During last week’s debate where even the liberal pundits had to admit that Mitt Romney won, and a debate that indeed does look to be a game changer, Romney said “I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.”
Actions of the Obama campaign have made us seriously wonder this week if the President was even paying attention. The Daily Mail reports that “Obama ‘believed he had BEATEN Romney’ in Denver debate.”
I’ll pause for you to stop laughing.
Whether or not the President is still residing in that make-believe world is uncertain, but somewhere, somehow, someone on the campaign thought it was a good idea to seize on the Big Bird comment.
No, seriously, they made it a campaign ad.
- The average salary of the twenty-one highest paid executives is more than $400,00
- The head of the corporation makes close to $1,000,000.
Translations: Big Bird’s owners are part of the 1%.
Not only that:
- Sesame Workshop owns something like $30,024,016 in securities, including: $5.6M in “Hedge Funds”, $14.7M in “Fund of Funds”, and $9.7M in “Private Equity”.
- In 2010, Sesame Workshop reported revenues of $133,042,300 and paid out $64,453,033 in salaries, other compensation, and benefits. Of the reported income, $46,930,656 was from royalty income.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting had revenues of $458,877,360 in 2010. Of that nearly $460 million, all but $11 million was from government grants.
H/T ClashDaily
That’s one darned expensive bird.
Earlier today Iowahawk tweeted:
But even at that, is a casual comment made by Mitt Romney, at the expense of Public Broadcasting employee turned moderator Jim Lehrer really a campaign issue?
Kevin Madden from the Romney campaign issued this reponse:
“Right now, you’ve got 23 million Americans struggling to find work. You’ve got household incomes going down. You’ve got a federal deficit, federal debt that’s over 16 trillion dollars,” Madden said. “I find it troubling that the president’s message, the president’s focus 28 days out from Election Day is Big Bird.”
And Mitt Romney himself said on the campaign trail:
Sesame Workshop is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization and we do not endorse candidates or participate in political campaigns. We have approved no campaign ads, and, as is our general practice, have requested that both campaigns remove Sesame Street characters and trademarks from their campaign materials.
No, the real issues in this campaign are not Big Bird or funding for public broadcasting (although that’s certainly one of them).
The real issues are that 23 million Americans remain unemployed and that our national debt is a number that even the Count finds hard to fathom.
