Arts Funding

I will grant you that there is a strong argument for letting the Arts be funded by their own earnings.

NEA funding is at $117.480 million in fiscal year 2004. That's for all the arts ... Music, dance, theater, arts, new media, community art centers etc.

That is is 6.8% of 8 billion dollars

and yet:
From the Government Accounting Office //
Burgeoning Corruption.

" Between May 2003 and June 2004, U.S. officials shipped nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq. As government audits later found, the cash was spent and disbursed by U.S. officials with virtually no financial controls or reliable accounting. The Administration cannot account for over $8 billion that was transferred to Iraqi ministries. This unsupervised flood of cash into Iraq became an open invitation to corruption. A senior U.S. official already has been charged with accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks from a U.S. contractor in exchange for steering up to $3.5 million in fraudulent contracts his way.

Government investigators have said that there are dozens of other criminal corruption cases being processed."

It is one thing to object to public funding of the arts, it is another to throw away almost 7 times that much money to "patriotic" crooks that are trying to figure how to rip off everyone in sight, most fundamentally the American taxpayers.

An interesting factoid is that the top 25% of the top income earners are sure they are a member of the top 1% that are getting 90% of the benefit from the Bush administration tax cuts. So 24% of these richest people in America are deluding themselves.

"Arts funding is really research and development. Are we going to say that anything that sells is OK? Or, like the British, are we going to spend billions on the arts? Unless you're willing to subsidize the arts, you're just handing down what's been done before." Peter Coyote, Chairman of the California Arts Council

Rant 01

Be gone o'pesky welfare Queens ...

Announcing my new political blogsite "Stop Me Before I Rant Again"

What the heck ... Happy Holidays.

My wife found this great site, for putting it all in perspective.

I gave $2300 to the military last year for a war that I was never able to vote against, and was in the streets to try and stop. That's way more than we spent on ourselves. Kathy and I bought a canoe on Craigslist for $200 that's about it.

I put the cost of the IRAQ debacle, the "mess o' potamia" as they call it on the "Daily Show" on my blog and home page.
233 Billion Dollars!! and counting

, absolutely ridiculous waste of my money.

Looking at it I realized if they would just stop the war for 40 seconds, they could payoff my mortgage ;-) Now that's what I call freedom ...

If you are a conservative and/or a christian , please compare the result of this neo-con agenda to your core beliefs.
This is a pdf file, but an interesting, if frightening read.

Predicting an ascendency of their position only after "a Pearl Harbor scale event" is very spooky when postulated in 1998.

Next time do us all a favor vote for a real conservative, a Goldwater conservative, if such a thing exists. Looking at Trent Lott, Tom Delay, Newt, etc. I am beginning to have my doubts.

I only support troops that are defending our freedoms, not insuring our energy resources into the future, not in the name of chicken-hawk slognaeering.
( Chickenhawk n. A person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person’s youth.)
Bush's military record if you look objectively at it, is very suspect.
Chenney used political connections to defer his draft commitment 5 times etc.

In which America is it that we are okay to consider torturing anyone? Why is there even a question about this? Is there some psycholinguistic inversion of christian values that focuses on Christ's death before the resurrection and not his message, not the very meaning of the resurrection itself?

Hussein was responsible for a horrible tragedy, gassing 5000 Kurds in Halabja (with munitions supplied by then under secretary Donald Rumsfield, by the way)



The current conservative civilian death total in Iraq since the recent invasion is 27,383. That is confirmed civilian deaths.
Not to mention 2152 US causalities, 8567 seriously wounded (poor duped suckers)

Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Kim Jung Eil, Tito, the descendants of Sheikh Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, maybe even Putin, now there are some real tyrants.

Saddam Hussein was a poser by comparison, but had control of very real oil-fields, no doubt.

I agree with the minority leader of the House Intelligence committee, someone who know the inside scoop:
REP. JOHN MURTHA, (D-PA): "Our military has done everything that has been asked of them. The U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It's time to bring the troops home."

Don't be fooled by Bush's new round of back pedaling.

Do you even know what has happened in Haiti in the last year and half? ... oh never mind. I'll save that for another rant ;-)

Our freedom, our legacy of liberty, and truth is at stake.

Please write your congressman and senators today.

Peace on Earth ... Good Will to All