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Wednesday June 15, 2005

Sesame Street is a Crucial Tool!
DISCLAIMER: This is my personal opinion only (well, and that of all other right-minded(TM) intelligent life forms in the galaxy)

I promise not blog for any more petitions like this for a long, long time. Maybe years. I usually don't even pass these things on to friends and relatives. But this one strikes too close to home for me.

I received an email today pointing me to this petition site to comment on a proposed House bill to gut spending for PBS and NPR.

http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/

The email also pointed to a Washington Post article (warning, this article and/or link may or may not persist, I don't have time to investigate that)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/09/AR2005060902283.html

Now, I will blog much later about my opinions about fixes needed to the U.S. educational system, and possibly introduce a new <rant> < /rant> macro.

And I also believe it is critical to have a news source that is not heavily influenced by a dependence on advertising revenue.

But for now, suffice it to say that despite a slight bias towards libertarianism (no claim that I'm any kind of true libertarian), I believe that some things like public health and universal literacy are crucial to our future and cannot afford to be ignored.

So I have entered this into the petition site and given them permission to send the letter from my home email address:

I consider PBS to be critical to American competitiveness in the world
marketplace,  as it partially compensates for many remaining deficiencies
in our educational system, compared to that of other countries.

With our trade deficit as it is, we cannot afford to give up any edge.

In addition, I have requested the same, especially from my more-conservative relatives living in more-conservative states. Even the family conservatives share the family's general medical background and orientation, and will tend to agree that in many ways the public health model applies to the public intellectual health.

( Jun 15 2005, 01:56:02 PM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]

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