The agreement announced Sunday averts a possible partial government shutdown when the new budget year begins Oct. 1 and pushes final decisions until after the November election. Bipartisan negotiations began in earnest shortly after a failed vote last week in the House.

with leadership agreeing to extend funding into mid-December. That gives the current Congress the ability to fashion a full-year spending bill after the Nov. 5 election, rather than push that responsibility to the next Congress and president.

Well, that’s not good. Expect a shutdown if the GOP loses the presidency.

    • FiveEnglish
      1•17 hours ago

      Manufacturing Consent has this to say about PBS:

      Globalization, along with deregulation and national budgetary pressures, has also helped reduce the importance of noncommercial media in country after country. This has been especially important in Europe and Asia, where public broadcasting systems were dominant (in contrast with the United States and Latin America). The financial pressures on public broadcasters has forced them to shrink or emulate the commercial systems in fund~raising and programming, and some have been fully commercialized by policy change or privatization. The global balance of power has shifted decisively toward commercial systems.

      James Ledbetter points out that in the United States, under incessant right-wing political pressure and financial stringency, “the 90s have seen a tidal wave of commercialism overtake public broadcasting,” with public broadcasters" rushing as fast as they can to merge their services with those offered by commercial networks." And in the process of what Ledbetter calls the “mailing” of public broadcasting, its already modest differences from the commercial networks have almost disappeared. Most important, in their programming “they share either the avoidance or the defanging of contemporary political controversy, the kind that would bring trouble from powerful patrons.”