It’s official. As of 10:17 pm tonight, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has passed both houses of Congress, and the arts are invited to the party. Quoth Americans from the Arts, by email: We can now confirm that the package DOES include $50 million in direct support for arts jobs through National Endowment forRead More
Srsly?
Via Fractured Atlas, it looks like the fabled $50 million NEA stimulus might actually have survived the reconciliation process (pdf, page 4) between the House and Senate packages of the bill…seemingly at the expense of three times that number for the Smithsonian. And on a related note, how many of you knew that the NEARead More
One last chance
Right now, the conference committee is hammering out the final version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The goal is to reconcile the House version of the bill with the Senate version of the bill. The House version includes $50 million for the NEA to help keep jobs in the arts intact. The SenateRead More
Around the horn: picking up the pieces edition
Obviously, the big story this week has been the effort to get the NEA funding through the Senate, which as it stands doesn’t look in very good shape with the Coburn amendment having passed. However, Americans for the Arts is taking out a series of full-page ads in several political newspapers and organizing a letter-writingRead More
Ouch.
Me, a couple of days ago: Anyway, it’s not like the arts are in poor company. Big Bad Sen. Tom Coburn also wants to eliminate funding [in the stimulus package] for casinos, aquariums, zoos, local parks, highway beautification, and just about everything else that’s not a tax cut. (Don’t worry, it’ll never pass.) The Senate,Read More
Time to cut the crap: The NEA money should stay
This is what Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) has to say about the $50 million for the NEA being included in the stimulus bill: Representative Jack Kingston, a Georgia Republican, wants to transfer the proposed NEA funding to highway construction. He failed to get the House to vote on his proposal, so he is now tryingRead More
Stimulus not getting much of a rise out of Republicans
And so it begins. Now that Republican opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is solidifying, political conservatives in the Senate are beginning to use the $50 million in NEA funding that was in the original design of the bill (and the version that the House passed) as a pawn for negotiations.Read More
On the Arts Czar question
As mentioned here a few days ago, there’s a petition going around, now up to nearly 200,000 signatures, advocating that the United States create a Cabinet-level position in charge of the arts and culture industries. This “Secretary of the Arts” would….well, I’m not exactly sure what it would do, but the main idea is toRead More
Michael Dorf for NEA head?
So speculates the LA Times. This Michael Dorf is not to be confused with the other Michael C. Dorf who also happens to be a lawyer, nor the founder of the Knitting Factory, which would have been an interesting appointment to say the least. Meanwhile, the whole cabinet position for the arts thing receives someRead More
Around the horn: road trip edition
I’m writing from lovely Caribou, ME, where my girlfriend and I are resting after the first day of a rather quixotic quest to travel the entire north-south length of US Route 1. The towns of northern Maine are, shall we say, sleepy in the winter; we have the run of our B&B since we areRead More