After breaking the ACORN scandal my friend (from  Azerbaijan) Andrew Breitbart promises to bring a new scandal that will rock America for days if not weeks. In his Washington Times column of september 7 he warned the MSM that he at least two different scandals were about to blow. The first hint; ACORN. The ACORN thing did indeed break and had a tremendous impact. The second hint? The National Endowment for the Arts.

This weekend he said the second scandal would break this week, late yesterday evening his editors of Big Government (his latest online adventure) and Big Hollywood – Michael Flynn and John Nolte – published a post in which they introduce the new scandal. And yes, it’s clearly about the NEA:

On August 25th 2009, Big Hollywood’s Patrick Courrielche broke the story of a conference call he attended with other “rising artist and art community luminaries”:

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

The email invite came directly from Yosi Sergant, then-Director of Communications at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and it advised this hand-picked group that the call was about laying “a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”

Courrielche describes the call this way:

Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.

It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me.

Within 48 hours of this phone call, 21 arts organizations endorsed President Obama’s health-care reform plan. Within days, Rock the Vote started an all out blitz that included a “health care design contest.”

More:

Among the Obama Administration officials on the call were Buffy Wicks, Office of Public Engagement and the lead White House official on the President’s Serve.Gov initiative to promote national service. Also on the call was Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov. One of their main goals on the call, it seems, was to encourage artists to produce works that would reinforce the President’s call for service; specifically through the Serve.Gov web-portal.

As Dana Loesch recently reported at Big Government, the Serve.Gov portal funnels citizens to volunteer or service projects connected with ACORN and other leftist groups. The taxpayer-funded website is evolving into a cyber-recruitment tool for the progressive movement.

And then the announcement:

So what did happen on that call? Was the NEA coordinating with the White House to push their agenda on a group of artists eager for and reliant upon the NEA for grants, or is the NEA telling the truth that this call “was not a means to promote any legislative agenda”?

Tomorrow at noon ET, explosive new information will answer that question and raise many others.

It seems likely that Breitbart caught the NEA and the White House breaking the law.

The most interesting aspect of the scandals brought to us by Breitbart is how he plays the media for fools. It’s utterly unbelievable to see how he forces them to cover scandals they do not want to cover and to spend attention to the dark side of the left.

As QandO puts it rather succinctly, Breitbart’s real target seems to be the MSM:

I think it was the media who were the real losers in the ACORN story, just as they were in the Van Jones debacle. Ever since last summer the media has unashamedly supported Obama in every way that it can, and covered up for him where possible. Embarrassing connections are buried, misstatements and outright lies are routinely ignored, and opposition is either painted in a most unflattering light or marginalized as fringe elements of little import. And that’s not to mention the constant caterwauling about racism at every turn. Breitbart easily outmaneuvered them in the past few weeks since, like the hare found out, you can’t sleep on the job and expect to stay out in front. As Ace said, “He warned the media. They ignored the warning.” I look forward to whatever comeuppance Mr. Breitbart has in store for them this week.

Tom Maguire adds:

Breitbart would be very shrewd to target the MSM rather than Obama. Presidents come and go but an alternative media empire could last, well, a long time. TheACORN story demonstrated both the need for alternatives and Breitbart’s ability to be that alternative.

That could very well be the result of these scandals and the of the way Breitbart deals with them. His Big Government, Big Hollywood and his news syndication website Breitbart.com have rocked the news world already and will continue to do so, I am sure. He’s setting up an alternative media empire, one that goes where the MSM dare not go either because they’re afraid to do so or because (and this is mostly the case) they don’t want to because they don’t want to do anything to hurt America’s progressive movement.

In the meantime, I can announce I’ll become a contributor to Big Government. More on that later.