“If the rescission bill becomes law, hundreds of cities and towns, especially those outside major metropolitan areas, will be affected,” continues the editorial board. “Nearly one in five NPR member stations could close down without federal funding, one analysis found. Listeners in the Midwest, South and West would be the hardest hit, becoming less informed about their communities.”

Such arguments are weak in a pluralistic media environment. You do not need state provision of Sesame Street. You can get newer seasons for free on YouTube, or access the rich archive from the ’70s and ’80s via HBO Max (or via some YouTube spelunking). Other shows have emerged since Sesame Street’s inception in 1969 that teach kids similar lessons. Now, the issue is not that kids have too little access to educational shows, but rather that many of them spend too much time watching screens.

Local news is in decline because there are natural limitations on how large the market can be, because sometimes there’s just not that much stuff happening, and because sometimes the quality of reporting is terrible. But massive operations like The New York Times still send reporters out to places where natural disasters have hit—like Kerrville, Texas—to do on-the-ground reporting. With scale comes a greater ability to dispatch reporters in such a manner. It’s not like this rural Texas tragedy has gone unreported.

The initial examples cited don’t help their argument either: The U.S. Postal Service takes forever to get our mail to us compared to DHL, Amazon, or UPS. Maybe it’s outlasted its usefulness, artificially propped up by government funding. (But at least it gave us some wild scandals and the term going postal.) Libraries are not exactly super useful in an era where people have near-universal internet access.

Like the phoenix, Big Bird will never truly die, even if the rescission bill passes. He will be reanimated via HBO Max and YouTube archives, no matter what happens to PBS. It’s just that cuts must be made somewhere, to save taxpayer dollars, so why not start here?

Jerome’s in the house (for now): “President Trump denied that he was planning an attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell after polling Republican lawmakers during a closed-door meeting about whether he should oust him,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The president suggested he could attempt to remove Powell for cause, arguing the central bank spent too much money on renovations of two historic office buildings.” But he also keeps claiming that Powell refuses to cut interest rates, and is trying to blame the state of the economy on him (as opposed to his own tariffs).

Kevin Hassett is a top contender for who would replace him (Trump has flip-flopped on firing Powell so many times that we probably shouldn’t assume anything is for certain). Hassett currently serves as director of the National Economic Council and believes that the Fed cutting rates before last year’s election, then putting rate cuts on hold during the early days of this administration, “raises the specter that they’re not being non-partisan, they’re not being independent.”

Scenes from New York: Some encouraging signs are emerging that people are mobilizing against socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who recently won the Democratic primary. Mayor Eric Adams’ fundraising haul, from June 10 to July 11, amounts to $1.5 million—a chunk of which has come from outside New York City (mostly Florida, not his pals in Turkey). For that same period, Mamdani has raised $852,000 (though $256,000 of that sum is eligible for public matching funds, so his actual haul could be closer to $1.1 million). Mamdani, too, is getting a ton of out-of-state contributions: an eye-popping 45 percent of contributions came from outside New York. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has raised only a paltry $64,000.