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And corporate grants don't? Wanna ask Diego Rivera how well he got along with Rockefeller and Standard Oil when he was painting a mural for Rockefeller Center.

And for an example of perhaps tolerant public spending on the arts, we could look at Great Britain.

Whenever the money comes from someone else, you can always be beholdin'.

We can look to Great Britain for a lot of things -- honest journalism, unrestrictive arts funding, better dance music, and government that is much more fun to watch on C-SPAN than our own.

I do have to differ with your point on Diego Rivera. There's a huge difference between receiving a donation from a corporate entity and being a hired contractor. If Microsoft hired me to design a billboard for them, and I delivered a poster featuring Mussolini, I have a feeling I wouldn't get paid. Diego Rivera wasn't given money to explore his own work; he was paid to paint a mural for Norman Rockefeller. Though I admire Rivera's testicular fortitude, you have to admit that he didn't really think about his client.

However, your point is well taken. If an art gallery accepted grant money from R.J. Reynolds, and then did an exhibition featuring paintings of emphesema-riddled lungs, I would imagine they couldn't count on money from R.J. Reynolds ever again.

I still hold to the original assertion, though -- it is a private entity's perogative to spend their money as they wish, as long as it isn't for duplicitous means -- perhaps you heard about our gas bills from two years ago? However, an administration that has placed so much emphasis on managing their propaganda, incurring opprobrium for their Orwellian steps to recharacterize history -- such behavior makes their proposal to increase arts funding highly suspicious. Using government funds to influence the freest of speech is far more -- far, far more -- reproachable than a private entity not wishing to support messages contrary to their own.

And while we're on the subject, check this out:

The play praises patriotism, but the judges only saw teens cutting up an American flag.

It was enough to disqualify Archbishop McCarthy High students from a competition early this week for their performance of The Children's Story. In the play, first published in 1963 by Shogun author James Clavell, third-graders in a classroom in a United States that has been defeated by a powerful enemy, presumably Communist, cut the flag into pieces. Their new teacher tells them if the flag is so good, everyone should get a piece and tells them to hand out the shreds. It's a message about the dangers of mindless political indoctrination.

Hell, even Antonin Scalia would be on the side of the kids.