muppets are in town. No, not for a show. They are in Washington to do business.

Inside the Beltway, Sesame Street turns into K Street and Elmo is a lobbyist.

Last year, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was allocated $420 million by Congress. And, President Obama is asking Congress to give a whopping $451 million to CPB in his new budget, even though the nation is more than $14 trillion in debt.

To put that in perspective, it would take Count Von Count more than 42 years to count the 451 million, one “Ah! Ah! Ah!” dollar at a time.

[...]

Publicly funded media simply has no place in our modern, tech-savvy society. CPB was created by the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act to “facilitate the development of public telecommunications.” Only a handful of television channels existed. More than 30 years later, Americans have thousands of choices in news, entertainment and educational programming provided by innumerable television, radio and Web outlets.

Shows like Sesame Street are multi-million dollar enterprises capable of thriving in the private market. According to the 990 tax form all nonprofits are required to file, Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 — nearly a million dollars — in compensation in 2008. And, from 2003 to 2006, “Sesame Street” made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales.

When taxpayer funding for public broadcasting ends, rest assured, Cookie Monster will still be fed.

Saving the country from crushing debt and taxes is going to require hard choices. Telling the Muppet lobby “no” should be one of the easy ones.

h/t: Cubachi via a link from someone on Twitter. Cross posted at Reclaim Conservatism.

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I know, most of you probably didn’t realize I wasn’t around. After all, when you’re just looking for pictures of Cote de Pablo, Liv Tyler, and Gabriel Anwar you may just miss the fact that I haven’t posted anything in a week. Well to keep you folks happy:

For the rest of you, a brief explanation. I will freely admit that it started with a mistake on my part. A mix-up with due dates and payments made and I didn’t pay Brighthouse on time. I really didn’t realize we were behind. Beyond that, we missed, or didn’t get, any notice that the bill was due. That’s where I stop taking the blame.

I was given the impression that I needed to go into their office. The problem was I was at work on Friday and couldn’t get off in time to get in there before they closed, besides which they decided to shut everything off mid morning. No Phone, no television, no internet. Still thinking, erroneously it turns out, that I needed to go into the office I went the weekend without being able to get online, missing my bRight@Night show, and missing the weekends playoff games. The cruelest cut was not seeing the premier of 24 season 8.

Of course it doesn’t end there. Monday was Martin Luther King day — another day for their office to be closed. And another two hours missed of the latest Jack. As you can imagine I was there first thing Tuesday morning. That’s where it get really good.

I was told two things that really got my blood pressure elevated. One, I never needed to go into the office (despite what we were first told). I could have taken care of things online or over the phone. Of course the facts that I couldn’t get online or use the home phone were just cruel irony. The second thing I learned was that the earliest they could get out to cut the service back on was Wednesday. Now understand that cutting service back on involved the complicated process of opening a box on the side of the house and reattaching a coaxial cable. When they finally did that (the good part is coming next) the procedure took a hot minute. So now you can add to the list of things missed the Massachusettes Massachusetts election returns. I didn’t find out about Brown’s great win until Wednesday morning when I got to work.

I was told that they were going to make sure that someone would hook things back up by 8pm. Around seven, with nothing going yet, I got on my cell and gave them a call. After listening to the same 60 bars of hold music over and over I was told that the note to come out on Wednesday never made it to dispatch and that there was no way anyone would be out that night.

I made it very clear that that was unacceptable. They made it very clear that there was nothing I could do about it. Turns out they were right.

Well, yesterday morning before noon they fixed things. In less than 60 seconds.

So, I’m back. I spend last night catching up on, well, everything. I watched the first three out of four episodes of 24 (I still have to catch up with the Blogs4Bauer liveblogging), read (and deleted) a ton of email, and tried to catch up on the items in my feed reader.

Thanks for listening to my rant. And for the Rule 5 rest of you:

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While most of the attention is on the ongoing protests in Iran, and the blogospheric coverage it is receiving, there are other stories that deserve to be covered and followed.

The Real Cost of Health Care Reform

It is consistently sold under the guise of saving “us” money, but in fact the costs would be staggering. How staggering? How about $4 Trillion dollars. Thats $4,000,000,000,000.00!

Yesterday, the CBO estimated that the current Democratic Senate health care bill would increase the defict by $1 trillion over 10 years while leaving 30 million uninsured, forcing the White House to distance itself from the legislation. While liberals have tried to emphasize that the CBO provided only a partial analysis of the draft legislation from Ted Kennedy’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a more comprehensive analysis of the legislation will only serve to drive the bill’s ultimate cost higher. For instance, because it was only working with a draft of the bill that had holes in it, the CBO did not estimate the costs associated with increasing Medicaid elgibility to 150 percent of the poverty level, or the full cost of providing subsidies to individuals with incomes at up to 500 percent of the poverty level to purchase insurance through state-run exchanges. Once this is taken into account, liberals are right that the final CBO estimate will reflect more people being insured, but the cost of the legislation will go up as well.

Related to that, but with a disturbingly different twist, is the sales job the Obama administration is doing on health care with the uncritical support of the MSM.

Obama’s ABC Infomercial

This story has many on the right re-naming ABC as the All Barack Channel. It fits.

First the story as reported on Drudge:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

Michael Laprarie writing at Wizbang comments:

It seems that the Obama Administration is prepared to bias the debate about single-payer health care not only with disinformation, but by working with the mainstream media in order to deliberately block efforts to present alternative solutions to our health care problems. Perhaps this is a lesson learned from the Clinton White House, which welcomed the debate over HillaryCare because they thought they would easily win it.

One missing element in all of this is any sort of opposing view, as Gaius points out.

They are apparently calling this a “debate”. But when only one side is presented, it is not a debate, it is a lecture. Or worse, propaganda.

This is also some very, very expensive free airtime for Obama. ABC is giving away the air time – and its credibility as a news organization.

[...]

They are not even trying to disguise that they are completely in Obama’s pocket anymore. That’s more than a bit worrisome.

Indeed it is. Michelle Malkin says, “ABC News should be required to register as a federal lobbyist.”

AllahPundit makes this point:

I’m honestly surprised, although it makes a certain sort of ruthless sense: If, as many righties have speculated, The One’s trying to ram through as many Great Society programs as he can before the political pendulum swings back to the center, the media might as well drop all pretense of objectivity and go for broke too.

There is much more on this story, but I’ll leave you with this link to a lighter look at the Sneak Preview of ABC’s Infomercial for Socialized Medicine from Doug Ross.

There’s one other story that deserves mention, but I’ve run out of time this morning. That is the firing of IG Gerald Walpin. This story deserves a lot of attention, something I’ll have to take care of when I return this afternoon.

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I think that the new USA series, Burn Notice, looks pretty good.

But somehow I keep getting distracted. (See why)

Not only is Gabrielle Anwar packing heat.

She’s Hot.

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