There’s not much to say about the NEA propaganda scandal that hasn’t been said by others, but a link round-up will be hopefully useful for those getting up to speed.

• We begin here with the Big Government articles themselves.  Summary: transcripts and audio reveal that the conference call of August 10th involving the federal agencies NEA, United We Serve, and the Office of Public Engagement; and various artist groups‘ involved the explicit recruitment of said artists’ groups to assist in pushing the administration’s legislative agenda.
• This despite claims by the NEA that said call did not pursue any legislative agenda.
• Note also that OPE Deputy Director (and Valerie Jarrett crony) Buffy Wicks has long-standing ties with ACORN.
• Patterico points out the obvious: that both the NEA and the administration lied when they claimed that no legislative agenda was addressed.  Despite the fact that this call was ostensibly hosted by Michael Skolnik, Skolnik explicitly stated that he was working on the behest of the NEA and the White House - a claim that was not refuted either by Deputy Director Wicks or at-the-time NEA Director of Communications Yosi Sergant (both of whom were on the call).  For that matter, the primary interest of Nell Abernathy, director of outreach for United We Serve (also on the call) is to make clear that Skolnik is the cutout between the artists’ groups and the government.
• I should point out at this point that Sergant is, of course, linked with Shepard Fairey, who had his own representative on the call.
• Ace of Spades notes that Winner & Associates were on the conference call as well.  You may remember them; they were a Axelrod-affiliated PR group that got traced back as being behind some rather nasty anti-Palin fake grassroots astroturf during the election last year.  They were apparently on the call at the invitation of OPE Director Wicks.
• You can refresh your memory of the Winner Incident here at The Jawa Report.  How interesting that they were there, and invited by an administration official, no less.
• Ace of Spades, again, quotes Slublog on the Hatch Act.  As in, this is actually technically forbidden by federal statute (I personally note ‘technically’ because Hatch Act prosecutions are few and far between).
• Ed Morrissey has what is probably the line of the day (”We do not fund the NEA for it to produce Leni Riefenstahl-type art”), and notes that the Washington Times would like help tracking down some of the call participants.
• And finally, I would like to remind everybody reading this that groups involved in pushing the administration’s health care agenda had racked up roughly 2 million dollars in grants from the NEA prior to it.

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This is actually from September 9th - you can tell, because they’re hyping the President’s speech as being a game-changer - but it’s instructive nonetheless. In this clip, Axelrod was asked, point-blank, why the administration isn’t trying to change the rules to let insurance companies compete across straight[*] lines, and his refusal to give a straight answer is almost as funny as is watching Wolf Blitzer pushing him to give one.

Mind you, the actual answer - “There isn’t anything in that scheme that benefits a Democratic client group, and interstate competition is part of the Republican plan that we keep lying about not existing, so we won’t support it” - is politically… fraught. Nonetheless, it’s instructive to remember that this administration has no interest in a bipartisan solution to health care reform, and even less interest in getting the Democrats in Congress under control. All the President wants is a bill to sign and the opportunity to declaim that he’s reformed health care. Anything will do at this point.

(Via Below the Beltway, via The Other McCain)

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

[*As Faithful Commenter NightTwister guessed: this is a Freudian slip, but I'm not going to fix it. On reflection, I like it better this way.- ML]

The Chief of Staff of a Member of Congress called this afternoon to suggest I look at the comments on Daily Kos about the President dropping the public option. (Now, how many times has he dropped it?)

Wow. The left is pissed-off, in deep emotional pain and feel betrayed.

Here is one comment such comment:

It’s hard to maintain a sense of equilibrium when you see all those around you, who have fought so hard for this issue, in emotional pain.

and another:

Obama is/was nothing more than another con-man politician . . . who knew how to speak the words that people outraged and despairing by eight years of Bush policies wanted to hear. But that’s all they were.

or this one:

We’re there to donate $, man phone banks, generate enthusiasm, and then let the “grown ups” make policy decisions the way they always did. We’re getting Clintonism w/o Clinton. Soon, we’ll get V-chips and school uniforms, or their contemporary equivalents.

and another:

if you take away the showmanship, it’s looking like Obama was never on the right side of that war - not even from the start.

and one more:

What’s really sad and maddening is that manypeople have worked through sickness and little money and others after a full week’s work, to get this. I’m not quite ready to believe it is dead, yet, but if they’ve known this for a long time, they have twisted the knife, by allowing us to spend our blood, sweat and tears, to no avail.

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The President’s most trusted advisor, David Axelrod told Politico:

“I think it’s fairly obvious that we’re not in the second inning. We’re not in the fourth inning. We’re in the eighth or ninth inning here, and so there’s not a lot of time to waste.”

That is about as good as it gets in terms of any admission from the White House that their signature initiative is in trouble (to continue the baseball analogy, the White House is behind) and the game is winding down.

A mid-August poll by Rasmussen of likely voters put President Obama’s support for a health reform bill at 34% without the public option:

“Just 34% of voters nationwide support the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats if the so-called “public option” is removed. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 57% oppose the plan if it doesn’t include a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.”

CBS News today had more bad health care polling news for the President:

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Just follow these easy steps!

1. Create AKPD Message & Media, a public relations company that specializes in astroturfing.
2. Attach yourself to the campaign of the candidate that eventually wins the 2008 Presidential election.
3. Disengage yourself from AKPD Media, but under circumstances where the company ‘owes’ you 2 million dollars, which it will then pay back over time (we call this ‘income’).
4. Become a Senior Advisor to the President.
5. Have the President negotiate a tone-deaf deal between the White House and lobbyist group PhRMA to get the pharmaceutical industry to support health care rationing.
6. ‘Discover’ one fine summer day that AKPD Media, the company that you created and which is still paying you money, has been given a fat advertising contract by PhRMA to astroturf health care rationing.
7. Profit!

See The Conservatives, Michelle Malkin, Protein Wisdom, Bloomberg, & Hugh Hewitt for more.

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I just had this forwarded by one of my RS colleagues who doesn’t have time to hit this right now. Turns out that the Axelrod spam did happen, and it’s all because of all those awful “outside groups of all political stripes“:

After insisting no one was receiving unsolicited e-mails from the White House, officials reversed their story Monday night and blamed outside political groups for the unwanted messages from the tech-savvy operation.

White House online director Macon Phillips said in a blog posting that independent groups—he didn’t name them—had signed-up their members to receive regular updates about Obama’s projects, priorities and speeches.

The White House had consistently denied that anyone who hadn’t sought the e-mails had received them.

But we can believe them when they now tell us that it’s not their fault. Because nothing, of course, is ever this administration’s fault.

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(Via Hot Air Headlines) I understand that it’s probably legally wise for the White House to assign responsibility for Axelrod’s health care spamming to all those evil, evil advocacy organizations, but really:

“We are implementing measures to make subscribing to emails clearer, including preventing advocacy organizations from signing people up to our lists without their permission when they deliver petition signatures and other messages on individual’s behalf.”

If the petitions were only presented in hardcopy form, somebody had to enter those email addresses into the system. If the organizations in question had provided a digital list of email addresses, somebody had to add them to the White House’s distribution list. If the organizations in question had signed up those email addresses one at a time, somebody on the White House Staff needs to explain why he or she didn’t even set up a please-click-to-confirm-your-registration system.

Somebody with a name.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

UPDATE: I’m receiving emails from folks who say an unsubscribe link was at the bottom of the Axelrod email they received. I’m also receiving more emails from people, including on Capitol Hill, who are saying they received Axelrod’s “viral” talking points memo despite never having signed up for White House emails in any way.

If there’s a part of this story that’s more troubling to me, it’s not the unsubscribe bit; CAN-SPAM likely doesn’t apply to government anyway, and I can always move Mr. Axelrod’s emails to my spam bucket on my own. Rather, the most troubling part here is the fact that the White House is apparently targeting people who have never offered their permission, or their contact information, to the White House in an increasingly desperate attempt to get somebody to listen to them.

Yesterday, the Obama White House launched a self-described “viral e-mail” that, according to ABC News, strategists and spokespersons hoped would “combat the viral e-mails that fly unchecked and under the radar, spreading all sorts of lies and distortions.”

The email, which is from Obama strategist David Axelrod and which has a subject line of “Something Worth Forwarding, is a lengthy (and wholly unremarkable)rehash of Obama administration/Organizing for America/Democrat National Committee talking points on the proposed health care overhaul.

The main content of this email is not really noteworthy in the least. What is noteworthy is the fact that Axelrod’s email appears to lack any way to opt out of future messages from info@messages.whitehouse.gov — a fact that, if Axelrod’s email is to be considered anything other than official government communication, may put it in violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

The CAN-SPAM (”Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing”) Act, passed in 2003, requires emailers to “give recipients an opt-out method,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. Axelrod’s email did not do that.

Granted, the CAN-SPAM Act was written to protect people against commercial email spamming, not against a White House that sent an email without an opt-out feature to a list of people who never requested to be contacted by the Obama White House, and who never provided the administration with their email addresses.

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Top White House aide David Axelrod told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos today that the administration intends to explore a number of means by which it can overhaul the nation’s health care system, but refused to reaffirm then-candidate Barack Obama’s “firm pledge” to not raise taxes on middle class Americans.

“The president had said in the past that he does not believe taxing health care benefits at any level is necessarily the best way to go here,” said Axelrod. “He still believes that, but there are a number of formulations and we’ll wait and see.”

Obama has not always been open to “a number of formulations,” however. In fact, prompted by Republican accusations his tax plan would hurt middle class pocketbooks, Obama was quite adamant he would do no such thing. While campaigning in Dover, NH, Obama said, “Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

Slow to fulfill campaign pledges or entirely reversing his position on others, the president has come under fire from the most loyal of Democratic Party activists, including the LGBT community and environmentalists, but waffling on his no-middle-class-tax-hike pledge stands to pit the irresolute president against a majority of the American voting public, not just disillusioned splinter groups.

After pressed on whether the president will draw “a line in the sand” by a persistent Stephanopoulos, Axelrod refused to take the bait and align the administration with any such ultimatum.

“One of the problems we’ve had in this town is that people draw lines in the sand and they stop talking to each other. And you don’t get anything done. That’s not the way the president approaches this,” he said.

The reason for President Obama’s now-obvious reticence to pursue campaign pledges—or make intractable ultimatums, for that matter—is quite simple. Keeping promises while juggling the competing interests of donors, activists, and voters is no simple feat. If you don’t make a promise, you can’t break it.

Then-candidate Barack Obama made promises of impossibilities—of a transparent government, of a new politics, of a hopeful and peaceful American—and performed little. Now-President Barack Obama makes no promises and yet he still performs little.

Color me surprised.

There mainstream media and the Left are all over themselves in recent weeks, trying to pin Republicans down on who leads our party. Is Rush Limbaugh our leader? Is it Mitch McConnell? Or is it Sarah Palin, or John Boehner, or Michael Steele, or someone else?

You can rest assured of two things:

1. The only reason they want to know is so that they can figure out whom to destroy, and;
2. It doesn’t matter.

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It’s a good thing that Bambi campaigned on “bringing America together”. And it’s a good thing that the Democrat Party claims to have “a long and proud history of representing and protecting the interests of working Americans and guaranteeing personal liberties for all.”

Because if they didn’t say so, I wouldn’t know it.

If you have not been introduced to David Axelrod, you should be. You pay his salary. He’s Barack Obama’s right-hand man, has been for years, and holds the official title Senior Advisor to the President of the United States. A highly sought-after campaign strategist, here’s a man who knows something about sleaze..

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Never blog angry.

Well, not quite true: never blog too angry. A little anger can help. Too much, though, and you end up wanting to pound on the wall; this pleases a certain demographic, and you may define ‘pleases’ any way that you like. So, now that I’ve calmed down - some - about Obama crony David Axelrod crassly equating Carrie Prejean with a dog:

When Axelrod was asked if he had weighed in on the Obama family’s dog choice, he answered, “I was only called in for the final three, and one was Miss California.”

…I’ll say this: after an event like the above I’d be embarrassed about me being on the same side of the same-sex marriage debate as Axelrod, except that there’s actually no evidence whatsoever that I am (I already know that I’m well to the left of his boss on this issue). As it is, I’d much prefer to have Carrie Prejean as my spokesperson than the people that have decided to publicly attack her; unlike them, she’s shown no indication that she personally hates her opponents.

I really should stop being surprised at this sort of thing, though. It’s not like it’s going to stop for the next 3.5 years.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Video Below Fold

It is always interesting to see the Democratic pot calling the Republican kettle black and here we have only the latest example of that with Obama’s top advisor attacking former Vice President Dick Cheney for his outspoken position on the failures of the Obama administration’s early efforts in office. But, even as advisor David Axelrod was attacking Cheney, there didn’t seem to be any memory on the part of CNN or Axelrod of the wild-eyed, fire-breathing attacks made by former Vice President Al Gore on President George W. Bush in the years after the 2000 election.

On CNN’s State of the Union with host John King, David Axelrod scolded Dick Cheney for not behaving like a “statesman” over the former vp’s statements that the country is becoming less safe because of Obama’s policies.

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Some of you may recall that many of the themes used by Barack Obama in his presidential campaign, and even some of the words that came off Obama’s TelePrompter, were first tried out by another David Axelrod client, Deval Patrick, in Patrick’s successful run for Governor of Massachusetts in 2006:

Three years later, one poll says the voters of the deep-blue Bay State haven’t gotten the Change they Hoped for, and they want a recall, with Patrick locked in a dead heat just for renomination:

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