Who's Afraid Of Sesame Street?

Evil Sesame Street: Spoof News











Could it be...Dick Cheney?

GOP Campaign To Make Faux News #1

Gearing up for the contentious November campaigns ahead, the GOP has succeeded in expressing a clear desire to make the admittedly nebulous War on Terror eternal (the fear of terror has played so well so far with the American electorate, after all), but acknowledges that that’s not all they need to win it.

They also want to take us back to the days when they were fully in charge with respect to the media. The American media, bludgeoned into a complacency that didn’t bode well for the free flow of honest & accurate information so essential to Americans’ ability to fully participate in the democratic process in the first frightening years post 911, has shown signs of recovering its role as the “fourth estate,” viewing much of what the GOP says about anything these days with well-deserved skepticism.

‘Berto’s threats to shut down reporters who dare leak “classified information”--and it’s all classified now, even if the reporter is long dead (Jack Anderson) & if it was previously non-classified) aren't enough. (And have the grace to look away, good Americans, while we leak classified info to destroy our political critics. That’s irrelevant to the discussion.)

In the war on terror, everyone is suspect, after all, we need clear leadership to tell us what we think, & if you aren’t getting your news from Fox, you aren’t playing fair.

Seems to Demon Princess, anyway, that’s what’s up with the recent furor over Congress’s stealth attempts to eviscerate public broadcasting by seriously slashing its budget. (Of a piece with all their other efforts to put the big black jackboot on any organization that relies on federal funds to effect a mission, & which don’t).

This is not America’s government anymore—it’s NeoCon time, & if you’re not with them you’re against God, Mom, Apple Pie, the Flag,& all that fascinating infotainment about the Brangelina baby (poor tot). What else do you need to distract you?

I had to wonder why on earth it suddenly became a big issue (again), so with a little digging, I learned that NPR has recently been getting into stem-cell research, and hey, looka what has been recently addressed & is coming up in the near future on PBS’s Frontline. Extended, intelligent programs. Oh, that’s the problem!

Highly critical stuff about how Donald Rumsfeld has been conducting the war in Iraq: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/interviews/

And slated for broadcast on June 20th, a program about the Evil Demon Mastermind himself, Dick Cheney. Appropriately titled “The Dark Side.” Check for your local stations’ airing while you’re at it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/

So, looking back at the Boston Globe article of June 8th, I just have to twitter a bit about the bald-faced lies & the lying liars who tell them; for instance, this:

“Still, Republicans say they remain adamant that public broadcasting cannot receive funding at the expense of healthcare and education programs. Republicans are looking for ways to save taxpayers' dollars, amid fiscal conservatives' concerns over the budget deficit.

“’We've got to keep our priorities straight,’ said Representative Ralph Regula, an Ohio Republican who is chairman of the appropriations panel that approved the cut. ‘ You're going to choose between giving a little more money to handicapped children versus providing appropriations for public broadcasting.’

“House Republicans yesterday revived their efforts to slash funding for public broadcasting, as a key committee approved a $115 million reduction in the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.

“On a party-line vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees health and education funding approved the cut to the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. It would reduce the corporation's budget by 23 percent next year, to $380 million, in a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending.”

Oh, yes, we must think of the little handicapped chirren, even though they may be watching Sesame Street or Clifford the Big Red Dog on public television. We can’t afford it all, & the poor sweet handicapped tots will just have to sacrifice.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/06/08/gop_takes_aim_at_pbs_funding/
Speaking of the very pious (new-found) effort to rein in spending, I imagine it’s totally out of the question that the deficit created by the stupid stunt of a war in Iraq should go without some itty-bitty amount of funding, ditto for the NSA & the “total information awareness” we need to root out the dissenters.

After all, they’re counting on being able to bang those drums in order to scare America into voting for them again.