The crew over at Big Hollywood and Big Goverment continued the fight today.

Further exposing the incestuous nature of the modern Progressive Left in America, John Nolte details the soon to be infamous conference call between the White House Office of Public Engagement, the NEA’s Communications Director, Serve.gov Director of Outreach, and a list of hand picked artists/trend setters/just plain “cool” people.

In it he paints a picture of the not so subtle desire of the Obama Administration to have a PR hit squad that even Joseph Goebbels would be proud of.

All evidence points to the fact that the conference call was a ruse, a front for a White House using Skolnik as a kind of beard in order to put an innocent spin on their abuse of the NEA and two non-partisan volunteer organizations (United We Serve – an initiative overseen by The Corporation for National and Community Service – a federal agency, and the White House’ Office of Public Engagement).

The goal: To motivate a group of hand-picked pro-Obama artists (grant recipients or those wanting grants) to push the President’s flagging agenda, especially health care — and to funnel this promotion through the ACORN related- Serve.gov website.

I am not a lawyer and certainly won’t attempt to debate the illegality of this call and the greater relationship that exists. There are others who have already done that and come to the conclusion that “laws were broken”…

All of this – particularly the government-sponsored conference call itself – is in blatant violation of the Anti-Lobbying Act (19 U.S. Code §1913), which explicitly provides: “No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation, whether before or after the introduction of any bill, measure or resolution proposing such legislation, law, ratification, policy or appropriation …”

[snip...]

Violation of the Anti-Lobbying Act carries punishment: “Any person who makes an expenditure … shall be subject to a civil penalty of not less than $10,000 and not more than $100,000 for each such expenditure.” And that’s not all: “An imposition of a civil penalty under this subsection does not prevent the United States from seeking any other remedy that the United States may have for the same conduct that is the basis for the imposition of such civil penalty.” In other words, criminal prosecution is available here.

Who am I to disagree. ;^)

I wonder if any of this will be covered by ABC, CBS, NBC, MSDNC, CNN, or any of those soon to be subsidized birdcage liners Bambi is thinking he like to buy and manipulate.

Aaron B. Gardner

Crossposted at my blog