Michael Bellavia

How lame was Washington's "Million Puppet March" yesterday? So lame that I couldn't even find a story about the event at the Associated Press's national web site.

Planning for the event began several weeks ago after GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in the first presidential debate that despite his love for Sesame Street's Big Bird he would not advocate further public funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Oddly, an unbylined AP story at the Washington Post written sometime earlier this week which was apparently not treated as a national story gave readers the impression that the idea for the march had only come up a few days earlier (posted in full because of its brevity and for fair use and discussion purposes):

My initial reaction to the story by Daniel Trotta at Reuters about plans for a "Million Muppet March" in Washington on November 3, the Saturday before Election Day, was that the whole thing doesn't seem as wildly spontaneous, grass roots-driven, and coincidental as presented. It turns out that it isn't. As Lee Cary at TeaParty911.com found (HT Newsalert via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit), the guiding force of the enterprise is an animation company executive who "just so happens" to have a lot to gain if the status quo of government funding of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting continues. It's also interesting how he's apparently able to use the Muppet characters in the "march" without worrying about getting anyone's publicly expressed permission to do so.

First, here are several paragraphs from Trotta's tripe (bolds are mine throughout this post):