Dear Chairman Landesman:

With all this fuss on Big Hollywood.com, Big Government.com and elsewhere over the NEA’s government-funded forays into partisan political propaganda, I thought maybe we could help each other out. 

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Right now, you probably want to support some art that addresses vital current issues from a right-wing perspective in order to demonstrate your impartiality (ha ha!), and I just want to cash in your organization’s evident willingness to spend good tax money on any kind of nonsense that can be passed-off as “art” (ca-ching!)   

Well, I am uniquely suited to provide you with just what you’re looking for!  As a college student, I got a “B” in my Visual Arts 1 class for dressing up a juniper bush in one of my Hawaiian shirts to draw attention to man’s essential oneness with nature while providing a stinging critique of America’s consumerist culture.  Sure, my black-clad, Bauhaus-loving classmates protested that I was a fraud who was more concerned with collecting four easy credits than internalizing our professor’s commie insights about how expressionism equals imperialism, but hey – aren’t all great artists rebels?   Or, at least, weren’t they before last January 20th?

Just kidding, dude!  Anyway, as your organization’s visual arts mission statement says:

Grants in the visual arts support projects undertaken by organizations that encourage individual artistic development, experimentation, and dialogue between artists and the public through exhibitions, residencies, publications, commissions, public art works, conservation, documentation, services to the field, and public programs.

Sounds awesome!  Now, I went to the NEA’s grant application site and there’s a long complicated process for getting grants that seems to involve me becoming a federal contractor.  Nothing like the government for taking something simple – like you writing me a fat check – and turning it into a bureaucratic death march!  Can’t wait until you folks take over health care! 

Anyhow, instead I think I’ll just cut to the chase and sketch out my proposed projects for you here.  You can fund the one – or ones! – that you like best:

1) My first proposed project is an interpretive dance piece to be performed on the streets of Greenwich Village titled “The Cry of the Employed.”

This innovative performance involves me using motion and song to tell the story of a beleaguered taxpayer forced to subsidize the ridiculous indulgences of pseudo-intellectual no-talents who try to pass off their pretentious junk as art.  Dressed in business suit and button-down shirt with a sensible tie, I will confront passing goateed hipsters and pierced bohos, acting out the story of a man who works hard only to have his money siphoned off support the antics of a bunch of pompous deadbeats.  My choreography will draw from the traditions of ballet, kabuki and Appalachian folk dance while incorporating maracas and jazz hands.  And yes, there will be krumping.

2) My second proposed project is a performance art piece that was going to be called Chocolate Thunder until I Googled it and found that this is the title of a very , very specialized series of erotic videos.  Instead, my piece will be called Suburban Fudge.  Out of an abundance of caution, I have not Googled this title.

In the tradition of pioneering NEA grant recipient Karen Finley, who famously covered herself in chocolate to demonstrate the corrosive effects of patriarchal hegemony, I plan to slather myself in rich, creamy Hershey’s to demonstrate the glory of corporate America.  This act will reaffirm my allegiance to Big Chocolate and underscore my belief that the best hope for American progress is a vigorous, lightly-regulated private sector.  Using my body, I will also form a Laffer Curve then engage in some dramatic readings from Milton Friedman’s Free To Choose.  And I will personally keep any profits from the performance, an act which itself is central to the integrity of the piece.

3) My third proposed project is an installation that takes Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ, the crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine, to the next level.  I call it Pee Health Care Reform Bill.

Now, the draft health care bill is well over 1000 pages long, so I’m not sure I can personally handle the, uh, logistics of this project.  This is where the NEA comes in.  I plan to use my grant to buy a keg of frosty Dos Equis Lager for me and my buddies.  After we drink it we can, well, get “creative” Serrano-style!  We’ll also need limes, and some snacks would be nice too.  I think I could get you a final product for, say, $25,000.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my email – though I have to say that as a conservative I am horrified by the fact that there’s an Internet domain out there with the name of “arts.gov” since the only proper involvement of the government in the arts is not to have any role at all.  Well, guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that, right?

I sure hope you dig my personal vision enough to cut me a check – just don’t forget the second “h” in “Schlichter” on the payee line!  And remember, because I’m a heterosexual right-wing gun-owning veteran with a real job, you’ll be able to check several important diversity boxes for your organization for the first time in its illustrious history! 

I’m looking forward to seeing you at the premiere of Suburban Fudge, but don’t forget to bring a jacket – the first three rows will get wet! 

Best,

Kurt A. Schlichter
Future Performance Artist

“Rule #7: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

For a presidential candidate to dispatch his agents of Change® to recruit artists & entertainers into his campaign is one thing. He understandably wished to avoid becoming old news. Heck, even radical activists get bored. So, to maintain their excitement and involvement, professional community organizers must constantly devise new tactics. And, as so many enjoy smugly reminding us all, “the ‘One’ won!”

Poli-end-zone-dances notwithstanding, for the President of the United States of America to use the power of his Office and the lure of his NEA’s favor, potential grant funds and the ideological “yes, we-can-change-the-world” Hope® & prestige for artists to create promotional propaganda for his Serve.gov & Corporation for National & Community Service partisan political agenda, produces an entirely different pattern and data set.

As George Will recently observed, “I don’t know how many laws that breaks but I’m sure there are some.”

Ben Shapiro cites The Anti-Lobbying Act (19 U.S. Code §1913) & 31 U.S. Code §1352.

The Hatch Amendment has also been cited elsewhere.

In any case, this story along with the ACORN scandal, the President’s close ties and history with ACORN, coupled with his lesson plan, disseminated by the federal Dept. of Education — with whom Ms. Wicks “worked closely” – that assigned schoolchildren to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president” (IOW, ‘write letters to themselves about how they can become agents of change for the president’) raises many red flags and questions.

Is this Ms. Wicks ‘view’ towards “an onramp to a lifetime of service?”

I’m with this Marine:  “Stay Away From My Kids!” My kids are here to serve an higher power than any current fashionable ‘One.’

Professional forensic investigative journalists are now connecting the dots and reporting on the nexus, stalls, pens and troughs of the President’s national change agent (Animal Farm) agenda as organized through Serve.gov & ‘the Corporation’:

Serve.Gov/’United We Serve’

Corporation for National & Community Service

Organizing for America

White House Office of Public Engagement

Prior inconsistencies matter:

The NEA & White House responses assert:

NEA: “This call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false. “

WH: “[T]he Aug. 10 teleconference ‘was not meant to promote any legislative agenda.’”

However,

Ms. Wicks stated on the call: “I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda… we need you, and we’re going to need your help, and we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here… We’re actually running the government…  We need your guys’ help to promote this.

I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda… we need you, and we’re going to need your help, and we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here.”

If not to promote the President’s legislative agenda (e.g., healthcare reform, cap and trade, not to mention his Dept. of Education lesson plans), then for what specifically did Ms. Wicks ask this collective of artists — that she clearly assumed to be strictly partisan Obama-supporters — for their help in promoting?

**

Other notable-quotables:

NELLIE ABERNATHY: we are really looking at reaching a new brand of people… We have 12 [do-it-yourself toolkits] that really allow people who are more self-directed who say I have a need in my community that I want to address, and it’s not necessarily attractive to me to go and serve soup at the existing soup kitchen with 80-year-old women… we are really looking at reaching a new brand of people.

YOSI SERGANT: whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know… My ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities’ utilities and bring them to the table.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” – George Orwell

“We have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.” – Hillary Clinton

It has been six months since the Administration took office and the far left have taken complete control of the government.  Has our capitalist past been improved upon?  Or, is the socialism we have had thrust upon us making us worse off?  Has the foreign policy of appeasement and apology made the world a safer place?  To put it more simply, are you better off now than you were six months ago?  Unfortunately, the answer is not only “no,” but “much worse.” 

When the President took office in January, the entire world was full of “Hope.”  The far left and moderates that put him there were hoping for “Change.”  Well, they got the change, but I do not think they were “hoping” to get the type of change they got. 

Foreign Affairs 

After three trips abroad, the President may have made a lot of friends, but he has not done much to make us safer.  Iran has continued its nuclear program unabated and continues to threaten both the west and Israel.  North Korea is testing missiles and nuclear bombs and nobody does anything about it.  Obama apologizes for American arrogance in the past and then cannot get the EU or anyone else to agree to his foreign policy or to spend more money on their own domestic stimulus plans. 

In Russia, he speaks, declares the meetings successful, but nothing happens.  Then, in a video that was not played at all by the liberal media in the United States, none of the Russian government officials shake his hands.  In fact, they snub him. 

Pakistan came very close to falling to the Taliban and is still fighting them off.  That was not a typo, Pakistan, not Afghanistan.  We have increased our presence in Afghanistan, but we still can not make any inroads.  In fact, the past few months in Afghanistan have been the bloodiest from an American standpoint in years.  The Taliban grows stronger and stronger each day.  Maybe we need a Bush like surge in order to finally end the quagmire there? 

To give the President some credit, we have begun our withdrawal of troops from Iraq.  This appears to be working as there has not been any major incidents since the withdrawal began.  Iraq has not fallen to the radical groups and the government seems to be stable.  However some troops should stay just to maintain the peace and calm that is currently in that country. 

Grade:  D 

Domestic Policy 

The stimulus package that is costing taxpayers almost 800 billion dollars is a failure.  That is a fact.  Actually, it is such a failure that the President’s numbers are tanking probably almost exclusively because of this.  His approval rating has dropped nine points in two weeks to under 56%.  He now has the tenth lowest approval rating over all presidents at this point in their presidency.  As we all know the stimulus package was passed with the President’s usual statement that it had to be done now.  The economy could not wait.  A crisis was about to occur. 

It was promised in order to get the stimulus passed, that unemployment would not go above eight percent.  It is now at 9.6% and easily on its way to over ten.  In fact, the latest estimates say ten is not even a top figure.  Jobs have not been saved.  They are being lost at an alarming rate.  There are even allegations that Obama’s office is keeping economic statistics from the American people so that his health care plan can pass.  If Americans knew the true numbers on the economy, health care would be dead on arrival.  But to listen to the President last night, the stimulus has worked.  I do not know what figures he is looking at, but they definitely are not the same ones the general public is seeing. 

Keynesian stimulus plans do not work.  As I have said before in this column, a stimulus did not work in the Great Depression.  It did not work in Japan in the 90’s and it will not work now.  Recessions are cyclical as are growth periods.  Time will end this recession and nothing else.  The only difference now is that when this one ends our future will be laden with more debt than anyone could have imagined on November 4, 2008, when this president was elected.  And, the Federal Reserve will be stronger and have more control of the economy as a result therefore. 

At the current pace, the Federal Debt will be doubled in less than eight years.  It took 43 Presidents to get the debt to ten trillion dollars.  Obama will double it in less than eight.  The current deficit of 1.3 trillion dollars is more than the last five years of Bush’s deficits combined.  And, last night in his sales pitch on health care, Obama says that this year’s deficit is inherited from President Bush.  Who is he kidding? 

Obama is now losing his own party members.  The so called “Blue Dog,” Democrats are running from him.  Maybe it is out of fear because of the “Cap and Trade,” debacle.  Maybe it is out of fear for deficits.  Actually, it is out of fear for their jobs.  If you were a Democrat from a conservative Southern or Midwestern State what would you do now?  We have the worst case of “Tax and Spend” in American history. 

Oh, I’m sorry; to correct myself so far it has just been Spend.  The Tax portion has not hit yet.  At some point, one of these spending sprees is going to break its own back and then the tax increases will come.  And, when they come, mark my words, it will not be just the rich that are going to feel them in their pocketbooks. 

“Cap and Trade,” has some of the largest penalties for capitalism in the history of the United States.  If you pollute, you will pay.  Thank God this bill looks like it is dead in the Senate.  And, thank God, the aforementioned Blue Dog Democrats are killing this proposed health care plan as well. 

Everyone in this country would love to have a health care plan that guarantees health care to everyone; that stops insurance companies from denying coverage based upon pre-existing conditions and that stops doctors from over treating.  But, a single payer system will not work.  It will ruin the best medical care in the world.  And, that assumes that someone actually figures out how to pay for it. 

Of course, Obama wants the “rich” to pay for it.  Keep the lower classes covered without having to pay.  Make the rich, evil capitalists pay for health care.  Make them pay for everything.  That will make life fairer. 

Grade:  F 

After all, isn’t that what this is all about?  This is about making life fair.  It is socialism pure and simple.  Since January 20, 2009, the government has taken over the insurance, banking and automobile industry.  We are regulating whatever industries we have not taken over.  And, now we want to create the biggest bureaucracy in the history of mankind; a government run health care industry. 

It is time to stop.  Life is not fair.  There will always be rich.  There will always be poor.  Is it fair for one child to be born on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with rich parents?  Is it fair for another child to be born into poverty in Calcutta?  Is it fair for the Far Left Liberals to take away all of the incentive for personal improvement and gain that have made this country different from India and the European Socialist countries.  No.  It is not fair.  And, hopefully 2010 is coming quickly so that all of the Far Lefties can be sent into retirement.  That includes specifically; Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, Barbara Boxer, and Barney Frank. 

Oh, by the way, I sent a letter to Barbara Boxer this week saying that I was against the health care plan and that she should not vote for it under any conditions.  This is the response I received: 

Dear Mr. DeMartini:

Thank you for writing to me about the need for health care reform.  I am committed to enacting comprehensive health reform that controls rising health care costs and ensures high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans. 

Congress recently passed a budget that lays out some basic principles for health care reform: making health care coverage affordable, guaranteeing Americans a choice of health plans and physicians, investing in prevention and wellness, improving patient safety and quality care, and making health care reform fiscally sustainable.  

As the number of uninsured Americans grows rapidly, more people are suffering and forgoing needed care.  It is estimated that more than 45 million Americans are without health insurance, including 6.7 million people in California. 

Escalating health care costs are hurting our families and our economy.  In order to put our economy on a sound path to recovery, we must address the costs and inefficiencies of our health care system.  As we move forward in the debate on health care reform, I will continue to fight for common goals of constraining costs, expanding access, and improving quality. 

I look forward to working with the Obama Administration and my colleagues to enact legislation that will put these principles for health care reform.

Again, thank you for writing to me. Please feel free to contact me again about this or other issues of concern to you.

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator

She did not even read my letter.  This woman should be the first to be put into retirement when she is up for reelection.

Look, with this sort of thing, you gotta go with your gut: when someone is trying to sell you something way too hard, the thing he’s selling ain’t good.

And the only thing you have to remember about health care is this: if Obama had to choose between the current system and the system he’s envisioning for all of us, he’d run screaming to the former. You saw him in that ABC infomercial – when asked by a neurologist (which is a real doctor, I think) what he would do if his wife or child got seriously ill. Wouldn’t Obama want the best damn care possible, nationalized health care bureaucracy be damned? At that point, Obama started thinking like a human again, not a teleprompter, and could no longer defend his plan. Instead, he said, “it’s my family member, if it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care.”

What, nothing about controlling costs?

In effect, what’s good for Michelle and Malia is not good for the rest of us.

No wonder Obama needs to sell us this thing.

Even he doesn’t even want it!

TONIGHT: Jill Dobson, Gregg Jarrett and the hilarious Jamie Lissow!