Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted 228 to 192 to zero out funds for National Public Radio and to prohibit local public-radio affiliates from using federal funds to purchase NPR programming. If the Senate passes this measure, a significant slice of the funding for stations hard pressed to raise money locally—rural and college-based stations, in the main—evaporates.
Meanwhile, Michael Tomasky writes in The Guardian:
all 31 Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee declined on Tuesday to vote in favor of a series of amendments acknowledging the scientific consensus around climate change.
The three amendments were attached to a bill aiming to curb the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate greenhouse gasses. They posited that “Congress accepts the scientific finding … that ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’”; that the scientific evidence regarding climate change “is compelling”; and that “human-caused climate change is a threat to public health and welfare.”
In a nod to scientific knowledge, one Republican declined to vote at all. The other 30 Republicans voted no. All the Democrats voted yes.
There are two parties in America. One is a hybrid of passion and oligarchy, audacity and caution, intelligence and populism. The other is a Flat Earth Party whose leaders say things like “The government’s too damned big!”
The Flat Earth Party doesn’t object to a 24-hour-a-day propaganda network whose economic success was based on the purchase of over-the-air broadcast channels by a foreign-owned corporation. It doesn’t object when broadcasters that receive their licenses gratis carry no news at all. It objects to the only serious radio news supplier in the United States of America–the one for which Americans spend $4 per year per capita. (The Germans pay $134 for their own public broadcasting.)
I’m speechless.
