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Obama Budget Plan Would Save 'One Life To Live'
WASHINGTON (CAP) - President Barack Obama continued to reveal details of his deficit-reduction plan this week, including a controversial provision that would raise taxes on the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans in order to save the recently cancelled ABC soap opera One Life To Live.
"One Life To Live is, uh, part of the cornerstone, the bedrock of American culture," said Obama in a press conference Monday. "How many of us spent lonely afternoons following the adventures of, you know, Bo and Clint Buchanan, and Viki, who suffered from dissociative identity disorder and became Niki, the sexually promiscuous party girl, and Karen and Larry Wolek, who, uh, had control chips implanted in their brains by the evil Dr. Ivan Kipling."
Obama recalled rearranging the rabbit-ears antenna on his small, black-and-white TV set as a youth in order to pick up the soap opera. "It was often very tough to get the signal there in Kenya," he said. "By which I mean, of course, Honolulu."
The budget provision, which would filter funds gleaned from the tax hike directly to ABC-TV in much the same way PBS and National Public Radio receive government funding, has not surprisingly drawn fire from the GOP.
"This type of thing is exactly the reason the country is in the fiscal trouble it's in," said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), whose own budget plan would drastically slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public education, environmental protection, social services and snow plowing, as well as eliminate road repairs on thoroughfares that go by senior centers and homeless shelters.
Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl - who drew fire recently when he said that "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does" is abortions, when the number is actually 3 percent - also spoke out against Obama's plan.
"Actually, what I had meant to say is the well over 90 percent of what One Life To Live characters do is get abortions," said Kyl. A CAP News study of episodes of the soap opera since its debut in 1968 shows that in this case, Kyl's figure is actually a little low.
And potential Republican presidential contender Sarah Palin, star of Sarah Palin's Alaska, called Obama's One Life To Live plan "redonkulous," saying, "Who wants to watch a big, dysfunctional family of crazies with dumb names say stupid things and go all over the place having babies and silly stuff like that?"
Obama said he remains undeterred, however. "To restore fiscal responsibility, we all need to share in the sacrifice - but we don't have to sacrifice the America we believe in," he said. "That's an America, you know, where Clint Buchanan can go back in time to 1888, or, uh, Viki Buchanan can get trapped in the lost underground city of Eterna and discover she had a long-lost daughter she never knew about because she'd been hypnotized to forget the birth."
Obama did say he was willing to compromise, though, noting that his plan includes no funding to save the also-cancelled All My Children.
"That show is just silly," Obama said.
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