Then can't the oil companies and corn farmers stand on their own too?

Meh... whatever. Standard republican blathering.

If he TOUCHES PBS there will be hell to pay. As someone who grew up with 7 channels, I vastly preferred settling for whatever was on PBS to mind numbingly flipping through hundreds of channels and finding only crap. I have seen the NOVA documentary on cows twice, and I fucking loved it both times. And the one on cat shows. Hilarious.

@2,

PBS was a mainstay for me when I was a kid, especially Are You Being Served and Victor Borge shows. Now, there's so much stuff on the Internet or DVD I don't watch much anymore, but PBS still has a special place in my heart.

I don't like him, too!!

Drops in the bucket compared to military spending and corporate welfare.

" I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf"

So that's our choice? We can only have PBS, Amtrak, etc if we borrow from other countries?

How about making rich people and corporations pay their fair share of taxes?

How about ending subsidies for things like oil companies?

How about cutting the military welfare complex down to about 1/4 of its current size?

How about combining medicare/medicaid/tricare/federal employee health care into one big group plan and letting anyone enroll in it?

Republicans are so dull-witted and unimaginative. Their politicians depend on that.

Yeah, let's not do that time travel thing. I don't like the idea of accidentally doing art for my great-great-great-great-....grandfather.

@5 - Part of the magic of PBS is that they are not beholden to corporate or commercial interests. Sesame Street was structured like a tv show on purpose, because the format easily reflects the attention span of children watching tv, except instead of commercials, the kids continue to learn about reading and counting, not toys and candy. Every penny Sesame Street makes on merchandise goes back into programming and children's services around the world. If you cut government funding for PBS, much of that will be undermined, and Sesame Street will no longer be brought to you by letters and numbers, but by Yoplait and Mattel. Jesus you're dumb all the time.

playing to the spiteful hinterlands. "artists hate you and they hate your god. they think they're better than you. why should they get your hard-earned money for free?"

meanwhile, don't mention that the deficit is 100's times larger than these combined subsidies and that only increased revenues and substantial cuts to the military can address it.

mitt should show us his solution to http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/…

Public bad, private good, no surprises here. PBS and NPR having been on the Republican hit list for years. It's their way of showing people that life is HARD and they're NOT FUCKING AROUND about THE MARKET UBER ALLES.

And yeah, the entirely gratuitous assertion there that China is funding PBS is, well... gratuitous. It's one more Mitt Fib. I don't even know if it deserves a response, because if you know anything about American revenues and spending you know it's completely absurd, and if you don't, you're going to vote Republican anyway.

Christ on a cracker, not this shit again. All the funding for the NEA, the NEH, and PBS combined is a fucking rounding error in the federal budget. Can we just give them the equivalent of the money that was flat out lost in Iraq (you remember, the skids of bills that seem to have mysteriously vanished off the face of the Earth) and see what they do with the increase?

Public Television is the only teevee that makes you use your brain. Which is why Republicans hate it.

Wanna bet he keeps the tax deductions for billionaires who "lend" their art collections to museums, but only after they've died and reaped the benefits of faux charity? That's the only kind of art Rmoney cares about: investment art.

If you think Amtrak's a losing proposition, you should look into airlines.

Cut military spending? Are you guys crazy? Do you know how many jobs that will kill?!

Mitt Romney - Fracking anything and everything for a few more bucks, damn the souls damaged in the process.

I don't like him either, Wm.™ Steven Humphrey. Not at all.

PBS costs about as much as TWO SECONDS of Bush's wars.

It sounds nice to say "stand on their own" but when you are upholding your principles by actively making the world a worse place to be, maybe your principles need to be shoved up your ass. Fuck you, Mitt Romney.

Growing up in a time before Internet (or cable tv), PBS was an intellectual lifeline for me...a way to get access to science through Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, Kurosawa movies, British comedy...

However, its monopoly on high brow video has long since vanished due to Discovery channel and Netflix.

Supreme ruler, not everyone can afford cable or Netflix, yet everyone pays taxes.

And, like an apartment in Kent, nothing lasts forever - but things like PBS are nice while they last.

I have the biggest crush on Catalina Vel-DuRay right now. Bigger than usual, anyway.

@20 would you do away with public libraries too? After all with the internet etc..... who needs libraries?

Bleedin' 'ell, how would I watch East Enders (even though we're 5 years behind)? Oy, sling yer hook, Mittens, wiffout EE I got nofink!