This just in: Republicans Lack Oomph

The RNC is closing in fast, (albeit threatened with a giant hurricane) and the Republican party leaders have been working like mad to make sure everyone has a rip-roarin' good time. Those Dems can keep their Black-Eyed Peas and Stevie Wonder! We're gon' have a hoedown!

It's this sort of thing that makes me wish I didn't have such a conservative agenda. Observe:

CNN, 08.30.08

The Democrats turned out the star power for its convention in Denver, Colorado, right up to the final night, when the 80,000-strong crowd attending Sen. Barack Obama's closing speech at Invesco Field was serenaded by Sheryl Crow and Stevie Wonder, among others.

The Republican National Convention, which begins Monday in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, may not have the same oomph, but it won't lack for well-known visitors.

Later:

[The RNC will feature] a Charlie Daniels Band concert on Wednesday. The Black Eyed Peas played the group's Denver show. Retail chain Target is co-sponsor of both shows.
Also in Minneapolis: a show titled "The Songwriters Circle: The Songs We Love," which will feature performances by Brett James (who wrote "Jesus, Take the Wheel") and Greg Laswell ("What a Day"), according to RollingStone.com. The show is sponsored by the ONE campaign -- which supports the fight against AIDS and global poverty -- and the Recording Industry Association of America.
Among other celebrities expected to be present are the Beach Boys -- who will be headlining a concert of their own Monday -- Gretchen Wilson and Sammy Hagar. However, one of the GOP's biggest celebrity names, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, may not make the trip. Schwarzenegger has said that state business may keep him in Sacramento.

Let's start with Charlie Daniels, the main attraction. This is Charlie Daniels:

In the past, he has penned such inspiring anthems as: "Robot Romp," "Great Big Bunches of Love," (I swear I am not joking), and "The South's Gonna Do It," a political song about being hardy and racist which goes:

So gather round gather round children
Get down well just get down children
Get loud well you can be loud here and be proud
And you can be proud here now
Be proud you're a rebel
Cause the south's gonna do it again


As well as "A Few More Rednecks," "The Legend of Wooly Swamp," and "Rajin' Cajun."

Also present will be: Brett James ("Jesus, Take the Wheel"), Greg Laswell ("What a Day"), and Gretchen Wilson ("Redneck Woman").

The performances will conclude with a good old fashioned hog wrasslin contest.

Don't get depressed, though, fellow countryphobiacs! Also present will be Sammy Hagar, also known as the 2nd best lead singer (out of 2 lead singers) for Van Halen! Somehow this makes sense in a strange cosmic way. What really surprises me is that the Beach Boys will be there. The Beach Boys are Republicans? The 60s have died and gone to purgatory.

I'm more excited with the Republican veep right now (and her naughty librarian vibe--but that's another post) than with the convention to nominate her and McCain.

I hate country music.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra is the new Ugly Chinese Girl... Almost

According to CNN:

"Eight years after Sydney hosted what was dubbed "the best Olympic Games ever," officials with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra acknowledged their stirring performance at the 2000 opening ceremony was entirely prerecorded. And perhaps even more cringe-inducing for Sydneysiders: some of the music was recorded by the orchestra of Sydney's rival city, Melbourne.

The revelation of the mimed performance -- which both orchestras have defended as a necessary precaution against embarrassing flubs -- followed an international uproar over China's decision to pass off the voice of a 7-year-old singer as that of another girl at this year's Olympic opening ceremony.

The Beijing ceremony's chief music director said the real singer, Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn't good looking enough."


I think CNN posted this news bulletin to capitalize on the recent Chinese escapades at the Beijing Olympics; it seems as though CNN is uncovering some vast conspiracy to make the Olympics a massive sham. Oh Noes! Call the WAAAAAAmbulance!

There are two major differences between the Beijing singer fiasco and this Syndey story, the first being that aside from this minor detail, the Sydney games were widely regarded as the best Olympics we've had in a long time. Nothing else significant went wrong, as opposed to the recent Olympics which were plagued by 1: The singer fiasco, 2: The underaged Chinese gymnasts (quite disturbing in itself) and 3: That weird trippy ending performance. I mean, SERIOUSLY? The giant pulsating wave of shiny people climbing up a giant toilet paper roll was neat, but it was so abstract and weird that I turned it to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire ABC Family. Seriusly, if that was Sydney's only problem, who gives a frick?

Second, it's far more humane. I certainly don't know what Yang Peiyi's opinion on the incident was (Although I could hazard a guess) but the decision was made clearly and explicitly (at least afterwards) because she wasn't photogenic enough. It wasn't unfair to the symphony tha they had prerecorded the song they were playing; I mean, come on, have you ever heard of the Jonas Brothers? Wondered at how they can keep their perfect electronically-enhanced voices painfully intact in their shriveled little necks even after groaning out their musical sludge at a live show in front of 50,000 screaming pre-pubescent girls? Why even when they prance around madly pretending they're real BA rockstars, you never hear them breathe any heavier? Why their live songs sound exactly like their album songs?

So despite what CNN is attempting to construe, everybody prerecords their music. But not everyone keeps a talented artist from peforming because they're not pretty enough. That's the difference between just being kinda tacky and being a douche.

The Chinese government is a douche.

There. I said it.

Farm Subsidies and the WTO, OR: Our Government: Robin Hood On LSD

So if you're a news junkie, you've probably been hearing a bunch of talk about how the WTO (stands for World Trade Organization) talks fell through. If you're not, then you haven't. I hadn't, but it sounded interesting.

So I did some digging as to what exactly the dealy-o was. Essentially, the US tanked its relations with the EU, China, India, and the entire WTO because it wanted to keep its farm subsidies at current levels. At the same time, India and China refused to remove their own protectionist policies, i.e. little devices called SSMs, which basically allow those countries to make US businesses pay more money to sell stuff to India and China. These are meant to protect poor Indian and Chinese farmers, just like US farm subsidies are meant to protect poor US farmers.

India and China won't get rid of their SSMs until we get rid of farm subsidies.

So what we have here is three major countries endangering trade and the global economy to maintain protectionist trade policies.

That annoys me.

The countries involved are being driven by this illogical fear that if they remove their trade barriers they will be flooded with cheap goods that will put all their poor farmers out of business. "But the farmers!" they cry. "They'll go out of business! They'll run out of food and lose all their business and live on the street and wear banana peels on their feet and eat stray rodents for nourishment! We need to protect them from those lousy foreigners!"

That also annoys me.

Reasons why:

Let's talk about farm subsidies. Farm subsidies work like this: The government gives money out of it's federal treasury to farmers, who then use the money to produce cheaper, better goods. No harm in that, right? It sounds like an innocuous policy to help the US compete with those nasty foreign growers. Not so. Farm subsidies, while sounding good are (like so many other feel-good government handout policies, cough-cough) impossible and immoral in practice. Warning: Statistic ahead:

-In 2003 (the most recent year I could find data for) the top 10 percent of subsidy recipients received 68 percent of farm subsidies, and the top 5 percent received 55 percent.

Imagine you have a hundred dollars that you want to give to a good cause--to help someone needy.

You have twenty friends. One is insanely wealthy, one is moderately wealthy, eight are doing OK, and the remaining ten are dirt poor. Who do you give you're money to? Well, DUH! You give 55 bucks to your millionaire friend, 13 bucks to your moderately wealthy friend, and divide remaining 32 bucks among the remaining 18 friends. Overall, even if you fairly distributed the remaining money, each of your non-wealthy friends get a buck seventy. Seriously? You fail.

It's like some sort of mutant welfare for rich people. It's bad enough that the US government has decided that it's its job to take on the fair distribution of wealth--That's another blog post for another day--but the gov seems to have decided that the rich staying rich is a more valuable goal than the poor becoming less poor. It's reverse Socialism. It's an economic oligarchy. Robin Hood is on LSD. Instead of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, take from everyone and give to the rich.

And now (to get back to the WTO) we're sacrificing our social and economic ties with the EU, the WTO, India, China, Brazil, etc. so we can continue to give our money to rich people.

Why?

Well, isn't it obvious?

The poor can't pay for advertisements.

The poor can't hire lobbyists.

The poor can't get you reelected.

Rich people can.

Cato and Reason understand.

www.reason.com/news/show/36207.html

www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=8459

Kick-Off

Alright, this is the first post in a long line of posts containing my angry christian centrist market-anarchist libertarian rants.

If you get mad at them, feel free to tell me I'm a stupid homophobic racist nativist , after which I will mock you, because I will probably agree with you on the majority of said issues.

This blog isn't about race. It isn't about politics. It isn't about right, or left, or abortion, or guns, or torture, or the economy, or Barack Obama.

All of these may surface as manifestations of the central idea of this blog, which is simply that government intervention and protectionism generally suck.