Turns out Mister Rogers is a YouTube star … he was just forty years early. In 1969, Fred Rogers appeared before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Communications. His goal was to support funding for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, in response to significant proposed cuts by President Nixon.
Of course now that Mister Rogers is long gone, only Big Bird is left to save PBS from the new Republican menace, Mitt Romney…
So far as subversive pranks go, this one doesn’t seem especially anti-establishment. How about hacking some banks’ YouTube pages instead? CNN reports on the juvenile shocker:
Hackers appeared to have commandeered the YouTube page of the venerable “Sesame Street” children’s show Sunday, reprogramming the page with content brought to you by the letter “X.”
The show page was taken offline Sunday afternoon, and visitors were greeted with a message from the video website informing them it had been shut down “due to repeated or severe violations of our community guidelines.” Users who called up the account earlier had found explicit sex videos instead of Muppets …
The special episode is sponsored by Wal-Mart. Ain’t that a kicker? Gabriela Resto-Montero writes in the NY Daily News:
There’s a new kid on the block on “Sesame Street.” The long-running children’s show will debut a new muppet, Lily, in a primetime special that highlights childhood poverty and hunger, Entertainment Weekly reported.
Lily’s family background reflects the bitter economic reality of the 17 million American children who live without regular access to affordable and nutritious food, the magazine reported. Country music singer Brad Paisley and his wife, actress Kimberly Williams Paisley, will host the hour-long show, titled “Growing Hope against Hunger.”
“We are honored that Sesame Street, with its long history of tackling difficult issues with sensitivity, caring and warmth, asked us to be a part of this important project,” the couple said in a statement. The show will air Sunday, Oct. 9. It is sponsored by Walmart.
Way too hot for Elmo! The producers have yanked the segment from classic kids TV show Sesame Street and it’s rapidly disappearing from YouTube too. Check it out while you can 
If you fill out and send in this form, you can remove you or your ward’s name from a list of prospective American military recruits. Its completion moves a name into a “suppression file” in the Department of Defense’s Joint Advertising and Marketing Research & Studies. This makes it much harder for military recruiters to reach out to a prospective recruit whose contact information they may have acquired in various ways. Federal law actually requires that they have as much access to high school students as any other prospective employer.
Sesame Street has become loved and reviled for its socially-conscious programming; in one famous example from 1983, after an actor on the show died, Sesame Street took the chance to impart to very young children the temporal nature of human existence by marking his character’s death on the show. The forward-thinking episode invited some degree of opposition because even adults 
themselves continue to find death very uncomfortable or even impossible to psychologically confront.
Premiering tonight on PBS at 8 p.m. EDT is a program, “When Families Grieve,” that features four families, two of which features fathers from the American military…
Poor Count … One, two, three … via All That’s Interesting:
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Frazier Moore for AP, via SF Gate:
Big Bird is leaving Sesame Street!
That’s what he decides on the “Sesame Street” season opener. A rapping real-estate agent pitches him on migrating to a new habitat (“habitat,” the episode’s “Word on the Street”). After sizing up a beach and a swamp for his new habitat, Big Bird chooses a rain forest.
But then he comes to his senses with a musical number.
“Sesame Street is my habitat!” he sings. “Sesame Street is my home!”
Indeed, Big Bird — that towering, yellow-feathered 6-year-old — has been calling Sesame Street home for four decades, ever since the show premiered on Nov. 10, 1969.
Now, as it marks its 40th anniversary on Tuesday on PBS (check local listings), he remains an essential member of the flock…
