Times have been tough lately as most of us know. Difficult to find work that pays enough to get by, rents are high wages are low. So it has brought on a new phenomenon to America: "The child that never moves away from home syndrome."

As so sensitively portrayed in the Matthew McConaughey movie, "Failure to Launch", Matthew plays a thirty something lad who still lives at home with his parents. So his parents hire Sarah Jessica Parker to lure him out of their house. She specializes in recalcitrant young men who never want to leave the nest.

We Americans have the same problem with the Big Bird and the rest of his rag tag publicly funded cartoon character gang who have been squatting in our living rooms for over 40 years. They have been raiding our fridges and not doing any chores around the house. Not only do they live rent free, they make us pay....The messages they have been sending to our pre-school children over the years primes them for their public school inculcation. I think if you take a look at what public education has brought to America over the past 40 years, you will able to see a correlation between data in and product out.

Of course I am referring to Public Broadcasting System/NPR/PBS/CPB, the whole family of public broadcasters held together by money forced from the US citizens. For many years this organization(s) has been a propaganda megaphone for all things left. If you relied on their news as the only source of your information you would have a definite skewed vision of how the world actually turns.

Big Bird & Co. earns millions of dollars...Hey Bird! How about kicking down some of that dough to the folks?.....Big Birds corporate structureof salaries(NPR, etc.) earn more than the President of the USA.

NPR will tell you it receives very little public money to operate, but that is not true. They receive a bulk of their money from it's network of stations, which do receive public funding. It's a shell game of subterfuge designed to muddy and confuse the debate.

With the unjust firing of Juan Williams several months ago and the just revealed taped conversations revealing the contempt that the CEO of NPR has for the ones who actually pay his salary, the US citizens, I think it is long overdue to let Big Bird learn how to fly on his own. We need to cut off all the hundreds of millions of subsidies. Let them compete in the free market of ideas and succeed or fail by what they produce....It's not like we don't have to sit through insufferable amounts of commercials because they're publicly funded. We have to see who their corporate sponsors are and interminable pledge breaks...so wtf (Winning! the future)

So it's time for the children to leave the nest, cut the umbilical cord and learn to survive on their own. I know it will make many cry and say how heartless we are to throw Big Bird and Co. out, but sometimes tough love is the best thing for kids. They can face the same daunting challenges that the rest of us adults have to face and succeed or fail in the effort.

And if they fail, they can pick themselves up, dust themselves off and try again.

Editors update 5/6/11: Taxpayer Funded NPR Brings Rock Stars to Swanky Washington Party
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/doug-heye/2011/04/29/tax-payer-funded-npr-brings-rock-stars-to-swanky-washington-party