National Endowment for the Arts links to partisan grant recipients
This story follows on the audio showing that the NEA had lied about the nature of the conference call. The links and pages will probably soon be scrubbed but Big Hollywood tells the story with pictures of the web pages.
Are we to believe that mobilizing artists to contact Congress and demand “affordable guarantee-issue insurance” is “unbiased” and not an attempt to “influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”?
And why is the NEA funneling artists ONLY to this single “resource?” Where are the links to sites calling for tort reform? Why not a link to the cheapest private carriers of health insurance or information on affordable catastrophic plans that are perfect for young, healthy artists?
The NEA is essentially saying to those looking for help regarding health insurance: Lobby!
The lawyers can decide how ethical or legal that is, but it doesn’t take a law degree to understand that the NEA couldn’t be any less helpful if it tried. (source)
Needless to say, if President Bush had tried this the past tense media would be all over it. There would be panels featuring media and Hollywood celebrities discussing the chilling affect this would have had on the arts and our culture. Certain Democrats would call for investigation into the waste of tax dollars and to determine if any laws were broken.
An interesting aspect of this is that the artists had already helped on the campaign, why see the need to encourage them to do so through a government agency that distributes our tax money via grants to artists? Are they really that stupid to miss the legal implications or merely that arrogant?
This President and his cronies might have the gift of combining both flaws in large proportion.
Those of us who paid attention during the election and did not rely on the past tense media for information are not surprised. We considered Obama’s actions when it came to his legislative record and his associations. His actions during the campaign consisted merely of words that deflected or distorted the truth on those matters. In other words, actions really do speak louder than mere words. Perhaps more people will realize that is the case even when certain media sycophants continue to leg tingling, lavish praise or despite those words being read from a teleprompter, while the reader is backed up by Styrofoam Greek columns.
This is only the second day of Breitbart’s addressing the NEA matter. Is there more? Time will tell.
An update before I post:
The White House is trying to get in front of this now:
White House officials say they are enacting specific steps to make sure such a call never happens again.
Today White House officials are meeting with the chiefs of staff of the executive branch agencies to discuss rules and best practices in this area, a conversation during which they will be told that that while White House lawyers do not believe that the NEA call violated the law, “the appearance issues troubled some participants,” Burton said. “It is the policy of the administration that grant decisions should be on the merits and that government officials should avoid even creating the incorrect appearance that politics has anything to do with these decisions.” (source, Thanks to Big Hollywood)
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Filed Under: Obama -- Politics -- News -- NEA – Culture
Author: Mark K. Sprengel | 12:59:00 PM |
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