Reclaim Conservatism

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.