Mitt Romney started the primary campaign by suggesting that federal arts funding should be cut in half. Now, in an interview with Fortune Magazine, he’s gone a step further, and has said that as president, he would entirely eliminate the subsidies for PBS, and for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. That shift in his position might be more devastating to the people who benefit from those subsidies, both as employees and as audiences for the work supported by them. But it’s a move that, rather than clarifying Romney’s views on the proper scope of government, move him deeper into a dodge that reveals the fundamental unseriousness of beating up on the arts.

Talking about cutting arts funding is a diversionary tactic, both in terms of the amount of money that would actually be saved by doing so, and in terms of a philosophical discussion about what the proper funding of government is. The arts are an easy thing to toss to the crowd because you can cherry-pick an example of something that was funded by the NEA or NEH that will sound silly to someone, even if it has tremendous value in terms of preserving folklife traditions or ensuring access to arts and culture to rural communities. Arts funding is a way at getting at an interesting question. Should the government perform functions only that we believe shouldn’t be allowed to be controlled by private interests, like control, regulation, and deployment of the armed forces? Or should it step into voids left by private enterprise and personal charity when there are important functions that don’t appear to be supported by the market? That’s a real conversation, and scapegoating arts funding is a way of avoiding it.

And the profound unseriousness of going after spending by targeting programs with small budgets and without constituencies that are perceived to be powerful (or as is the case with Amtrak, something else Romney has proposed cutting funding for, with constituencies it’s politically valuable to rope-a-dope with) is really something that Republican politicians should be held accountable for. There are a lot of conservatives who enjoy the credit for talking about shrinking government but don’t actually want to be held responsible for taking things away from people, and the arts are a convenient space for them to stake that particular ground. It would be awfully nice if Paul Ryan’s addition to the Republican ticket forced Romney out of that space and into an honest debate about what shrinking government would mean. But it strikes me as more likely that Ryan will get pulled into this sliver of territory that lets conservatives talk and talk about spending, without actually having something meaningful, and difficult, to say.

Over at Deadline, Ray Richmond puts the five nominations for non-white actors out of 94 acting nominations handed out by the Emmys this year in historical context:

One of the dirty little secrets that haunts the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is its woeful (some might even say shameful) track record in honoring African-American actors and actresses with Emmy Awards. Consider that were Giancarlo Esposito of AMC’s Breaking Bad to win this year for supporting actor in a drama series, or the mixed-race Maya Rudolph to take the comedy guest actress prize for NBC’s Saturday Night Live, they would become the first black performers to win in their respective categories ever. Similarly, if Don Cheadle triumphs in the lead actor in a comedy race for his work in the Showtime half-hour House of Lies, he’d become only the second African-American in history to win in that category.

In fact, the four lead comedy actor/actress and supporting comedy actor/actress races have found African-American performers winning Emmys a grand total of four times–once in each category. Combining the victories for black actors and actresses in all 16 performing categories throughout the 63-year history of the Primetime Emmys results in 35, or roughly 5% of the total number of statuettes handed out.

Awards may not change everything. They’re not an iron-clad guarantee of future success—in fact, they can lock people in to the kind of roles that made them successful in the first place. And an acting Emmy may not automatically open the doors for an actor who wants to produce, or write, or direct. But they are a credential none the less, a testament to a general consensus on the quality of someone’s career, and it may help when it comes to getting in to read for desirable parts and to negotiating lucrative contracts. The pool of non-white actors who get regular work in television is already small enough. If those actors are ending up with a smaller portion of valuable credentials than their white counterparts, that means they’re losing out on leverage, and the chance to make what they will of it.

The bridge is yours.

-Congratulations to Alec Baldwin on some snazzy-looking nuptials.

-Is President Obama unroastable?

-Jodie Foster against the Hollywood gossip machine.

-How cable can forestall cord cutting.

There’s something incredibly sad about the kind of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking Megadeth’s David Mustaine exhibited in Signapore, in which he blamed the shootings at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises and at the Sikh gudwara in Wisconsin. As the Huffington Post reports:

“Back in my country, my president,” Mustaine begins and then pretends to gag himself with his finger, “is trying to pass a gun ban so he’s staging all of these murders. The ‘Fast and Furious’ thing down at the border. And Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there. And now, the beautiful people at the Sikh temple.” Mustaine went on to say, “I don’t know where I’m going to live if America keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it’s turning into Nazi America.”

It’s obviously hateful and conspiratorial to suggest that President Obama would murder his own citizens to advance a policy agenda, just as it’s appalling to say that members of the American government had anything to do with the September 11 attacks. But in a way, I understand the desire to believe that there’s a single source of the violence that’s mushroomed across America in recent weeks, a single motivating factor. It’s a frightening thing to contemplate the host of hatreds and instabilities that can violently disrupt our public spaces, be they movie theaters, places of worship, or now, following the shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters a neighborhood over from where I work. The prospect of trying to confront the flaws in our mental health system, our gun laws, and the destabilizing influence of racial hatred all at once is overwhelming.

Blaming President Obama is a gesture of terror, more than anything else. And he’s also a target against whom very little can be accomplished, other than cranky mid-concert ranting. It’s an attempt at double absolution: fixating on Obama is a way to shut out the real and varied causes of mass gun killings, and alleging a conspiracy means that the only thing to do is rant and complain, rather than taking up actual action or picking actual political positions. Mustaine’s allegations are deplorable, but they also speak to an anxiety about the world and an inability to confront those anxieties that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

The New York Times has a long roundtable on how to improve the representation of women in front of and behind the camera, focusing mostly on film. A lot of the suggestions are cultural, ranging from encouraging better research on women’s ticket-buying patterns to treating women’s money as if it’s as valuable as anyone else’s. And Martha Lauzen, who heads up the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, and whose work I’ve relied on substantially in my reporting has an even blunter suggestion:

Regulation, tax incentives and hiring mandates offer possible solutions to the gender imbalance in Hollywood. Broadcast and cable networks are now vertically integrated, meaning they produce and distribute their own programming. This was not always the case. In the 1970s and ’80s, federal regulation stipulated that the broadcast networks could produce only a certain percentage of the programming on their stations. This regulation helped encourage an environment in which independent production companies could operate.

In the early 2000s, the Caucus for Producers, Writers and Directors (unsuccessfully) proposed that networks and large cable and satellite interests be prohibited from producing more than 50 percent of their programming. If this legislation were coupled with significant tax incentives for women-owned production companies, this one-two punch might help redistribute resources, making greater diversity a real possibility.

Perhaps such regulation could be collected in some sort of Gender Equality in Media Act that would also require the major film studios to hire a certain percentage of women in important behind-the-scenes positions. In addition, as only 11 percent of films currently feature female protagonists, tax incentives could also be given to films that tell the stories of girls or women.

As far as I can tell, the California Film and Television Production Credits, for example, don’t give any preference to women and minority-owned production companies. I don’t think I’d be comfortable providing tax incentives on the basis of content—that is really not a slippery slope I want to start down. But given how many projects go after production tax credits in all the varying states, and given the debate over how much they actually help local economies, those credit programs could do some substantive good if productions involving women and minority-owned businesses, or with women and minority directors, got priority when it came to handing them out. I imagine that would be an awfully speedy way to make some improvements in hiring and representation that, as of now, aren’t improving naturally on their own.

Sesame Street has one Spanish-speaking character already, a little lamb named Ovejita, who likes visiting school with Murray Monster. And a sharp-eyed friend noticed that the show is casting a second bilingual character who not only speaks Spanish, but is “comfortable with multiple Spanish dialects and accents.” Strategically, this is probably a smart step—if Sesame Street wants to fulfill its mission of providing quality early-education television to a growing audience, having characters who speak Spanish is a good way to expose children whose first language is English to a language it may be useful for them to know later, and it may give families whose first language is Spanish a door into a show that would otherwise seem unfamiliar. There’s been a lot of conversation lately about the fact that Hispanic and Latino viewers aren’t turning in to broadcast television, and it’s smart business and educational sense to try to meet the members of those audiences who are looking for some Spanish-language programming where they are in a way that matches Sesame Street‘s mission.

I’m also impressed that the call requests multiple Spanish dialects and accents. One of the things I think is most important in talking about diversity is the recognition that one black character can’t represent the entirety of the black experience, that “Latino” is not a monolithic thing, nor is “gay.” It’s very easy for culture to fall into a rut, where because we have dandy-ish gay male characters, or tough black male characters, or Sofia Vergara on Modern Family, the assumption is that we’re covered and we don’t have to look for new kinds of characters and new kinds of stories. If Sesame Street can help build the expectation in its young audience that diversity itself will be diverse, it’ll be doing the larger culture a favor along with teaching a little Spanish.