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Voting with my pocketbook: Arthur edition.

Via Glenn Reynolds, ladies and gentlemen: your tax dollars at… actually, “waste” doesn’t have the right connotation of “bizarrely surreal.”  Essentially, Democratic legislators have mainstreamed the antiwar Left’s Giant Puppet People by bringing the cartoon aardvark Arthur to a budget discussion.

Now, here’s the thing: I try to regulate what my kids watch.  I’m assisted in this by the fact that my wife is, frankly, too cheap to pay for cable; so we buy and rent videos.  Arthur was on our list of stuff to maybe buy when the kids were older; it is abruptly no longer on that list.  It’s nothing personal, but if the Other Side is going to be using cultural icons as partisan weapons then it’s perfectly acceptable for me to respond appropriately.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I see that PBS & NPR seem to have enough money in their budgets to play partisan political games, which I believe is not a concept enshrined in the mission statement of either.  Why am I paying for Democratic partisan agitprop, again? – That’s a rhetorical question, by the way: I know that the answer is “Because they’ve always gotten away with it before.”

But I’m a fair-minded man.  They can keep their funding; just as long as the Democrats tell us what we can cut from entitlement spending in exchange – and that’s going to be independent of whatever cuts that we make anyway.  Call it a… practical exhibition of the concept that elections have consequences.

COMMENTS

  • blooch

    What’s next… a parade balloon of Clifford? No, wait…a giant red object looming over the Capitol is not the sort of symbolism they want. Bring out Caillou to whine a little instead.

  • Uma Richie

    Sesame Street for at least the last 10 years has been 45 minutes of touchy-feely rubbish with about 8 minutes of numbers and letters thrown in. If they would halt new production and rerun the 1970s learning-bombardment episodes, the children might actually benefit from the show again.

    Like Moe’s and his wife, we’re raising our family without cable or dish. I won’t be sad to see PBS lose its funding.

  • meepman

    …to testify before a Senate committee. (On what I’m not sure, but does it really matter?)

  • http://www.FranBaker.com frankieb

    Now a puppet? Sounds like the Dems are getting desperate.

  • WarEagle01

    I’m tossing the few Arthur videos we still have. I always thought they were kind of creepy anyway. Especially that rabbit character.

  • blogan2

    Go to the toy aisle at a store. Plenty of merchandise with Elmo, Big Bird, and others. They’re on a ton of clothing. Does PBS license their characters for free? I would think with proper business management, all of PBS could be funding by Sesame Street merchandise.

  • congressworksforus

    You are clearly depriving your children of an incredibly important indoctr, errr, educational opportunity by refusing to buy these marxist propaga, errr, impressive educational videos.

    Shame on you!

  • earlgrey

    from product licensing.

    I didn’t have Sesame Street on for my kids. I wathced it with my son a few times, and it is not like a remember it at all. They have dumbed it down, and theire are a lot of other choices for kids programming. We prefer boomerang.

  • runner12

    for shows like Sesame Street. Can you imagine the bidding war that go on between Disney and NickJr. for that show? Sorry, but the children’s shows like Clifford and Sesame Street would actually fare better on a private company’s payroll.

    Ahh, capitalism, it works every time.

  • Adjoran

    Sesame Street and Bill Moyer have made millions in private sales of taxpayer-subsidized productions. They are hardly alone, the guy who did the Civil War and Baseball documentaries also got rich, and Arthur’s creators don’t need food stamps, either.

    It’s always been a scam on the taxpayer. Time to stop it now.

  • 6eorge Jetson

    The popular shows and their derivatives will do fine.

    When I was a kid, there was CBS on 2, NBC on 4, ABC on 7, CBC on 9 on VHF, and on UHF there was 20 (Spiderman, Super Heroes), 50 (Three Stooges and Gilligan’s Island reruns) and PBS on 56. I suppose you could make the case for public TV filling a void.

    There are a gazillion channels today. There’s no need to subsidize one more.

  • oblio

    I think 90% of my kids unacceptable behavior they picked up from him. The rest was from me :)

  • rickbull

    and he’s there to petition for block grants for aardvarks so that they can invest in ant farms.

  • rightwingmom52

    singing “Forget You” on the Grammys, not to mention the other lyrics of that foul song.

    I’ve started asking people I do business with if they support the liberal agenda. If they do, they don’t get my business. For example, I had a heart-to-heart with my doctor not long ago. I asked her straight up what she thought about Obamacare. She was a little hesitant to answer at first but was truly in a rant by the time she finished. Thankfully, she was against it.