The GOP Aims To Kill Big Bird

If it's not corporate, it's not good to John Boehner.

As a part of the GOP's push to cut $100 billion, but come up short, from the budget this year, they have decided to cut all of the funding from PBS and NPR. I guess they think all non-corporate media isn't worth saving. They are funded under the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which gets $420 million in it's operation budget currently. They were asking for $608 million in their next funding cycle, due to begin in 2013. The GOP doesn't think they should get ANY of that funding. In fact, as Brent Lang writes:

CPB has requested $608 million for its next funding cycle, which begins in 2013. So far, the current constellation of Republicans in the House and Senate do not seem inclined to grant that request.

“With record debt and unemployment, there’s simply no reason to force taxpayers to subsidize liberal programming they disagree with” Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) said in introducing legislation last October to cut CPB funding.

To compound the problem, when the leadership of PBS, NPR and the CPB trudge up the steps of congress to plead their case, they’ll find it’s not the same group of Republicans that cropped up the last time the party regained control. The band of moderates, who might be more willing to back public media as a necessary expenditure, has dwindled to near extinction.

“They're way to right of the Republican party of 1994 that came in with Newt Gingrich. NPR is the bête noire of the Republican right,” Raphael Sonenshein, a professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton. “These people are more conservative to the point where the only media they see as legitimate is Fox, and everything else is unreliable.”

This useless Congress is a joke. The whole CPB budget is one-half of one percent of their proposed $100 billion cut, and is in here because they think Sesame Street and academic television is "liberal." This is little more than blind ideology, and not helpful.

This whole "cutting" is a joke, and a cruel one at that. Cutting $100 billion from this year's budget simply takes the deficit this year from $1.5 trillion to $1.4 trillion, as long as nothing else unplanned happens. It does little to nothing about the DEBT crisis, currently crossing $14 TRILLION. All they are doing is making sure the government can do LESS to actually help PEOPLE. Does this group of cowards even address the entitlement problem? No. Do they take the Defense Secretary's $100 billion plus in cuts he wants to see to his budget along with these cuts? No. This is a joke, and we all hope the Senate forces the House to engage reality.