Return and Revamp

It has been about nine months since my last blog entry, and now I feel it is time to make a return. 2010 was certainly a year of worldwide elections, but reporting on only these with each post made me weary enough to quit the blog for too long. I've decided to revamp the basis and purpose of my postings - I am not fivethirtyeight, nor even a pale copy of it, nor should I try to be. Instead, I'll discuss what's happening in our world and why it matters. That seems reasonable enough.

As a personal update, I completed my year in Colombia teaching fourth grade and returned to the States in early December. Since then my primary focus has been on applying for graduate schools, for funding from graduate schools, for jobs in the cities where the graduate schools are located, and finally for jobs in my own area. I have so far been accepted into Master of Public Policy programs at George Washington University and American University in Washington, DC, at the University of Maryland in College Park, and at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. The deadlines are coming soon and I'll be making my final decision within a month's time.

The first issue I want to tackle is the bill to cut federal funding for content on National Public Radio. I simple cannot fathom why this makes any kind of significant budgetary sense. The proposed cut, which passed the House of Representatives on March 17, 228 to 192, with only Republican Party support, eliminates the $22 million in Treasury funds that go toward everything but operating costs for NPR member stations. Consider now the 2010 budget for the Department of Defense, which stands at $533.8 BILLION, the $130 billion for "overseas contingency operations," and the extra $319 billion (at least) for defense-related operations outside the DoD. The grand total for all defense spending in the United States for fiscal year 2010 was at lowest estimates a $1.01 TRILLION dollar affair. Twenty-two million dollars, by comparison, is but a fraction of a fraction of one percent of defense spending.

Clearly, the motivation behind this bill is not budgetary at all, and is instead a philosophical aversion to NPR's purposes, the first of which is to "provide an identifiable daily product which is consistent and reflects the highest standards of broadcast journalism." With a fall 2008 record of 27.5 million listeners per week and a 2005 Harris poll indicating that NPR and PBS are the most trusted news sources at 61%. I cannot abide the thought of losing my own most trusted news source of NPR and having to rely on the blatant commercialism of our modern-day yellow journalists at the worst of the worst, Fox News and MSNBC.

It comes as relief to hear reports that the funding cut measure will fail in the Senate before it reaches the president's desk as a fully-formed bill.

I've included a poll from October to illustrate the general public's feelings on the matter.