Why, when all else fails, do the right wingers always return to this?:
NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller spoke out on Saturday against a proposal by House Republicans to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The plan to get rid of federal money for the nonprofit company that oversees funding for public broadcasting was part of a budget proposal put out by Republicans on the Appropriations Committee.
It is a great place to cut, considering how little we spend on gleaming new weapons systems we no longer need in the post-Cold War era.
It’s as if, in a supermarket full of food, someone was endlessly after eliminating the Weetabix just because it’s made of Canadian wheat. I mean, really–leave my low-key pleasures alone. Go pick on the Hungry Man Salisbury steak dinners or something. I like watching Frontline and obscure foreign programming without advertising interruptions. It’s a harmless hobby.
And if it’s about supposed media bias, perhaps we should start by transferring some money from the federal budget to pay Rush Limbaugh to retreat to an island somewhere with a pile of pharmaceuticals.
AND speaking of accretions of fat:
Imagine: A government run by and for the rich and powerful. Leaders who lecture others about “sacrifice” and deficits while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy. A system so corrupt that rich executives can break the law without fear of being punished. Increasing poverty and hardship even as the stock market rises. And now, a nation caught between a broken political system and a populist movement that could be hijacked by religious extremists at any moment.
Here’s the reality: Income inequality is actually greater in the United States than it is in Egypt. Politicians here have close financial ties to big corporations, both personally and through their campaigns. Corporate lawbreakers often do go unpunished. Poverty and unemployment statistics for US minorities are surprisingly similar to Egypt’s.
Interesting as well to hear that Egyptian workers are protesting because of such dramatic income equality. We are not, last I checked.
AND LASTLY, some very cool news in the Herman Melville/Massachusetts end of the flow chart:
Marine archeologists off Hawaii have found the sunken remains of a 19th-century whaling vessel skippered by a captain whose ordeal from an earlier shipwreck inspired the Herman Melville classic “Moby-Dick.”
Iron and ceramic scraps from the Nantucket whaling ship Two Brothers were located in shallow waters nearly 600 miles from Honolulu in the remote chain of islands and atolls that make up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
The ship, which struck a reef and foundered in 1823, was skippered by Captain George Pollard Jr. Two years earlier, Pollard commanded another ship that was rammed by a whale and sank in the South Pacific in a saga immortalized in Melville’s 1851 novel “Moby-Dick.”
Great photos here.
