For those that believe the United States of America can no longer afford to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that, in turn, funds the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television network, NPR (National Public Radio), and a myriad of other public, non-commercial broadcasters, take a few moments to view this graphic.

Wow! We could all each save a whole $1.03 every year! That sure would buy a lot, wouldn’t it? Most importantly, it buys the silence of programs like Frontline so citizens will no longer be incorrectly influenced by leftist, socialist, Jesus-hating, homosexual propaganda telling people lies about how Wall Street caused the financial crisis when we all know it was labor unions. It would free the airwaves of this trash that could then be filled by fine, upstanding Christian broadcasters preaching the word of the Lord…well, except those parts about loving thy neighbor and turning the other cheek because then people might not think its a good idea to keep an extra watchful eye on non-Protestant immigrants because we all know that Jesus hates people like that because they take our jobs and waste our tax money, right? Let us especially not forget that it was wrong of PBS to keep William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Firing Line on the air for ages when it was the only mass media outlet for conservative thought through the entire sinful decade of the 1970′s because political ideas should not be subsidized by the government.

All sarcasm aside now, the Republican Party’s reason for wanting to shut down all public broadcasting is so transparent that I’m surprised they even bother with the “We can’t afford it” line.  OK, let me take on the argument of it being part of a whole range of cuts that will get the federal budget back in line.  I’m sorry to say that they won’t.  The budget cuts being proposed by both parties are only for the discretionary spending portion of the budget.  In plain terms, that is the relatively small portion of money left over after we have paid for Medicare, Medicade, Social Security, defense, interest on the federal debt, and the “black budget.”  It is a mere drop in the bucket that won’t make one bit of a difference in how deep this country is in red ink even if we cut off all discretionary spending.

Let me say that again.  We could cut all discretionary spending and it would not reduce the federal deficit.

Maybe some of the people reading this don’t ever watch PBS and, thus, don’t want to pay even $1.03 per year to fund it.  Can anyone be serious that it is not worth that measly amount of money if only to keep Sesame Street on the air?  In a world where most people on the anti-PBS side of the fence also greatly complain about our poor education system, loss of values, and how television is full of trash (especially the portion aimed at children), I cannot see how anyone could think of killing off Sesame Street with its proven educational and moral value to society no matter how many times Rush Limbaugh and the bastion of misinformation, Fox News, told them that something on Frontline was nothing but socialist propaganda.

This just goes to show how out-of-whack this country is right now where anything that truly benefits the lower classes like free, public broadcasting is twisted into being a hand-out and a waste plus how any news reporting that exposes corporate malfeasance, military abuse, or government corruption is perverted into being a socialist plot.  Too many don’t see such things as an investment in either people as individuals or a free informed, and well-rounded overall society.  Worse yet, they don’t see the proverbial man behind the curtain who has big, commercial plans for all of those television and radio frequencies that would open up almost overnight if the CPB is shut down — stations that would not serve the public interest as was so wisely deemed by a smarter Congress many decades ago but would only serve the interest of keeping money, power, and the ability to shape public opinion in the hands of a few.

I hope any anti-PBS people will think about this a little more carefully, especially if they ever had children and might remember watching Sesame Street or Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood with them.  Maybe they will think about it a little more if they see if they can find $1.03 in loose change down between the cushions of their sofas.

Yes, that’s right…just $1.03 per year!  Is anybody other than a politician or delusional “Tea Party” freak really so short-sighted, ignorant, heartless, and narrow-minded to truly believe that this is a budget cut worth making when it wouldn’t make any difference in the federal debt or one’s future tax liability?  Sadly…yes, they are.  Thus, it is time for those of us that appreciate truth, honesty, and diversity — whether moderately conservative, liberal, or somewhere in between — to do two things.  First, write to both of your U.S. Senators and make sure they do not allow the CPB to be de-funded.  Second…start couch-fishing for that $1.03 every year because, whether it is in 2012, 2016, or 2020, barring a huge, unforeseen shift in politics and American opinion, any funding for the CPB will probably disappear one way or another so it will be up to all of us who realize its value to the country to keep PBS, NPR, and all of the rest on the air.

NOTE: Credit for bringing the graphic above to my attention and inspiring this entry goes to the Creative Director of PBS Kids, Mr. Wil Wheaton, thanks to a post he made on WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR.

For those that have been around the World Wide Web as long as I have, there have certainly been a lot of changes.  Trends have come and gone and those sites that have not kept up with the times seem ancient-looking even though the “real” time that has passed is barely a blip in history.

While it has been nice to see many things improve design-wise on the Internet from the days when almost everything was nothing but text and hyperlinks, some things have been downright horrible.  This ranges from the overuse (or, any use) of Flash to those that believe it’s really a good idea to make their navigation links off-white on a white background because it looks cool to some silly hipster that thinks he is god’s gift to Web design.  Sometimes, it makes one wish for something more standard even if it ends up cluttered or clunky looking.

It is becoming more and more difficult to find a “live” website that uses some sort of older design.  About the only ones I can recall off the top of my head that are of any consequence are the Astronomy Picture of the Day site that probably hasn’t been redesigned since 1995 and some other sub-sites and pages deep within NASA.gov that might be even older.

Even most personal websites have changed greatly since they began to take off around 1996 when the Web really started going commercial.  Most have either turned into blogs with fairly basic designs (just like this site) or have taken advantage of professionally-designed albeit occasionally repetitive templates.

All of these things flooded back to me and came together in my mind when I made one of my regular visits to a long-running and somewhat historic website that, after being about the same since I first discovered it in 1998, finally got itself a new and very modern-looking design.  Adding more to my recollections of the Internet’s relatively brief history was that this website might be better remembered by many for its appearances on other websites, especially all of those plethora of personal home pages that cropped up through the late 1990′s on free hosts like GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, FortuneCity, TheGlobe, and so many more.

That is because anybody that bothered to surf anywhere on the Internet outside of Yahoo between at least 1998 and…oh, let’s say 2004 to be generous…has seen this little gizmo or its smaller version probably more times than they could ever count.

Yep, it’s none other than the good ol’ Weather Underground “sticker” (what we would now call a “widget“).  Even back in 1998 it amazed me how anybody thought that the readers of their personal website (no doubt also filled with a plethora of other animated gifs) would give even the slightest flying fuck about what the temperature was in the author’s home town.  Yet, these things were everywhere at one time even making it into those hideous, overly HTML-laden, MIDI-embedded e-mail signatures forced upon the world by the users of WebTV (now MSN TV).

However, in fairness, this was the era before RSS feeds, YouTube, and all kinds of other things including the National Weather Service (NWS) having a truly informative and well-updated website.  So, having some gizmo on a personal website that actually gave something resembling real-time information that was also free was a big step forward especially for those that were just barely learning how to cut-and-paste text much less learn basic HTML.  It certainly must have been a boon to Weather Underground as they eventually parlayed this attention into taking over the weather reporting chores for many major websites including those for television stations and newspapers and then even providing that information for their actual medium.

That’s a nice story for Weather Underground, a site that started before most of us had ever heard of the Internet thanks to the efforts of a few folks up at the University of Michigan (which is an even more wicked twist on the site’s name as that is where the original and much more infamous Weather Underground terrorist group came together).  It has developed into a nice little community over the years and has seemed to hold its ground even with the improvements in the NWS website (especially after being reorganized under weather.gov), the rise in popularity of The Weather Channel’s weather.com, and the advent of the Fox News-like AccuWeather (where no storm can ever be hyped enough until every man, woman, and child is cringing in their basement or hallway and praying to Jesus to spare them from the coming apocalypse).  While the NWS is best for warnings and Intellicast (the more technical version of weather.com) has a much less cluttered radar picture, Weather Underground still has the easiest and most understandable radar picture plus the added feature of taking reports from thousands of personal weather stations…allowing one to get readings close by that really mean something instead of from the nearest airport which never seem to match what is happening where people actually live and work.

While old and clunky, Weather Underground chugged along as it always had…until a couple of weeks ago when they finally unveiled their new design…much more open, less cluttered, and spartan than before but with all of the information still there…somewhere…got to relearn the whole damn thing now…kind of hard when the basic layout has been the same for at least 13 years if not longer.

And…even though their use has greatly declined, even the “stickers” got a major overhaul.  Gone on the new designs are the familiar rainbow and cloud with something more streamlined, modern…and boring.

The one nice thing I can say about the new Weather Underground designs — both on the stickers and of the website itself — is that they were kind enough not to do what pretty much every other big Internet website has done.  They didn’t force everybody to use the new one.  Finally, somebody took notice of how much hate and discontent happens at places like Facebook when they change the layout and don’t give people the option of using the old one instead (especially when most new layouts suck and do nothing but frustrate all of those people that aren’t educated enough to not use Internet Explorer as all of the Flash, JavaScript, and Silverlight crammed into new designs causes that piece of shit browser to run slower than Christmas or just plain crash).  Thus, people such as me who liked the somewhat cluttered but more condensed look of Weather Underground with its many plain old HTML text hyperlinks and the ever-cheesy but lovable smiley forecast icons can still use them all by clicking on the “Classic View” link.  New people get what they want, old people get what they want, and nobody walks away pissed — what a concept!

In this era of desktop widgets, free weather alert programs given out by local television stations, and services from a plethora of organizations that will call up one’s cell phone or send it a text message if threatening weather is on the horizon, perhaps it doesn’t mean much what Weather Underground does. Its “stickers” are hardly seen anymore unless one accidentally clicks on a link that goes to some abandoned page still up on Angelfire that was last updated on Saint Goatfelcher’s Day 1999 and, truth be told, it’s really mostly a site for weather geeks like me as most people get their weather from their favorite local television station’s website (although, in many cities, one of its four major stations gets its information directly from Weather Underground).

That being said, Weather Underground is still an important website in the history of the Internet, amazing that they held out for so long on their previous design, and stunning that they left the old design up to give everybody an option.  Whether one uses the site or not, it sets an example that I wish more companies and Web designers would follow in that keeping one’s long-time customers is just as important as attracting new ones.

Yesterday, I finally remembered to fill out my new voter registration form I needed to send in now that I live in a new city.  I came to the point where I was asked to fill in my political party.  I stopped to think about it for a good, long time.

You see, here in California, the voters took an understandable but still incorrect tactic to try and break the eternal logjam between Democrats and Republicans in our state and local governments.  In June 2010, they approved Proposition 14 which dictates that the state will now have “top two” primaries.  In short, this means that, in our June primary elections, all of the candidates for any particular office will be lumped together regardless of party.  Then, the two people receiving the most votes will face each other in the following November’s general election…yes, even if it is two Democrats or two Republicans running against one another.

The idea is that this will bring more moderates to the California State Legislature as well as the executive offices including the governor.  The unseen consequence is that it has absolutely killed any ability a third party might have to influence the electoral process.

I am well aware that no third party has a chance to win a major election, even in supposedly nutty California (which, outside of cities like Berkeley, is actually far less radical than people are led to believe).  However, even though relegated to the sidelines due to both voter choice and underhanded scheming on the part of both Democrats and Republicans (the one bipartisan effort that can always be counted upon), third parties still serve a great purpose in influencing elections either by bringing forward previously ignored issues or simply to register a protest vote against one’s usually-preferred major party.

It should also be a matter of fairness in what is supposed to be a free and open election process.  Yet, despite only occasional success by very unusual candidates such as Jesse Ventura winning the governorship in Minnesota, the Democrats and Republicans get scared shitless that somebody from the Green Party or Libertarian Party might get elected.  In fact, a Green did once make it into the California State Assembly (Audie Bock who won in a very weird special election) and the Democrats and Republicans gleefully worked together to make sure that she was rendered ineffective while in office and would not get reelected (although she admittedly did much on her own strategy-wise to ensure her defeat).

Without the ability to have a general election be one voice for each of California’s six long-running political parties, those looking for support for Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom, and American Independent candidates will have multiple Democratic and Republican voices — and, most importantly, money — crushing whatever good they might do for the process.  Admittedly, the good might be nothing but making sure the public realizes that some of these third-party ideas are bat-shit crazy.  Still, this is America where we were all taught that everybody should be heard from the hood-wearing fascist to the fist-pumping communist.  Sadly, it is our two major parties that use the political tactics of those totalitarian systems in order to shut-out other viewpoints.

I find it a sad day to finally have it directly in my face that I will have no choice in every November’s general election but to vote for the lesser of two evils.  I haven’t always “thrown away my vote” as people always say when finding out somebody voted for a third party candidate, but I like to have the option.

“Who did you register with,” you ask?  Well, it was a hard choice between three options.  I immediately threw out two because the American Independent Party is veiled Nazism and the Peace & Freedom Party is out-and-out communism.  That left me the non-mainstream choices of being an independent, a Libertarian (a.k.a. Republicans that secretly smoke pot), or a Green (a.k.a. Democrats that openly smoke pot).

I really thought strongly about registering as an independent since party affiliation no longer matters in California other than who sends me junk mail through the primary election season.  However, I decided against it since I want to protest this poor and possibly unconstitutional “top two” system.

I certainly gave the Libertarians a great deal of consideration.  Their message of sticking with the U.S. Constitution and truly respecting personal liberties of all types is extremely appealing.  However, until they show me how regular people will be able to realistically fight large corporate powers that might encroach upon their property and/or health, I just look at Libertarians as basically being anarchists in suits.

That left the Green Party.  Now, understand that, even though I chose to be a Green, it is more as a protest than an endorsement and I do not promise to vote for all or even any Green candidates in future elections.  I must admit that, after having been out in the wilderness in the wake of the last Ralph Nader campaign for President, the Greens (at least in California) offered a very common-sense slate of candidates in the Golden State for the 2010 election.  Thus, I was impressed because nobody was proposing any radical and truly socialist programs with which I strongly disagreed that the party’s last few sets of candidates had been offering.

Will the Green Party keep me on and not force me to change my official political allegiance whenever I have the thought to drop into my local post office and get another voter registration form?  It’s hard to say especially since the Greens have often not been able to properly organize a one-man run to a two-holer shithouse (which they claim is intentional and I claim is utterly fucking stupid).  If they keep bringing forth people to be on the ballot that have common sense and respect for the beliefs of others, I will probably stay on.  If they go back to being closer to the Peace & Freedom crowd, I’ll have to look again at registering as a Libertarian or an independent.

Still, it doesn’t really matter other than I want to make my small protest in wanting to have the freedom to choose somebody else besides a Democrat or Republican in a general election.  I don’t think that’s much to ask especially in light of what is happening in Egypt and other places in the Arab world right now.  How ironic that they are finally getting more choice in their leaders while Californians get less.