2012 Presidential Election, Big Bird | featured news

What do a Navy mom, Big Bird and AARP have in common? They want President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney to leave them alone.

...Romney was greeted Tuesday by protesters dressed up like Big Bird, Elmo and other Sesame Street characters, The Des Moines Register reports. The Elmo protester shouted, "Trickle down economics does not tickle me." And the gang, identified by the newspaper as supporters of the liberal Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, sang a ditty about the economy and Wall Street to the tune of the Sesame Street theme song. It began: "Stormy days ... taking our jobs away."

President Barack Obama deployed Big Bird in a new campaign ad Tuesday mocking Mitt Romney's vow to end federal funding for public broadcasting. Romney's campaign dismissed it as an example of Obama being small-minded while the foundation behind Big Bird's program, "Sesame Street," asked that the ad be taken down.

...Or, as astrophysicist and PBS “Nova ScienceNOW” host Neil de Grasse Tyson put it, more pithily, on Twitter, “Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive.”

Furthermore, the budget benefits would be miniscule. The CPB’s two-year, $445 million government grant makes up less than 1/100th of a percent of a Federal Budget worth upwards of $3.5 trillion. Think Progress blogger Alyssa Rosenberg details all of the proposed arts funding in Obama’s 2013 budget, including subsidies for the Smithsonian Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. The total funding is $1.55 billion, still a tiny fraction of overall spending. So despite making a splash on Twitter, Big Bird’s fate won’t have nearly the same impact on government spending.

Who knew Sesame Street's Big Bird would play a role in tonight's presidential debate in Denver? About 30 minutes into the verbal contest between President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the former governor explained that he would cut what he considers non-essential items in the budget, including cuts to PBS, which employs debate moderator Jim Lehrer.