Time to dust off the ol’ trench coat
Why am I just hearing about this stimulus cash from the National Endowment for the Arts now? (Washington Examiner link)
…CounterPULSE, which received $25,000 in stimulus funds, and which may be best known for its “Perverts Put Out,” a “long-running pansexual performance series.” The group urges guests, “Join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun.”
Last Friday, the NEA defended this and numerous other small grants of extremely questionable merit in a letter to Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla. “The NEA did not use [stimulus] dollars to fund any of the projects,” wrote Patrice Powell, the agency’s acting chairman. The grants, she wrote, “can only be used to provide salary support for staff positions or fees for previously-engaged artists and/or contractual personnel that are critical to an organization’s artistic mission and in jeopardy of being eliminated as a result of the current economic climate.” In other words, you’re not paying for “Perverts Put Out.” You’re paying to make sure that CounterPULSE has enough money to produce “Perverts Put Out.”
Everyone knows how expensive it is for us pervs to maintain a staff, er, I mean keep our secretaries…er, uh….
Yeah, $25k isn’t much, compared to the trillions the stimulus will cost, but still, “Perverts Put Out”…really?
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Usual Suspects
“The NEA did not use [stimulus] dollars to fund any of the projects,” wrote Patrice Powell, the agency’s acting chairman.
That is a fallacial argument. Even if the NEA could put the (non-)stimulus money in a bucket just for payroll (which they can’t), doing so would allow the NEA to take an equal amount of money (from other sources) out of the payroll bucket and use it somewhere else.
So even if they did not directly use the money for the projects, it still allowed for the funding of them.