Today starts off strong and goes down smooth.

The future of public broadcasting

If I’ve learned one thing while painting the bedrooms in my house this week, it’s not to paint while you read the paper. With enough splatters of Antique Silver covering her words, a certain thrice-weekly Pilot columnist stops making sense, and begins to seem like she’s making unreasonable leaps of logic.

Big Bird and Pat Nixon - Photo by Nixon Administration

I’ve been listening to NPR instead, so forgive me if today’s dispatch reads like it would be better named If You Heard the Radio. Above is a link to the second hour of yesterday’s Diane Rehm Show, which provides a useful primer in why federal funding for public broadcasting is important and necessary. If I had a transcript, I’d copy thirty facts from it that help make the case. For instance, the cost of public broadcasting is one twenty-fifth of one percent of all federal discretionary funding. Rural PBS stations will fold without federal funding. And so on.

Then again, it’s possible WHRV didn’t play Diane Rehm’s second hour. Every day our local NPR station broadcasts only half of my favorite show, which by all rights we should hear from ten o’clock to noon. The 11 AM hour WHRV gives to On Point instead. When I moved here and discovered this, I wanted to end federal funding for NPR just to teach them a lesson. Actually that’s a lie—but the reasoning behind my lie is exactly why Republicans want to slash public broadcasting.

A considerable fraction of the legislature both in Washington and in Richmond remains angry that news analyst Juan Williams was fired last year for contract violations. It’s not firsthand anger; there just happens to be a certain man on a certain other radio show telling them what to think. To soothe their vindictive feelings on behalf of that person, Sesame Street may be stolen from kids all over the United States.

This isn’t breaking news, and although there’s a CPB funding bill in the legislature currently, I don’t know what Richmond legislators have said about it in the last few days. The truth is I’ll be an unreliable If You Read the Paper writer for a while. You see, I can hardly bear to read local news in January. Opening the paper to Virginia politics during the legislative session feels like checking a credit card balance after a weeks-long spending spree—that is, unpleasant enough that it’s easier not to look.

Oh, one more fact from Diane Rehm: In Britain each citizen pays $85 per year in taxes toward the BBC. In Canada it’s about $35 per person per year to the CBC. Japan’s public broadcasting network takes over $60 from each adult annually. Here in America it’s $1.57 per person per year, which works out to four tenths of a cent per day. When you see four tenths of a cent lying on the sidewalk, do you even stoop to pick it up?

Real fountain of youth? Non-surgical anti-aging techniques

Today at noon on HearSay with Cathy Lewis, which bills itself as Hampton Roads’s only locally produced, public affairs radio call-in program, you can learn about the “many ways you can help recapture a younger appearance both inside and out.” That sounds like a reasonably good show, but do you know what would make for an even better show?

Dear Cathy Lewis: Every morning, along with others at AltDaily, I open my inbox burning with the hope I’ll have an invitation to come on your program to discuss the many things AltDaily has accomplished. Every morning, when I see it isn’t there, I check my spam folder. Afterward I check my inbox again and then my spam again. Some say I’ll feel better if I abandon my hope. They say optimism is a disease. They don’t grasp that years from now, when I learn to access Gmail without that concomitant smolder of disappointment, only emptiness will have replaced it.

So here is my offer.

Two AltDaily writers or editors of your choice will appear on your show for free. You pick the date and the weekday. We’ll tell our readers to buy your merchandise. (I’m assuming you have merchandise.) At least one previous guest of yours has become president. If you’re the sort of host who likes for your guests to try to become president, we’ll make our best good-faith effort. We’re happy to talk about recapturing a younger appearance or whatever else you have in mind. Our voices are tailor-made for radio. If you write out a list of your favorite HearSay guests of all time, we’ll study it and embody their finest qualities.

Let me say in advance that I’m thrilled and honored by the invitation.

Tabula rasa

I’m tempted to keep running with If You Heard the Radio and link to nothing but NPR shows today, like this URL for The Thomas Jefferson Hour, but then I’d be engaging in a Juan Williams-level breach of contract. (I live in fear of AltDaily’s lawyers.) Suffice to say everyone should check out The Thomas Jefferson Hour, which WHRV plays every Tuesday at 1 PM.

This show is one of the reasons why WHRV is one of the reasons why Hampton Roads is a nice place to live. In this week’s episode, President Jefferson explains why a standing army or for that matter any type of professional military would be a disaster for American democracy.

Changing climate means changing oceans

Sorry, I can’t stop: today is Science Friday, so tune in later today to learn how the oceans are changing along with our climate—or, if you don’t believe climate change is happening, tune in to grow irate at the liberal media for letting climate scientists control the discourse on climate change.

I See Stars - Photo by NASA

Tattooine’s twin suns—coming to a planet near you as soon as Betelgeuse explodes

As long as we’re on science, there might be two suns in the sky by next year, says the Australian site news.com.au.

Right-to-work amendment clears Virginia House

Earlier this week, when U.S. House Republicans passed what they called the “Repealing the Job-Killing Healthcare Law Act,” most media outlets chose not to take up that propagandistic language as its own. Here in Virginia, though, the idiom of the “right to work” has taken hold to such a degree that nowhere does the Virginian-Pilot or Daily Press or Times-Dispatch or Washington Post or Roanoke Times mention that this amendment is as accurately named as 1984’s Ministry of Love.

Va. House backs removing mandated HPV vaccine for girls

The House of Delegates yesterday  “gave preliminary approval to a bill that would no longer require girls to receive the HPV vaccine,” reports the Post. Why do Republicans oppose the mandate? One reason is that “the measure passed in 2007 with a good amount of lobbying from the vaccine’s maker.”

Yes, we all know Republicans hate it when industries profit from health care. I guess the silver lining to increased cancer deaths will be the single-payer system they introduce to put a stop to this system of profiteering.

The American National Cancer Institute has said that “widespread vaccination has the potential to reduce cervical cancer deaths around the world by as much as two-thirds, if all women were to take the vaccine and if protection turns out to be long-term. In addition, the vaccines can reduce the need for medical care, biopsies, and invasive procedures associated with the follow-up from abnormal Pap tests, thus helping to reduce health care costs.”

Naturally the majority party in the House of Delegates opposes it.

There are exceptions, like Republican Del. Christopher P. Stolle of Virginia Beach. An obstetrician and gynecologist, Stolle stood yesterday to say that “I very, very strongly oppose this bill.” He believes the mandate’s end would mean “as many as 1,300 more women a year would die” and “that a vaccinated population offers benefits even to those who are not vaccinated because widespread immunization reduces the circulation of the virus in the rest of the community.”

But according to other Virginia Republican lawmakers, none of that matters, because a mandate is “government intrusion on personal liberty.”

Bill aimed at legalizing poker gets killed

Virginia Republicans vote for government intrusion on personal liberty.

Va. bill to tighten rules for abortion clinics advances

Virginia Republicans vote for government intrusion on personal liberty.

GOP’s ‘repeal amendment’ sounds like 1861, black caucus chair says

Virginia Republicans do their part to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Virginian secession.

Ten conservatives who will define 2011

Slate puts Ken Cuccinelli at number eight.

Discharging gays cost Pentagon $200 million

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell cost “an average of $52,800 per discharge” between 2004 and 2009—and despite popular perception to the contrary, it’s not over yet.

Don’t panic! Betelgeuse won’t explode in 2012

Never mind about that second sun, says Discovery News.