Life imitates Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
House Democrats made their case for continuing taxpayer funding of public media outlets such as NPR and PBS with a little help from Arthur the PBS cartoon character, who visited the Capitol Wednesday morning.
The friendly but silent aardvark (the transcript of his testimony will make for interesting reading)
joined Democratic Reps. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, Earl Blumenauer of Oregon and others to hit back against Republicans who have pledged to cut the funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the next budget. We need your help today, Markey said as a person dressed as the character walked toward the Capitol building. We cant leave Arthur and all of his pals in the lurch. Arthur is--excuse me for being blunt here Mr. Markey, but this is an important point--he's a fictional character. He doesn't physically exist. He's just a series of pen-and-ink still images displayed at a rate of 24 frames per second, giving the illusion of motion due to a psychological effect called beta movement. ARTHUR IS NOT REAL!
The members stood behind dolls of Sesame Streets Big Bird, Grover and Elmo. Behind them, House aides held up signs showing Bert and Ernie being handed a letter that reads, GOPink Slip: You are fired, and another that showed cartoon characters being tossed away from a scale weighed down by Big Oil.
Were here to create jobs, not lay off Bert and Ernie, said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York. Nita, can I explain something to you, dear? Well, I'm going to anyway whether you like it or not. Get your fingers out of your ears and stop saying "La la la la la!" like that.
That's better, dear.
Here's the thing: Sesame Street is produced by an outfit called Children's Television Workshop. It's technically a not-for-profit corporation, but that doesn't mean it doesn't make money. It licenses the characters of Bert and Ernie and all the other puppets to books, video games, a friggin' 14-acre theme park, and people who make toys, clothing, training pants, furniture, murals, postcards, neckties, samplers, stained glass windows, and tattoos for all I know. These people sell BILLIONS of dollars of Sesame Street-themed merchandise every year, and CTW gets a cut of the revenue from every Bert doll, Elmo car seat, Big Bird windbreaker, Oscar the Grouch deluxe picture book, and roll of Sesame Street easy-on vinyl wallpaper--as it properly should. The only reason this stuff is in such demand is because kids watch the show and love it and ask their parents and grandparents for the tie-in merchandise.
From that perspective, every hour of Sesame Street is a one-hour commercial for Sesame Street tie-in merchandise. PBS shouldn't be paying CTW for the show, CTW should be paying PBS for the airtime!
Posted by: Mike ||
02/16/2011 15:54 ||
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#1
Well, go public and run it as a for profit venture. Or at least a public service sans government funding where all the other "made possible by" funding they get is tax deductible for the corporations giving it. At very least they could break even.
#4
No problem - directly fund CTW (of course, all Sesame Street licensing fees would then go to the US treasury). Cut Federal funding for all other NPR / PBS operations.
#2
I have a confession: Back in the 80s, I briefly worked for FEMA at one of their regional centers.
We had a supply clerk named Roger. He was a long-time career employee and was quite literally the laziest person I have ever encountered. His indolence was so great, so much in excess of what we normal goof-offs and goldbricks could manage, that it was actually admirable. He should be in the Guiness Book of World Records.
Roger was paid about $18 an hour (remember, this was over 20 years ago) to sit in his chair all day and briefly rouse himself if someone needed a new pencil or perhaps some sticky notes. He would sit there and stare catatonically at the wall for hours at a time.
Naturally he would doze off pretty frequently. I walked by one day and shook him. He awoke, startled, and demanded to know what I needed. I said Nothing, I just wanted to make sure you hadnt died on us. Wed look pretty stupid if you started to decompose before anyone realized it.
He just said, oh and went back to sleep.
The San Francisco earthquake came along and the FEMA center was a beehive of activity. Several of us went to the Bay Area and worked about 100 hours a week taking relief applications. Not Roger, though. He had to do a lot more work, perhaps an hour or more a day, but they hired four temporaries to help him so he would not miss his rest.
#6
LOL. AC, we now know where Scott Adams got his inspiration for "Wally", the lazy character in the Dilbert cartoon strip. Wally has developed laziness into an art form.
Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding. They got to save their phony baloney jobs!
One group of researchers looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 percent wetter. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to be a substantial increase, said the report from a team of researchers from Canada and Scotland.
The study didn't single out specific storms but examined worst-of-each-year events all over the Northern Hemisphere. While the study ended in 1999, the close of the decade when scientists say climate change kicked into a higher gear, the events examined were similar to more recent disasters: deluges that triggered last year's deadly floods in Pakistan and in Nashville, Tenn., and this winter's paralyzing blizzards in parts of the United States. Ok, stop there a sec... You only took the data from 1951-1999 and didn't single out events... yet events that happened since then were singularly examined...
Now, it has been a while since I was a studying the scientific method... but THAT IS CALLED COOKING THE DATA AND CHERRY PICKING DATA TO FIT YOUR HYPOTHESIS!!!!,
Ok, the rest of the story I have to summarize, but cherry picked data... short time frame of study... no dissenting part of the paper... and all funded by foundations that have a remarkable interest in MMGW means that these studies aren't worth the paper they are printed on. More bullshit to push the goddamn Maxist takeover of economies in the name of saving the fucking planet.
These crooks need to be laughed out of the scientific world, sued for everything they got for the damage inflicted on the economy, then fired into the sun to reduce their "carbon footprint".
#2
Then there's this, from a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal. The one group of researchers were already behind the times before they released their report, poor dears. Isn't science wonderful!
The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder
The latest research belies the idea that storms are getting more extreme.
Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter's fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December's blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.
But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.
As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."
In other words, researchers have yet to find evidence of more-extreme weather patterns over the period, contrary to what the models predict. "There's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has affected extreme weather," adds Roger Pielke Jr., another University of Colorado climate researcher.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/16/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
bring it, bitches
Issa can handle himself, and the subpoenas should start flying. Ima hoperin for some jail time for Holder and his racists at the DOJ
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/16/2011 8:42 Comments ||
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#2
I am just sick of this liberal tactic. If they can't beat them in the field of political ideas, they do their best to destroy people personally. They go after even the person's kids and family, which used to be off limits for everyone.
Keep it up, assholes. There is a platoon of really pissed off people waiting for you to step too far over the line into illegal territory.
#3
The foaming at the mouth left wing "targets" anyone who disagrees with them and their agenda, anyone perceived as a threat, and anyone who might rise as a viable opposition candidate. Since most of these Trotskyites/Alinskyites are paranoid, this includes just about everyone. I use the word "targets" because they really go ape $hit whenever anyone uses the word but themselves. There are many, many people who are fed up with their tactics--more than they realize.
#5
Sarah Palin, Joe Arpaio and now Darrell Issa. It sure is easy to see who scares the weenies and it seems to be anybody who has the guts to stand up, ask the hard questions and tell it like it is.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/16/2011 12:37 Comments ||
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A key subpoena has already been fired. From today's WSJ: Taxpayers wanting the whole story of how Countrywide Financial used its VIP loan program to grease politicians and reward its partners at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may soon have it. Thanks for this belated act of political hygiene go to House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, who Wednesday issued a subpoena to Bank of America, which bought Countrywide during the financial crisis.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has issued a broad subpoena to Bank of America, which bought Countrywide in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.
By March 7, the bank will need to produce all documents related to the company's VIP program, also known as the "Friends of Angelo" program in honor of former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.
The phoney liberal 'crusade' mentioned in the original article is a crude attempt to keep the lid on widespread official corruption. I don't care if Issa ate dead babies when he was 19, I do care if congressmen took bribes from Mozilo.
#7
A key subpoena has already been fired. From today's WSJ: Taxpayers wanting the whole story of how Countrywide Financial used its VIP loan program to grease politicians and reward its partners at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may soon have it.
wonder if there's extradition from Irish households holding a certain Connecticut Senator - the "other heel side" of the waitress sammich?
Posted by: Frank G ||
02/16/2011 22:08 Comments ||
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I can conceive of no possible reason the Federal government should be concerned with how children are nursed.
None.
The ultimate (to date) nannyism.
Posted by: Fred ||
02/16/2011 00:00 ||
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Fred, I take it you are past the age where you would be nursing a child, so perhaps you don't understand this as fully as some of our politicians seem to.
#3
I have both nursed and used formula. There is a built-in cost-savings for using what nature provides for free, not to mention that losing the pregnancy weight is easier. The Lamaze people are already involved in heavily promoting breastfeeding, no doubt much more effectively than government involvement.
#5
I might be willing to take up breast-feeding again if there was money in it. I suppose it depends on how hawt the breasteses in question are, though. Or how much cash.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding.
