Awaits Gov. Crist's signature. Details.

Audio of Iraq address.

President Bush from the White House site:

President Bush Disappointed by Actions of House of Representatives Regarding Colombia Free Trade Agreement

Today's unprecedented and unfortunate action by the House of Representatives - led by Speaker Pelosi - to change the rules governing legislation to implement our trade agreement with Colombia is damaging to our economy, our national security, and our relations with an important ally. It also undermines the trust required for any Administration to negotiate trade agreements in the future.

Read the rest here.

A painting from a retrospective exhibit of a well-respected octogenarian Austrian artist is currently inspiring a controversy at Vienna's Stephendom Museum. Part of a major exhibit in the Cathedral's museum, the homo-erotic painting by Alfred Hrdlicka depicts the last supper of Jesus and the apostles as a homosexual orgy. The exhibit features other paintings also representing Jesus in a sexual context.

After the show opened German and US bloggers began a passionate discussion of the exhibit online, with the bulk of the disapprobation falling on Hrdlicka's painting of the iconic event. But the criticism, including charges of blasphemy, were discounted by people connected with the exhibit. Criticism was characterised as uninformed blathering by provincial outlanders and American Christian "fundamentalists" who didn't "get" Austrian art. But the controversy refused to die.

The Last Supper painting has been removed from the exhibition, according to this, but the other paintings with content considered offensive or blasphemous are still up.

An exhibit of art depicting a religion's central figure in a homo-erotic sexualized representation deemed sacrilegious, blasphemous and unseemly by some viewers in a museum operated by that religion raises interesting questions about art and the Church, freedom of expression, censorship and self-censorship in the arts in the West.

Art and and the Catholic Church have always been mutually supportive. Historically, regardless of artists' personal beliefs, artists relied on the patronage of the Church, churchmen and religious patrons. (Patrons who, having acquired their wealth, were now conscious of their mortality and preferred a less warm eternity).

What should the position of a Church be toward works and their exhibition or performance in Church supported venues, quite separately from a generalist's view, when they are areligious, irreligious or (by the teaching of the church) heretical? (This is a very different issue than the one raised by the reaction of members of one faith to depictions of their religion's central figure by people and cultures outside their faith, as in the publication of the Danish Cartoons). Should a museum or university or other venue support and promote works that mock, undermine or disrespect the core beliefs of the religious organization under the auspices of which it operates? Can a religion continue to be taken seriously by its membership and prosper when it disregards the protection of its brand?*