You have to feel for Margaret Spellings, the country's new secretary of education. What a lot of stuff on her agenda!

The national school dropout rate is disgraceful, especially for black, Latino and foreign-born kids. Too many children are trying to learn with obsolete textbooks in inadequate, antiquated and unsafe schools. A depressing number of youngsters' ability to learn is impaired by health problems and poor nutrition. Students' achievement levels fall farther behind those in other Western countries.

And there's the small but immediate problem of trying to stop department bureaucrats from secretly (and illegally) spending taxpayers' money to hire conservative commentators as shills for President Bush's pet programs.

So what did Spellings, another of

Bush's old Texas pals, make one of her first official acts of business? Easy. She shot off a blistering letter to the head of PBS to denounce Postcards from Buster.

Now for the non-cognoscenti (including me until the current silliness), Postcards is a wildly popular show aimed at preschoolers. It features a cartoon bunny named Buster who, with his cartoon father, travels the country visiting with real small children.

From its description, the show is classic uplifting and non-offending PBS fare, with Buster (an asthmatic child of divorce himself, natch) visiting families to showcase the great diversity of this great land and sending video "postcards" to his audience of other tykes.

According to Buster's blog - yep, even cartoon bunnies have blogs these days - he has spent time with five kids who share one bedroom in a trailer in Virginia. He's been part of a Friday "prayer night" with a large Mormon family in Utah, watched traditional Native American dances at an Arapaho reservation in Wyoming and gotten a glimpse of Gullah culture on a South Carolina island. He's enjoyed quality time with Muslims and Hmongs and country music fans, with kids being raised by single parents and by grandparents.

You can almost hear Woody Guthrie ("This Land is My Land . . .") singing in your head.

The 'L' word

Most recently Buster was scheduled to tell his audience about his visit to Vermont, where he helped a few new pals make maple syrup and cheese. Sweet, right? Except (stop reading if you're of a delicate nature), one of the children in question was being raised by two mothers.

Egad, the "L" word! Not, mind you, that "lesbian" itself was heard on the show, but from published accounts there were briefly shots of each woman, and the little girl referred to one of them as her "stepmother." Worse, the girl had two friends who also had two mothers.

Well! That was enough to get the show to the top of Ms. Spellings's short list. Who cares about hundreds of schools leaking asbestos when there are four lesbians lurking on Postcards from Buster?

And lucky Ms. Spellings! It seems that the Department of Education helps to pay for Postcards as part of a program to encourage preschool learning, so she had a ready-made excuse to butt in. After making some ominous if veiled threats to cut off the program's funding altogether, Spellings got to the point.

"Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode," she sniffed in a letter to the head of PBS. Surely, Congress did not intend to "introduce this kind of subject matter to children."

What subject matter? Sugaring? Cheese fermentation?

You don't have to threaten PBS twice. The network caved and announced that it wouldn't distribute the show to its 349 member stations. (PBS people claimed they decided not to distribute the episode two hours before Spellings's letter arrived. Sure, whatever they say.)

In fact, PBS CEO Wayne Godwin told the Boston Globe, the network needs to evaluate itself to determine how such an episode reached an "advanced stage of acceptance."Maybe, he said, the network should cobble together a committee to evaluate the "suitability for broadcast" of children's programming. (next page »)