The newly elected Republicans who recently took control of both of Minnesota’s legislative houses, though, are residents of Tea Party America, and in Tea Party America the government has no business spending money on anything besides arming militias, to shoot abortion providers. Take it away, House Majority Leader Matt Dean:

Dean also singled out a $45,000 payment of Legacy money that was made last year to science fiction writer Neil Gaiman for a four-hour speaking appearance. Dean said that Gaiman, “who I hate,” was a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota.”

Why would Dean have anything against internationally beloved author Neil Gaiman? Does he hate enchantment?

As Gaiman explained at length, at the time the library story “broke,” he was offered that much money — his regular speaking fee — by a Stillwater, Minnesota, library that had to use the Legacy money (which is meant to do things like bring famous authors to suburban libraries) by the end of the month, or else lose it. Gaiman gave the money to charity.

Gaiman responded to Dean on his blog today, and it is well worth reading:

I think that Minnesota has things it can be proud of – quality of life things, that make it really good to live in this part of the world. The things that have kept me out here for twenty years. One of the biggest things is it has really good Public Radio and a thriving, active, involved arts scene. It makes me sad to see people trying to crush or even diminish these as part of their political agenda.

And also I think that if you’re a Republican in Minnesota, and you read my books or my blog, you could do worse than tell Matt Dean what you think of this kind of bullying schoolyard nonsense from someone who’s meant to be representing you. Honestly, it makes you all look bad.

Oh, right, public radio. This bizarre attack on a writer who is probably far too successful and popular to still warrant the “cult” label was part of a push to defund public radio.

But it is a sort of half-assed attempt at defunding, honestly. Minnesota Public Radio (distributor of “A Prairie Home Companion,” producer of “Marketplace” and “The Splendid Table”) receives a bit of money from the Legacy Fund. After the panel in charge of giving out the Legacy Funds approved legislation giving public radio and television millions of dollars, Leader Dean was forced to remind Rep. Dean Urdhal, the Republican chairing the House Legacy Funding Division panel, that Republicans hate public radio. So Urdahl introduced a new amendment that would make everyone compete for grants, instead of just being given the money by the legislature. MPR will very likely still get money. Socialism… averted?

Attacking “A Prairie Home Companion” and the author of “Coraline” is deeply stupid Republican overreach — about as tone-deaf as a heartland Democrat threatening to take your guns away — because those things are very popular, among many groups of voters, across Minnesota and the country as a whole. Dean may hate Gaiman, for reasons unknown, but there are a lot of teenaged goth girls (and women who were once teenaged goth girls) in the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs, and Rep. Dean will surely regret crossing them.

BBC, the largest broadcaster in the world, takes in $7.5 billion in income a year. If Americans were right, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would have a bigger budget than every military on Earth besides our own. NPR would beat China in an arms race.

What would the Corporation for Public Broadcasting even do with that kind of money, besides continue to have a liberal bias and support the establishment of sharia law? We have some guesses:

• “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” would be broadcast live from a moon base.
• PBS would require a donation of at least $100,000,000 before sending you a DVD box set of a Fleetwood Mac reunion show.
• $250,000,000 gets you a genuine Thai silk tote bag filled with precious stones. And one DVD documentary on the making of “The Red Green Show.”
• “Frontline” would always be in IMAX 3-D.
• Robert Siegel and Neil Conan voiced at all times by Kiefer Sutherland and Morgan Freeman.
• Childrens Television Workshop would purchase the entirety of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in order to film Sesame Street live on location.
• Click and Clack would be androids.
• “Are You Being Served?” would be painstakingly digitally altered until funny.
• Terry Gross would conclude interviews by deciding if the subject lives or dies.
• Ken Burns documentaries would be produced with original footage obtained via time travel.
• Every home, office and classroom in the nation would have a radio that can be turned down, but never completely off.
• Juan Williams would be missing and presumed killed by an unmanned CPB drone.
• “And part three of our show: What do you do when your mega-yacht’s death ray disintegrates your mother-in-law? It’s David Sedaris on the best Thanksgiving ever.”
• Garrison Keillor could finally get that thing with his sinuses cleared up.

Nonetheless, reading those comments and criticisms made us realize there are a couple of points that these two wizened veterans of public broadcasting — with the multiple tote bags and coffee mugs to prove it — would like to clarify.

For one, when we described the right-wing media machine as NPR’s “long-time nemesis,” it was not to suggest that somehow public radio is its left-wing opposite. When it comes to covering and analyzing the news, the reverse of right isn’t left; it’s independent reporting that toes neither party nor ideological line. We’ve heard no NPR reporter — not a one — advocating on the air for more government spending (or less), for the right of abortion (or against it), for or against gay marriage, or for or against either political party, especially compared to what we hear from Fox News and talk radio on all of these issues and more.

Take, for example, talk jocks John and Ken on KFI-AM Radio in Los Angeles. They beat on California’s state Legislature like a cheap piñata. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Within a matter of moments, they refer to various lawmakers as ‘traitorous pigs,’ ‘con artist’ and ‘Republican dirt bag.’ They use gruesome sound effects to suggest the mounting of one legislator’s head on a stake — his entry into the duo’s hall of shame.”

The personalities, “whose frequent targets are taxes, labor unions and illegal immigrants, not only reach more listeners than any other non-syndicated talk show in California but also have the ear — and fear — of Sacramento’s minority party.

“‘There is nary a conversation about the budget that does not involve the names John and Ken,’ said Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), the state Senate leader.” And that’s true whether what they say is grounded in fact or simply made up wholesale out of flimsy, opinionated cloth.

So what do conservatives really mean when they accuse NPR of being “liberal”? They mean it’s not accountable to their worldview as conservatives and partisans. They mean it reflects too great a regard for evidence and is too open to reporting different points of views of the same event or idea or issue. Reporting that by its very fact-driven nature often fails to confirm their ideological underpinnings, their way of seeing things (which is why some liberals and Democrats also become irate with NPR).

That’s why our favorite new word is “agnotology.” According to the website WordSpy, it means “the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt,” a concept developed in recent years by two historians of science at Stanford University, Robert Proctor and his wife, Londa Schiebinger.

Believing that global climate change is a myth is one example of the kind of ignorance agnotologists investigate. Or the insistence by the tobacco industry that the harm caused by smoking is still in dispute. Or the conviction that Barack Obama is a closet Muslim, and a radical one at that, who may not even be from America.

Those first two illusions have been induced by big business in a cynical attempt to keep pumping profits from deadly pollutants, whether fossil fuels or nicotine. The third, dreamed up by fantasists of the right-wing fringe, is in its own way just as toxic and has been tacitly, sometimes audibly, encouraged by certain opponents of President Obama who would perpetuate any prevarication to further blockade his agenda and deny him and fellow Democrats reelection.

None of them is true; rather, they fly in the face of those of us who belong to what an aide to George W. Bush famously called “the reality-based community [who] believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” He told journalist Ron Suskind, ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

To the accusers of NPR, the created reality of however they define “liberal” is not the same as what they mean when they call themselves “conservative.” If it were, the two would be exact reverse images of each other. Where media are concerned, all you have to do to know this is not the case is to hold them up, side-by-side. If “liberal” were the counterpoint to “conservative,” NPR would be the mirror of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and James O’Keefe, including the use of their techniques as well as content. Clearly it isn’t. To charge otherwise is a phony gambit aimed at nothing less than quashing the public’s access to non-ideological journalism, narrowing viewpoints to all but one. We know from firsthand experience that any journalist whose reporting threatens the conservative belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists at Fox and on talk radio.

Remember, for one, when Limbaugh took journalists to task for their reporting on torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted by American soldiers on their captives as a little necessary “sport” for soldiers under stress, saying: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation … you [ever] heard of the need to blow some steam off?”

The Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by the Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting prison abuse. Half or more said they “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic.” Many of those people came after NPR for reporting what actually happened at Abu Ghraib.

But to clear up one other thing, what NPR also isn’t, is what it could be.

In our support for its much-needed survival, admittedly we may have been a bit fulsome in our praise. Like many commentators who posted after our previous two pieces, as regular listeners we know there is room for improvement, the need for more diverse voices and for more courageous journalism that reports not merely what the powerful say but what they actually do for their paymasters.

Americans need more and sustained reporting on what the journalist William Greider calls “the hard questions of governance” — those questions of how and why some interests are allowed to dominate the government’s decision-making while others are excluded. Who gets the money and who has to pay? Who must be heard on this question and who can be safely ignored? None execute this kind of reporting better than Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on “Democracy Now,” which, while carried by many public radio and television stations, is not distributed nationally by either NPR or PBS. Public media — radio and television — too rarely challenge the dictum: “News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.”

Yet in the words of Confucius, better a diamond with a flaw — a big flaw — than a pebble without. For all that it provides — but mainly because it is a true journalistic, rather than ideological, alternative to commercial and partisan broadcasting — we continue to support government funding of public media until such time as a sizable trust or some other solid, independent source of funding, unfettered by political interference, can be established that will free us to tell the stories America most needs to hear. Short of that we’ll need the courage, as one of our journalistic heroes, the late George Seldes, wrote, “to tell the truth and run.”

“It is time for American citizens to stop funding an organization that can stand on its own feet,” said Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., the sponsor. He said it was not a question of content — which many conservatives say has a liberal bias — but whether taxpayer dollars should go to nonessential services. “As a country we no longer have this luxury.”

Other Republicans also denied that the measure was a vendetta against NPR, although the organization left itself open to conservative attacks last week when an executive, talking to conservative activists posing as members of a fake Muslim group, was caught on camera deriding the tea party movement and saying the NPR would be better off without federal funding. Both the executive and the president of NPR resigned after the incident.

“Nobody’s on a rampage,” said Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who also asked “why should we allow taxpayer dollars to be used to advocate one ideology?”

Democrats retorted that the legislation would do nothing to reduce the deficit and would be a blow to local public stations that rely on the national programs that include “Morning Edition” and “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me” to attract listeners. “This bill would pull the plug,” said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass. “It would snuff out stations from coast to coast, many in rural areas where the public radio station is the primary source of news and information.”

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., displayed a blow-up photo of the two brothers who host the car advice show “Car Talk” with the caption, referring to their nicknames, reading “Save Click and Clack.”

The White House said it “strongly opposed” the bill and voiced similar objections, saying “undercutting funding for these radio stations, notably ones in rural areas where such outlets are already scarce, would result in communities losing valuable programming, and some stations could be forced to shut down altogether.”

The move to curtail federal subsidies for NPR follows a House vote last month, as part of the GOP plan to cut federal spending for the remainder of this budget year, to take back some $86 million budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the parent organization of NPR. That proposal, which also faces opposition in the Senate, does not provide for $430 million in future spending for CPB.

Thursday’s bill would ban federal funding of NPR, which was about $5 million in fiscal year 2010. It would bar public radio stations from using their federal grant money to pay dues to NPR. That total was about $2.8 million in fiscal 2010.

It also would bar public radio stations from using federal funds to buy NPR programs. NPR received $56 million in programming fees last year, its largest single source of revenue. Stations could still use federal money to produce their own programs.

In fiscal years 2009 and 2010 the CPB distributed federal grant money to more than 600 public radio stations, which used that money to buy programs and pay dues to NPR.

NPR says that of its $145.5 million in budgeted revenues in the fiscal year ending last September, only 1. 9 percent came from station dues. The biggest chunk, $63 million or 43 percent, came from station program fees. Another $36 million, or 24.7 percent, was derived from corporate sponsorships. About 3 percent came from grants from federally funded agencies such as the CPB and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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The bill is H.R. 1076.

Online:

Congress: http://thomas.loc.gov

Keillor told The Associated Press in a follow-up e-mail Wednesday that he’ll be 70 in the spring of 2013, “and that seems like a nice round number.”

“The reason to retire is to try to avoid embarrassment; you ought to do it before people are dropping big hints. You want to be the first to come up with the idea. You don’t want to wait until you trip and fall off the stage,” Keillor told the AP.

For the first time this season, “A Prairie Home Companion” had a guest host on Jan. 15, when singer and fiddler Sara Watkins of the band Nickel Creek hosted the show from St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater, with Keillor appearing as a featured guest. Keillor said at the time that he had never gotten to see the show himself and wanted “to stand in the back of the hall and watch for a few minutes.”

Keillor has ruminated before about retirement. In 1987, he surprised his fans by quitting “A Prairie Home Companion.” But he returned to the airwaves two years later with a new touring show, “American Radio Company of the Air,” and a few years after that he returned to St. Paul and reclaimed “A Prairie Home Companion” as the name of his variety show.

In 2009, Keillor suffered a minor stroke but was back on air three weeks later. He created “A Prairie Home Companion” in 1974 and celebrated the show’s 35th anniversary in 2009 with a show in central Minnesota’s Stearns County, which inspired Keillor’s mythical hometown of Lake Wobegon — “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.” The show is now broadcast on nearly 600 public radio stations and heard by more than 4 million people each week.

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Online:

AARP Bulletin: http://www.aarp.org/bulletin

A Prairie Home Companion: http://www.PrairieHome.org