Lunch Break: Is this the end of cowboy poetry festivals?
To give us a break from the daily grind…
Time will tell if the government will pull the plug on 2011 federal spending for the annual Cowboy Poetry festival in Nevada.
Harry Reid, not surprisingly, believes we should continue funding cowboy poetry because “tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist”.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCi4I4vxqBQ[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SzapVq1YW8[/youtube]
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Mar.15, 2011 1:00 pm |
Video of the day |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
It looks like this party is large enough to support itself, eh?
I’m kinda glad that we could afford to support something like this with our tax dollars, but after a while a program needs to support itself. If this sort of thing is so valuable that we ought to devote tax dollars to it, then we should look to starting new programs, and not just pork-rolling the same old ones.
I recommend that the Cowboy Poetry money be transferred to the American Chesterton Society. There’s a conference that deserves some public support! Investing in “common sense,” for a change.
Oh, and the Chesterton Conference travels around the country…. so it won’t be pork-rolling in one state all the time.
“tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist”
Am I just dense or does this sentence make no sense? What did he mean by that? If the festival didn’t exist, tens of thousands of people wouldn’t have been born? or would have died? What is this? I’m confused….. :S
You’re not dense, Vita. It’s a bizarre statement.
I’m at school, so I didn’t watch the videos. I just read the comment about festival-goers not existing, and looked down at the second video to see the boy with a scared sort of look on his face, and imagined him thinking “I’m gonna disappear!” There you go again, Harry Reid, frightening small children.
This concludes my silly stream of consciousness post.
Let’s get real. Politicians make silly slips during their speeches.
He didn’t meant that people would cease to exist.
He meant that this joyful gathering of people would not exist, without seed money from Congress’s funding of the arts. Apparently, the Senator thinks that the festival will fail without more pork.
But we hear the joke — because there really are thousands of Nevada citizens who truly no longer exist, because of the money that was given to abortion providers in that state.
The event seems to be well-attended. It needs to be well-managed financially and can make a nice go of it as a private concern.
It’s always a problem when the government pays for art exhibits and performances. People will pay for that which they value. If people aren’t willing to pay for cowboy poetry, then the cowboys can either do it for free, or the endeavor dies. Simple.
The same for the portrait of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung, by ‘artist Chris Ophili. From Wikipedia:
“One of his paintings, The Holy Virgin Mary, a depiction of the Virgin Mary, was at issue in a lawsuit between the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art when it was exhibited there in 1999 as a part of the “Sensation” exhibit. The painting depicted a black African Mary surrounded by images from blaxploitation movies and close-ups of female genitalia cut from pornographic magazines, and elephant dung. These were formed into shapes reminiscent of the cherubim and seraphim commonly depicted in images of the Immaculate conception and the Assumption of Mary. Following the scandal surrounding this painting, Bernard Goldberg ranked Ofili #86 in 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. Red Grooms showed his support of the artist by purchasing one of Ofili’s paintings in 1999, even after Giuliani famously exclaimed, “There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects!”[4] The painting is now owned by David Walsh and is on display at the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania.[5]”
The same for Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ”. From wikipedia:
“Piss Christ is a 1987 photograph by photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art’s “Awards in the Visual Arts” competition,[1] which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.”
But I’ll make Dirty Harry a deal. I’ll support money for cowboy poetry, if he’ll support an equal amount of money for art exhibits of aborted babies and a rogues gallery of notorious abortionists to be shown in the same galleries as Piss Christ and Elephant Dung Mary.
What say ye Dirty Harry? Yodle me a yes in true cowpoke fashion.
I heard the latest attendance was 7,000. Hard to believe Dingy Harry would lie about that.
Hans, he’s not lying, that’s just Senatorial math.
Kelsey, funny comment.
Also, those 2 cowboys with the very full mustaches – egad, what are they thinking?! How do they not get hair in their food, how do they not spit out hair all day long, how do they brush their teeth, and (if they have sweeties) how do they kiss them without grossing them out?
Those mustaches need to be trimmed pronto! :)
This is the kind of stuff that drives the average taxpayer insane. Why on Earth is our government wasting our money on some Cowboy Poetry Festival?! Let the cowboys pay for their own festival!
lol you guys lol Harry is saying that without the funds there would be no festival, a festival that brings 10,000 people to the local area and opens up jobs by bringing in revenue to local businesses. I agree it was a horrible example but that is the point he was trying to make and he is right. Where else should the money go? Even more tax breaks for the richest 1% or more bombs to drop on brown children in whatever third world country we choose to attack next?