NEA being used for pro-Obama propaganda?

It's really not surprising. Anything funded through the political process will eventually be used for narrowly political purposes, though it's tough to predict exactly when this will happen. I guess it's not surprising that it would be the Obama administration that would begin to use the National Endowment for the Arts so blatantly to "encourage" artists to produce socially relevant art that would just happen to benefit the administration's current agenda.

Patrick Courrielche, a producer and arts marketer, was on a conference call from the NEA August 6, along with 75 other arts community types. Key paragraph from Patrick's post: "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?"

Final graph: "And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “

Is the hair on your arms standing up yet?"

Now my objection to the NEA is more fundamental -- that it takes money from those with no interest in the arts to fund mostly the safe, the conventional and the mediocre, and through its influence encourages artistic cravenness. It would be no loss to the arts in America if the NEA disappeared, and would probably be a net gain for creativity and artistic independence. If it is also being used to promote political propaganda, that's pretty terrible too.

Russian-Ukrainian gas dispute has geopolitical aspect

I guess there's a tentative agreement between Ukraine (with implications for Central and Western Europe) over gas pricing and flow to Western Europe, involving international monitors. So the crisis (if it really deserves that moniker) may be over -- for now. I think most people understand there are geopolitical aspects to the dispute that may well trump the economic aspects (though with the world financial crisis having hit energy prices and Russia's economy pretty hard the economic aspect is not trivial). As this Register editorial explains, Russia's desire to remind Ukraine of its energy dependence is tied to deep-rooted Russian fears about invasion, tied to the knowledge that its borders are not well protected by topography, and what it sees, as in the Bush administration push to admit Ukraine to NATO (which most European countries now oppose, in no small part because of a similar gas cut-off three years ago), as U.S. messing about in what has traditionally been known as the "near abroad," which Russia considers vital to its security. If the push for Ukrainian NATO membership continues, expect more of what might be considered as Russian nastiness toward Ukraine.

I wrote about the gas cut-off back in 2006, for Antiwar.com, explaining the geopolitical aspects in more detail than I want to do in a blog post. Here's a link.