“It’s amazing how times change.” That’s how Marc Schiller from the website Wooster Collective, a stalwart booster of international street art, began a letter to their readers explaining why they had been invited to the White House, why they accepted, and what they found there (namely, that there are graffiti artists working in the White House).

Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

When Sara and I started the Wooster Collective eight years ago, it felt to us at the time that the ONLY lens the media was providing as a way into understanding street art and graffiti was vandalism.

We want this to change.

Last month when we received an invitation to attend a briefing at The White House (yes, that one), we were at first a bit shocked, definitely skeptical, and finally, after giving it a lot of thought - absolutely delighted. To be included in the conversation at the level of The White House, we felt, was a huge testament that our voice (meaning our collective voice) was being heard.

Yesterday, along with about sixty amazing organizations who are committed to grassroots arts initiatives, we met with various officials in the Obama Administration, to listen and learn what the administration was thinking in regards to the Arts, to ask questions, and then to participate in working sessions on issues that we felt passionate about. (Ours was the need to better understand the issues around public and private space)

Read the entire letter and the conversation it sparked.

Source: Wooster Collective

Barack Obama is on the cover of January’s Columbia Journalism Review—but this hardly distinguishes the magazine from the others on the rack. The distinguishing feature is that Barack Obama appears something just short of sinister as he smirks and stares at you through a side-glancing eye. It’s almost as if the magazine’s art department peered inside the mind of a conservative talk show host and painted the Obama they found there.

The editorial inside calls on Obama to “turn the lights back on in the White House” and presents a laundry lists of actions he could take to decisively reject and reverse the excessive secrecy of his predecessor. 

Here’s a taste: 

* "In his first budget, restore, as Congress intended, the Office of Government Information Services to the National Archives and Records Administration, and remove it from the Justice Department, where conflicts of interest on transparency abound."

* "Get a handle on 'pseudo-secrecy'—the wholesale marking of documents with secret-ish labels outside of the official classification system—by reducing its use, establishing a system for appeals of such labels, and forbidding their use in Freedom of Information Act decisions." 

* "Revise outsourcing contracts to ensure that records generated by private companies doing government business will be treated like any agency-generated document."

The magazine's pages are peppered with points on a “Sunshine Timeline” that begins with a set of laws on public court proceedings and records passed by Henry III in 1267 and stumbles through the centuries grabbing at events as it finds them:

1766: Sweden adopts the first freedom of information law.

1935: The creation of the Federal Register, “the first comprehensive accounting of U.S. executive-branch rules and regulations.”

1953: “The American Society of Newspapers commissions a survey of all the laws (local, state, and federal) that could be used to gain access to government records—and concludes that the situation is bleak.”

1966: The Freedom of Information Act passes. “Without the votes to sustain the veto, and with Bill Moyers, his press secretary, urging him on, LBJ signs the bill.”

President Bush just returned from a weeklong tour of the Middle East, which included his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories since becoming president. For such an important visit—one that Bush hopes might establish his legacy as a diplomatic peacemaker—a mere press release just wouldn’t do. So the White House tried something new, in the form of what looks to be a blog, aptly titled “Trip Notes from the Middle East.” But don’t get too excited: The Trip Notes, written by various White House staffers over the course of the visit, are anything but substantial. Posts from Bush’s January 8-16 visit include descriptions of the weather, lodging conditions, how the staff kept busy on the airplane, and the array of animals on King Abdullah’s ranch. But cheers to the White House for attempting to embrace modern technology.

(Thanks, Columbia Journalism Review.)

—Sarah Pumroy

This Thursday, January 3, marks the first major contest in the 2008 road to the White House: the Iowa caucuses. Today, I am driving down to Des Moines to run my romantic visions of American democracy into the cold snow bank of reality.

“The Iowa caucuses are a process so bizarre and byzantine it is either, depending on your outlook, the essence of grass-roots democracy, a quaint anachronism, or perhaps just plain crazy,” Mark Coultan wrote for the Australian newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. My image of the caucuses comes from the Norman Rockwell painting, “Freedom of Speech,” where a man in a blue-collared work shirt stands up at a town hall meeting. I imagine the man as a farmer, nervously shuffling his feet, saying to the politicians, “Now, I may not know much, but one thing I do know is that the Washington fat cats aren’t looking out for us simple folks.”

That sentimental version of Iowa politics may never have existed. Today, millions of dollars are being spent on advertising and organizing to sway the people of a state with less than 1 percent of the population of the United States. And that state, according to the US Census Bureau, is 94.9 percent white.

Even knowing this, Rockwell’s middle-America imagery remains powerful, at least for me. That’s why I’m headed down there, with visions of democracy dancing in my head. Lacking in both plans and credentials, I’m going to Iowa to see what I can find. You can follow the progress here on the Utne Politics blog.

—Bennett Gordon