![]() ![]() Many of the shorts were permanently burned into the minds of young viewers.Īlong with the educational content, the series won accolades for the consistently high quality of the songs - besides Dorough and Ahrens, performers included genre legends Jack Sheldon, Blossom Dearie, Essra Mohawk, and Grady Tate - and the overall cleverness of the lyrics and animation. The Saturday morning format provided a perfect vehicle to repeat the shorts over and over until the lesson was learned from the start, Schoolhouse Rock! was a roaring success as both education and entertainment, running for 37 episodes repeated endlessly over 12 years. Jones loved the concept, Eisner persuaded his regular program lineup to snip three minutes off each program's running time to accommodate it, and a legend was born. The initial pitch was made to Michael Eisner, then vice president of ABC's children's programming, who brought along one Chuck Jones. Thus the idea to introduce basic learning concepts to young minds via simple-but-catchy rock, jazz, folk and pop tunes - most of them written by jazz mainstay Bob Dorough and eventual Broadway lyricist Lynn Ahrens - accompanied by entertaining visuals, animated by a team led by Tom Yohe. Networks couldn't advertise things related to the cartoons they were airing in those timeslots, so there was an opening for educational shorts even after running through cereal commercials.Īt around the same time, advertising executive David McCall noticed that while his son was struggling in school, he had no trouble remembering the lyrics to his favorite songs. Prokop, citing a New York Times story, notes that a tax lawyer once described these efforts as a “back-door way for the Bush Administration to achieve what it cannot get from Congress, which is repeal of the estate tax.Schoolhouse Rock! was a series of educational short cartoons - so short, that they'd fit into the space of a single commercial break - that aired Saturday mornings on ABC, originally between 19 and again from 1993–2000.īack in the day, Saturday morning children's programming was supposed to be at least tangentially educational, and Merchandise-Driven advertising was severely limited. Bush's Administration weakened estate tax enforcement-by reducing staff and ordering fewer audits. A classic case was the way President George W. ![]() ![]() On all three, Republican presidents have already used their authority to subvert legislation’s intention. Writing at Vox, Andrew Prokop considers three issues on which a future Republican president might be inclined to go easy on enforcement-taxes, environmental regulations, and Obamacare. But it’s a lot less clear whether Obama has truly expanded conventional understanding of executive authority. ![]() Posner is probably right that, over the long run, conservative presidents can take more advantage of executive authority than liberal presidents can. While a President Rand could gut the regulatory state, the opportunities for a President Hillary Clinton to advance liberalism through non-enforcement are much less fecund. A conservative president can refuse to enforce laws, but a liberal president can’t enforce laws that don’t exist. The great bulk of federal law is liberal economic regulation, not conservative morals regulation. And while immigration laws are the type that liberals might not love, Posner says, there are many more that Republicans would want to subvert: As Posner sees it, presidential discretion largely means the ability not to enforce a law-or, at least, to enforce it lightly. Its thesis is that Republicans should actually celebrate Obama’s decision, even though they oppose what he’s trying to do on immigration, because Republicans can do more with a powerful executive than liberals can. One, by Eric Posner, appears at the New Republic. Two recent articles provide two very different perspectives on that question. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |