Is Big Bird Richer Than Mitt Romney?

Published October 6, 2012 | By Iowadawg

It is, of course, the political season, but are those who are making a big deal about Mitt Romney’s debate comment about PBS and Big Bird overreacting? To put it another way, isn’t the Sesame Street franchise in particular strong enough by now — it’s been on the air since 1969 — to make a go of it without being on the taxpayer’s dime?

After all, cable networks like Discovery, Animal Planet, NatGeo, and many others are doing just fine standing on their own in the private marketplace without taxpayer funding. Should PBS continue to be treated differently?

This Romney vs. Big Bird story is being hyped up in part for political reasons to (unsuccessfully) try and change the subject from President Obama’s disasterous debate performance on Wednesday night. In the aftermath of the debate, Romney is gaining ground in the polling according to various news outlets, assuming the polling is and has been accurate in the first place, which is a debatable point in and of itself.

That being said, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint notes that “from 2003 to 2006, Sesame Street made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales.”

So Big Bird is living large, as BigHollywood.com explains:

‘If you break that down, it works out to over $50 million a year Sesame Street is taking in from all that merchandising.’

“Yep, that one-percenter Big Bird makes about four times what Mitt Romney does annually and yet Barack Obama still wants you and I to still carry his freight.”

PBS and NPR receive about $400 million in taxpayer money every year. Should PBS continue to get a taxpayer subsididy given the massive deficit and the debt or should this be one, of many, federal government programs that need to be cut?

From HERE.

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Mark Steyn: Will Big Bird ever leave the government nest?

Apparently, Frank Sinatra served as Mitt Romney’s debate coach. As he put it about halfway through “That’s Life”:

“I’d jump right on a big bird and then I’d fly … .”

That’s what Mitt did in Denver. Ten minutes in, he jumped right on Big Bird, and then he took off – and never looked back, while the other fellow, whose name escapes me, never got out of the gate. It takes a certain panache to clobber not just your opponent but also the moderator. Yet that’s what the killer Mormon did when he declared that he wasn’t going to borrow money from China to pay for Jim Lehrer and Big Bird on PBS. It was a terrific alpha-male moment, not just in that it rattled Lehrer, who seemed too preoccupied contemplating a future reading the hog prices on the WZZZ Farm Report to regain his grip on the usual absurd format, but in the sense that it indicated a man entirely at ease with himself – in contrast to wossname, the listless sourpuss staring at his shoes

Yet, amidst the otherwise total wreckage of their guy’s performance, the Democrats seemed to think that Mitt’s assault on Sesame Street was a misstep from whose tattered and ruined puppet-stuffing some hay is to be made. “WOW!!! No PBS!!! WTF how about cutting congress’s stuff leave big bird alone,” tweeted Whoopi Goldberg. Even the president mocked Romney for “finally getting tough on Big Bird” – not in the debate, of course, where such dazzling twinkle-toed repartee might have helped, but a mere 24 hours later, once the rapid-response team had directed his speechwriters to craft a line, fly it out to a campaign rally and load it into the prompter, he did deliver it without mishap.

Unlike Mitt, I loathe Sesame Street. It bears primary responsibility for what the Canadian blogger Binky calls the de-monsterization of childhood – the idea that there are no evil monsters out there at the edges of the map, just shaggy creatures who look a little funny and can sometimes be a bit grouchy about it because people prejudge them until they learn to celebrate diversity and help Cranky the Friendly Monster go recycling. That is not unrelated to the infantilization of our society. Marinate three generations of Americans in that pabulum, and it’s no surprise you wind up with unprotected diplomats dragged to their deaths from their “safe house” in Benghazi. Or as J. Scott Gration, the president’s Special Envoy to Sudan, said in 2009, in the most explicit Sesamization of American foreign policy: “We’ve got to think about giving out cookies. Kids, countries – they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes.” The butchers of Darfur aren’t blood-drenched machete-wielding genocidal killers but just Cookie Monsters whom we haven’t given enough cookies. I’m not saying there’s a direct line between Bert & Ernie and Barack & Hillary … well, actually, I am.

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Nice great piece of Iowa History….I like reading stuff like this, not just about Iowa, but any state or country.

Back to Herring, Iowa

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the fighting from World War I ceased at 11 am. Around the world people celebrated the end to the final and greatest war the world had witnessed up to that point in history. The small town of Herring, Iowa joined in the julilation. The town’s people and area farmers gathered at the bottom of the Herring Hill near the center of town. They took two long poles and spliced them together with wire. Later that night the Herring folk celebrated the end of the Great War by hoisting the towering flagpole and proudly flying Old Glory in the town center.

Finish reading it all HERE>

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Reports indicate U.S. soldiers and British Royal Marines have been urged to show “courageous constraint” by not shooting Taliban members spotted planting IEDs.

The reason? Shooting them might disturb the locals. more

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The Oil And Gas Boom In The North Eastern US

It seems like yesterday when I sat in a public school classroom and listened to my teacher telling us that in 30 years, every last drop of oil in the world would be all used up…and then what?

Well, here we are 45 years later and there is still plenty of oil and gas, new reserves, massive reserves are being discovered almost every day.

The Left has given up trying to scare us into their alternative energy schemes by claiming that we’re running out of fossil fuels. Now they’ve re-written their script, it’s all about Global WarmingCoolingClimateChange. Yeah, HotColdWetDry will kill millions if we don’t embrace their pie-in-the-sky wind and solar schemes.