President Bush just proposed drastic cuts to NPR and PBS. Previous attempts have been stopped, but enough is enough: With the new Congress, we can make sure this never happens again.
We need Congress to save NPR and PBS once and for all.
Can you help out by signing this petition to Congress?
Here are my personal comments on the situation:
NPR radio is my main source of in depth news and I’ve been a member for many years. Last year I made my biggest contribution ever.  But membership contributions only account for a small number of the listeners who take advantage of NPR and those of us who do pay our way.  Â
What little the government adds to the funding pool doesn’t even come close to making up for the freeloaders. Â But since these freeloaders pay taxes, some of those taxes should go to fund NPR and PBS.
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I agree that this would be bad policy, except this is a petition and not something that is likely to become policy.
If Moveon.org was in a position of negotiation with the Administration, this makes for a good opening position knowing that your real goal is some fallback position. Also from a position of negotiation, which is really between Congress and the Administraion, one has to make a strong counter proposal for any given drastic starting postiion.
Hopefully, we will see that Congress will recognize the strong response to Moveon's petition, not the petition's words, and counter with an increase of 25 percent?
The petition:
"Congress must save NPR and PBS once and for all. Congress should guarantee permanent funding and independence from partisan meddling."
I like public broadcasting. I've both donated and signed past petitions to prevent defunding of public broadcasting. But this petition is different.
What does "once and for all" mean? Are they suggesting a constitutional amendment? If not, how exactly do they propose preventing future changes to funding?
And what is the difference between "partisan meddling" and submitting budget bills and voting on them?
There was another petition posted at the same URL from Nov 2005 to May 2006 (before the election), but it was in opposition to a particular proposal, and didn't call for establishing any permanent level of funding that couldn't be altered by future lawmakers.
Have a look at that previous petition on the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://civic.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
Although superficially similar, this new petition is significantly different. It calls for permanent funding that cannot be rescinded, regardless of how NPR/PBS may change in the future. Do we really want to establish a publicly-funded institution that is accountable to no one?
I think that would be bad policy, and bad for democracy. "Once and for all" is a lazy and dangerouse wish.