From BigHollywood.com…

EXPLOSIVE NEW AUDIO Reveals White House Using NEA to Push Partisan Agenda

… On August 10th, the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and the Corporation for National and Community Service hosted a conference call with a handpicked arts group. This arts group played a key role in Obama’s arts effort during his election campaign, as declared by the organizers of the call, and many on the call played a role in the now famous Obama Hope poster.

Much of the talk on the conference call was a build up to what the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was specifically asking of this group. In the following segment, Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, clearly identifies this arts group as a pro-Obama collective and warns them of some “specific asks” that will be delivered later in the meeting.

Head over to Courrielche’s post and read it, note the quotes and listen to the audio of the call. You’ll get the impression speakers like Buffy Wicks and Yosi Sergant are on a campaign teleconference call with donors, and not artists who are supposed to be non-political since many of their projects are funded by taxpayer dollars.

This friends, is simply another symptom of the disease. The National Endowment of the Arts should not exist at the federal level. No federal funding… zip. There is no authority in the United States Constitution to fund this organization, and by doing so, we eventually guarantee this type of corruption.

Man, the Founding Fathers were all geniuses.

Others writing… Atlas, Geraghety, Power Line, Instapundit, Hot Air, Malkin, AJ and … well … every other friggin’ blog I read…

My original post continues below, but here is the post from Mike Flynn and John Nolte posted at 6:43 p.m. – either 15 minutes or 3 hours and 15 minutes after my original post. The post is specific to the NEA and mentions Wicks. The last two paragraphs..

So what did happen on that call? Was the NEA coordinating with the White House to push their agenda on a group of artists eager for and reliant upon the NEA for grants, or is the NEA telling the truth that this call “was not a means to promote any legislative agenda”?

Tomorrow at noon ET, explosive new information will answer that question and raise many others.

Update: Malkin has more and AJ at Strata-Sphere also writing.

Original post continues…

So here’s a wrap-up of the scuttlebutt.

Patrick Courrielche over at BigHollywoood wrote about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) getting involved with promoting the Obama agenda on Aug. 25.

Some speculate it may be an NEA bombshell, but I don’t think corruption at the NEA is going to be a big story. Nobody will care all that much, unless it is super-revealing. My opinion on the NEA? They should not be funded with one dime from the federal government. From Courrielche’s piece…

… I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Now admittedly, I’m a skeptic of BIG government. In my view, power tends to overreach whenever given the opportunity. It’s a law of human nature that has very few exceptions. That said, it felt to me that by providing issues as a cynosure for inspiration to a handpicked arts group – a group that played a key role in the President’s election as mentioned throughout the conference call – the National Endowment for the Arts was steering the art community toward creating art on the very issues that are currently under contentious national debate; those being health care reform and cap-and-trade legislation. Could the National Endowment for the Arts be looking to the art community to create an environment amenable to the administration’s positions?

From there, speculation surround Buffy Wicks, White House director of Public Engagement who also was one of the organizers of the conference call mentioned in Courrielche’s piece. A comment with the screen name iowahawk over at Ace of Spades (comment #12) states that he spoke with Breitbart and it was going to be really good, and then posted a link to a picture of Wicks.

Not sure if the commenter iowahawk is Iowahawk, but there is no denial yet on his site.

Wicks served as the Western regional director for the Obama campaign and she also seems to be big into the phrase community organizer and was not happy with the Democrat response to removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq.

Back to Courrielche…

The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.

Patterico’s Pontifications notes Breitbart called out the main stream media on Sept. 7 for failing to due their job. …

When the next big scandal hits – and it will, and it most certainly won’t come from traditional journalism – all eyes will be on “Pinch” Sulzberger to see if he does his job.

So, whatcha got for us this week Andrew?

Others mention SEIU, but who the heck knows?

Hat top to Malkin for reminding me about this Wall Street Journal piece from Sunday that I got through but never commented on.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan did a public service last week when he visited New York City and spoke up for charter schools and mayoral control of education. That was the reformer talking. The status quo Mr. Duncan was on display last month when he let Congress kill a District of Columbia voucher program even as he was sitting on evidence of its success.

What it comes down to is that federal money is being spent by local cities and towns as they see fit, to promote what works in their education system. I don’t think that one federal dime should be used for education, but when you take federal dollars, that cash usually comes with strings attached or they could take the funding away in the future with little or no warning.

Programs that are working in Washington D.C. are being cut off in favor of sending cash to public schools. I wrote about the subject and Duncan’s differing point of view here and here. More about the District’s program…

It’s bad enough that Democrats are killing a program that parents love and is closing the achievement gap between poor minorities and whites. But as scandalous is that the Education Department almost certainly knew the results of this evaluation for months.

Voucher recipients were tested last spring. The scores were analyzed in the late summer and early fall, and in November preliminary results were presented to a team of advisers who work with the Education Department to produce the annual evaluation. Since Education officials are intimately involved in this process, they had to know what was in this evaluation even as Democrats passed (and Mr. Obama signed) language that ends the program after next year.

And from the beginning of the article, we have the New York information…

In New York City with its 1.1 million students, mayoral control has resulted in better test scores and graduation rates, while expanding charter schools, which means more and better education choices for low-income families. But mayoral control expires in June unless state lawmakers renew it, and the United Federation of Teachers is working with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to weaken or kill it.

But lest you think only conservatives are outraged by the Obama administrations flip flopping stance on a very successful program in the DC schools … no less than liberal pundit Juan Williams has urged the reinstatement of the voucher money. Even better … Juan knows the only thing blocking these kids from a good education and it’s definitely not money as Steve points out here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6EV8BMjuhk

Video Note: Unfortunately there is some dropped audio in this video, I apologize.