Discuss “Bush puts the fun in ‘unfunded mandate’”

“Oscar the Grouch has been friendlier to the Sesame Street characters than President Bush [has been],” congressman Ed Markey (D–Mass.) said last week. And with $157 million possibly sliced from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget in the next two years, Bush is a much more serious problem than an ornery green monster living in a trash can.

We could be part of a generation that slowly watches public broadcasting die in America. Both television and radio programming are endangered now, as more and more of the federal funding pie is being diverted to hurricane reconstruction and the continuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bush’s new proposed spending plan axes 13 percent of public broadcasting’s budget for 2007, and almost...