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October 10, 2012 · By Rick Manning · 0 Comments
Hillary Clinton on Sesame Street
The Obama campaign launched an Internet hit campaign using Big Bird to attack Mitt Romney as a result of Romney’s debate claim that he would eliminate funding for the Public Broadcasting System if elected president.
Romney unequivocally declared that the U.S. government was going to have to make some tough choices due to the gigantic budget deficit, and singled out the home of moderator Jim Lehrer’s PBS News Hour saying, “I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides partial support for PBS and National Public Radio (NPR), receives about $450 million a year in taxpayer dollars. But as House Republicans who voted to take the multi-million-dollar earning Big Bird off the public dole discovered he and his movie star pals don’t go down easily.
Congressman Doug Lamborn, in an exclusive 2011 interview with Americans for Limited Government’s Frank McCaffrey pointed out, “Why should taxpayers, when we are running trillion-dollar deficits have to pay for something like this that could pay for itself, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Yet, two years later the Big Bird subsidy remains.
Team Obama has even given Big Bird his very own campaign ad in an attempt to mock Romney’s nation’s annual trillion-dollar-plus budget deficit.
More than just symbolically, Big Bird has become the major dividing line in the election.
Will America vote to continue spending $3.60 for every $2.50 our nation takes into our treasury unconcerned about how our government covers the bills and unaware that the trillion a year results in devastating our economic growth and overall job creation.
Romney in the debate called the saddling of our children and grandchildren with an insurmountable debt to pay for our luxuries and excesses a “moral issue.”
Perhaps those who believe that Big Bird, Elmo, Kermit and Miss Piggy need a taxpayer subsidy to help with early childhood education missed the “Tickle me Elmo” craze that generated millions of dollars, and they undoubtedly were unaware that Kermit and Miss Piggy went Hollywood a long time ago making millions in the process.
Or, perhaps they haven’t flipped around to the hundreds of channels on their televisions and envisioned the bidding war to bring Big Bird to a privately funded station.
As strange as it might seem, Big Bird just might be the perfect symbol for this election.
Will America behave like grown-ups with an out-of-control budget and start cutting back on the luxuries in an attempt to bring it somewhat under control, or will they behave like children (or Baby Boomers) who have little regard or comprehension of the consequences of spending a week’s worth of lunch money on Monday because mommy is just going to give them more on Tuesday?
If Team Obama gets its way, Big Bird will remain on the public dole enslaving the generation that watches him today to those who lent America the money to subsidize him.
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He caught a chill riding horseback several hours in the snow while inspecting his Mount Vernon farm. The next morning it developed into acute laryngitis and the doctors were called in. Their response was to bleed him heavily four times, a process of cutting one's arm to let the "bad blood" out. They also had him gargle with a mixture of molasses, vinegar and butter. Despite their best efforts, the doctors could not save former President George Washington and he died DECEMBER 14, 1799, at the age of sixty-seven.
Ryan T. Anderson has a great series of articles about marriage at Ricochet, released in conjunction with his new book, co-authored with Sherif Girgis and Robert P. George, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense. Anderson discusses why marriage matters, what marriage is, and why government has a role in protecting marriage from being undermined or counterfeited.
Last Friday, an 84-year-old President Reagan appointee, North Carolina Federal Judge James C. Fox, issued a ruling declaring the state’s “Choose Life” license plates to be an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, giving the ACLU its desired victory against the message, “Please don’t choose to kill your pre-born baby.”
Phillips Brooks was born DECEMBER 13, 1835. The bishop of the Episcopal Church in Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks took a trip to the Holy Land in 1865, and wrote home: "After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem...Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds..."
In 2013, $2.2 trillion of the $3.65 trillion budget will be on so-called “mandatory” spending — a Washingtonian euphemism for automatic spending. It just operates on autopilot, and even increases of its own accord as a function of the rising population that qualifies for benefits and built-in cost-of-living adjustments. But is such a design constitutional?
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"We don't intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the party over to the so-called moderates wouldn't make any sense at all." - Ronald Reagan, Nov. 10, 1964 |
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