Reid: Save federal funding for the cowboy poets!

File this under: Did Harry Reid just say that? In the middle of his tirade against House Republicans' "mean-spirited" budget bill on the Senate floor Tuesday, the Senate Majority Leader lamented that the GOP’s proposed budget cuts would eliminate the annual "cowboy poetry festival” in his home state of Nevada. (See also: Reid’s prostitution lecture bombs.) Reid clearly has a soft spot for the Baxter Blacks of the poetry world and thinks Republicans don't. “The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”...more

Baxter, Baxter where art thou? Does Baxter Black only bard to a bureaucrat's bucks?

Does Waddie Mitchell wander the west because of Washington's wasteful ways?

Does Michael Martin Murphey only croon to congressional currency?

The answer is no and we may actually here from two of these performers.

Now let's look at what Senator Reid said:

The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”

So Reid believes "tens of thousands" of people "would not exist" if it weren't for federal funding of the festival. That's a lot of people's lives who depend on cowboy poetry!   I know that's not what he meant but it is what he said (who knows, maybe he did mean it).

Reid is part of the Government Gong Show that has been committing fiscal cruelty against us for far too long. 

He needs to retire to Elko where he can oversee the outhouses at his favorite festival.