The news shows basically had the same things: Obama needs to "go big" with his jobs plan; Romney and Perry are going to be criticizing each other; the economy and who is going to get the blame. Yawn.

There were a couple off the mainstream discussions that I thought were really good. One was on "To the Contrary" where they discussed that a Penny's tshirt that Penny's had been offering that read something like "I'm too pretty to need an education. I can get my dumb brother to do everything for me..." or something like that. Apparently there was an organized campaign against Penny's to get it to quit selling these t shirts and Pennys did just that. I thought that the females on the panel shredded that pretty well, and it was interesting. The next discussion that I thought was above the pablum was on McLaughlin Group, which discussed federal government arts funding.

A Mr. Carney - a conservative that sat in where Monica Crowley used to sit (where did Monica go?) (Rich Lowery usually takes her place these days, but hey, it's a holiday weekend) made the absurd analogy that because the Beatles made so much money that they didn't need help from the National Endowment for the Arts. The fact is that when artists make it to the top levels of income, they aren't getting too many grants from the National Endowments. There are some very important grants that go to previously unrecognized or emerging artists that do need help because the private sector isn't supporting their art. But that seems to be typical of the kind of arguments that these type of views will make.

Carney and Pat Buchanan both mentioned the word "urine" in describing art that one would imagine was funded through the National Endowment. Buchanan used the term "cultural pork" in describing funding for artists. Yet, according to McLaughlin, the budget for the National Endowment was, did I hear this right, $49 million? That's a pittance in the contemporary federal budget.

A nation that abandons its creative freedom is a nation moving closer to repression. Hopefully a majority of people in the US understand that and know what their options are to avoid this direction.