After Republican proposals to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities died in Congress this year, it might have seemed like there was a momentary lull in the fight over public funding for the arts. But at the state level, Republican governors and Republican-dominated legislatures are using difficult economic times as an excuse to slash the budgets of arts agencies and public broadcasters, or to try to eliminate them entirely.

In five states, Republican governors or legislatures have proposed either dismantling arts agencies or entirely eliminating some of their funding streams:

KANSAS: The most pitched battles are in Kansas, where in February, Gov. Sam Brownback signed an executive order dismantling the Kansas Arts Commission to make way for its replacement by a privately-funded group. That move meant Kansas will likely lose $778,200 from the National Endowment for the Arts and $437,767 in funding from the Mid-American Arts Alliance. Both organizations require states to support the arts before they’ll kick in funding. The Kansas legislature pushed back, overriding the executive order and approving $700,000 to fund the agency, but on May 10, Brownback told the entire staff of the Commission that their jobs would be eliminated in June. He has suggested he will veto the legislature’s appropriation when the budget arrives on his desk, a move that will have the same effect as the executive order.

Brownback may also line-item veto $1.5 million in state funding for public broadcasting, though the budget the legislature approved last Friday produces a $50 million surplus even with arts and broadcasting funding included.

SOUTH CAROLINA: Gov. Nikki Haley said in her State of the State address in January that “the role of South Carolina’s government in the year 2011 can no longer be to fund an Arts Commission that costs us $2.5 million. … When you release government from the things it should not be responsible for, you allow the private sector to be more creative and cost efficient.” State lawmakers essentially ignored her requests, moving forward budgets with a 6 percent funding cut and amendments that require the Commission to spend most of its funding to provide grants. Haley reaffirmed her desire to eliminate state funding for the Commission in April, raising the prospect that she will line-item veto funding for the Arts Commission and South Carolina’s educational television program, which she also targeted in her January address.

ARIZONA: Gov. Jan Brewer entirely eliminated funding for the Arizona Commission on the Arts’ general fund, though the agency still gets some money through its Trust Fund, which is supported by businesses filing fees in the state.

FLORIDA: Gov. Rick Scott initially proposed keeping the Division of Cultural Affairs alive, but declined to fund its grant programs; the state legislature sent him a budget with $2.5 million in grant funding. Scott’s still considering line-item vetoes to trim the budget further.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: The Republican-dominated House of Representatives moved to dissolve the state’s Department of Cultural Resources in March, but the Senate Finance Committee has stood behind the Department’s continued existence, though it has proposed $530,000 in cuts.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, which has been tracking proposals to eliminate or reorganize the organizations it represents, is also following proposals in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin to cut state arts funding by between 30 and 80 percent.

And state-level public broadcasting also remains vulnerable:

VIRGINIA: Gov. Bob McDonnell used a line-item veto to eliminate $424,000 in funding for public broadcasters to develop educational materials for the state’s public schools, efforts he said were “not core services of government.”

MAINE: Last week, Gov. Paul LePage proposed cutting all state funding for the Main Public Broadcasting Network.

NEW JERSEY: In December, Gov. Chris Christie moved to privatize the formerly public New Jersey Network—WNET, another public television outlet, may acquire NJN.

The sums of money involved in these fights are minuscule: at $11 million, New Jersey’s subsidy to the New Jersey Network is the largest appropriation at stake. Cutting funds for arts agencies and public broadcasters won’t balance state budgets. But it does give Republicans an excuse to strike a blow in the culture wars that it will be very hard for arts organizations to recover from.

Due both to the news that The Thin Man is headed for a remake, the failed remake of Arthur, and the fact that Netflix Instant is letting me make up for lost time and a childhood mostly without a television by giving me access to all of Cheers, I’ve been thinking a lot about alcohol and popular culture. Obviously, both Arthur and the Thin Man movies were built around fairly constant levels of alcohol consumption and a fairly unrepentant attitude towards that, which poses a real challenge to remaking them given how much attitudes about alcohol use and abuse have shifted since the originals were made. By contrast, Sam’s alcoholism is a constant if mostly unobtrusive undercurrent in the early seasons of Cheers.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a contemporary pop culture phenomenon that presents addiction in such a matter-of-fact way, as part of someone’s larger life, rather than the defining feature in it. We’ve got a lot of movies about the process of recovery, which makes sense, given the way we’ve made a cultural fetish of rehabilitation. And we have a lot of culture about the tragedy of addiction, whether it’s Nic Cage drinking himself to death in Vegas (life lesson: if that’s the only movie you have available to you at a slumber party, go with the board games), or the baroqueness of addiction, like in Bad Santa. But we don’t have a lot of shows or movies about the normalcy of addiction—I’d be curious as to how the Anonymous bit of A.A. plays into that—and the maintenance work of recovery, which is what most people who don’t fly off to lux treatment centers need to do. It’s an extraordinarily individual response to a condition with considerable societal costs. The universe, or rather, Funny or Die, appears to have answered my plea in the form of a short movie, Successful Alcoholics:

The final scene in particular is a great explication of the challenges of staying sober—or for that matter, walking away from the highs of manic depression in favor of a blander equilibrium. And it’s further proof that Lizzy Caplan is a marvelous actress. I’d love to see a feature-length version of this, with her starring in it.

Edit: It’s come to my attention that I didn’t do a great job of defining exactly what I’m looking for. As I said in comments, I’d like to see something that a) is in a contemporary setting, that b) isn’t specifically about addiction/the drug trade/in some other way an “issue” show or movie, where c) the character’s addiction is a day-to-day factor the way it is in Cheers, rather than relapse thrusting the issue to the fore only to have it not be talked about much otherwise. And I’d be curious to see this happen on a huge hit. Captain Cragen on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is a good example of this. But on a show like Bones, for example, where almost every episode ends in a bar, it would be interesting to see a character who goes along but doesn’t drink because he or she can’t. It’s always annoyed me how Booth’s gambling equation is generally only brought out for Very Special Episodes.

Spoiler alert, if you haven’t watched last night’s episode.

Glee has a lot of problems, but I’ve always thought that the show’s use of people with Down syndrome to punctuate its already wildly inconsistent emotional arcs rather than treating them as actual characters has been among the most troubling things about it. The fact that Sue Sylvester has a sister with Down syndrome and that she’s reasonably kind to a student with the condition have been a way for the writers to be extraordinarily lazy about writing that character: Sue is a cartoon villain, and those two characters pop up as a reminder that we’re supposed to like her sometimes against the mountain of available evidence. Sweeps week is a time when showrunners do all manner of crass things in the name of goosing ratings. But I thought killing Sue’s sister, and retroactively filling in the details of her life and personhood, to set the stage for Sue’s redemption was particularly distasteful. On the other hand (and I have no faith that the writers will remember this plot point beyond this episode) if Sue actually runs for Congress in Ohio on a platform of moderating health care costs, I am going to have to keep watching the show. I wish Glee would do something irredeemable so I could disavow it. But infuriatingly, it keeps clinging to actual ideas.