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Can’t have a week without another slice of GOP Presidential hopeful Thaddeus McCotter on guitar.
McCotter doggedly takes his message, with guitar, to the people. I admire his determination.
Guitar players have to stick together, even when one of the clan plays with shorts-wearing certified pantywaists, as during this performance of Tommy Tutone’s “867-5309/Jenny,” in Ames.
The special appeal phenom of male classic cock rock performed by distaff tribute bands — illustrated.
My impression is that it’s always been about leering and moentizing small to medium crowds of leerers. An impression this semi-pro video capture backs up in spades.
The first half of which is focused exclusively on the butts of the ladies onstage. And the rutching around in of tight denim.
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He could be right. One thing the rage vote has going — utter conviction. They will be there on election day.
From the WaTimes today, the first snap depicting the ad for Chinese counterfeit guitars over a book review about conflict with China:
The second — the ad for Chinese counterfeit guitars spun out over a piece on Google being penalized by the Justice Dept. for selling ads for illegal Canadian pills …
“Google Inc has agreed to pay 5 million to settle a US government investigation into the Internet search leader’s distribution of online ads for Canadian pharmacies illegally selling prescription and non-prescription drugs to American consumers,” it reads.
Click through the TradeTang ads leads to sales carts for a host of fake American guitars including Gibson and Paul Reed Smiths.
DD has observed that many of the ads for these counterfeit goods are distributed through Google’s AdSense/AdWords/AdChoices services.
GOP Presidential hopeful from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, continues his under-appreciated guitar-slinging meet-the-people tour at the New Hampshire Young Republican Lobster Bake and Straw Poll last weekend. There can be no doubt the man’s dedicated.
McCotter also extends the tradition of GOP men fond of milchtoasty interpretations of classic rock tunes.
The Young Republicans of New Hampshire could do with a little less melted butter on those lobsters. Whoa, boys and girls!
Jump on the grenades, boys.
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Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has hired a prominent Washington criminal law attorney to defend him against any charges resulting from government investigations into the financial crisis.
Blankfein, one of the most prominent and successful figures on Wall Street, retained Reid Weingarten, an attorney known for representing clients in high-profile cases of alleged corporate wrongdoing …
The decision to bring on a top legal name such as Weingarten suggests how seriously Blankfein is taking the investigation and that there could be a new push to investigate the firm and its executives on criminal grounds.
“He’s got an incredible amount to lose, and there’s a lot of anger out there,” said Philip Hilder, a criminal-defense attorney in Houston …
Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein — the song.
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Today, at the Washington Times — the de facto right wing newspaper of the capitol, this unintentionally hilarious tableau:
In case you’re late in on this series, the banner ad above the opinion piece is for a Chinese internet trading site selling counterfeit American electric guitars. The opinion is a Congressional politician’s complaint about Chinese counterfeiting.
The guitars are sold out of Beijing with many of the ads spun out on Google’s AdWords/AdSense business.
Clicking through the WaTimes ad takes you to a page selling fake Paul Reed Smith guitars. Paul Reed Smith’s are made in Maryland and are the very high end of domestic electric guitar manufacturing.
When DD blog first noticed the made-in-China counterfeiting business, its ads were on the Washington Post and pointed to sales for faked Gibson guitars. I notified Gibson and the Post and the ad was changed to specifically advertise “Made in China.” And the Post ad also switched clickthrough to fakes of the product of the much smaller company, Paul Reed Smith, the company victimized today.
It’s explained in greater detail in this series of posts.
The funny part comes in the WaTimes opinion piece, written by a politician, underneath the TradeTang ad.
Excerpted:
If there ever was a time to get serious with China, now is the time. The recent news of fake Apple and Ikea stores is almost too absurd to be true. But in China, the rules don’t apply. Brand name and innovation mean zip. Intellectual property is free game. Anything is up for grabs, and if I were a betting man, I’d bet that the government is getting a nice cut out of it all. But that’s communism, right? It’s a system in which your ideas are my ideas, your success is my success …
I also met Jim D’Addario, CEO of D’Addario Guitar Strings, an instrument strings manufacturer based in New York. This business, family-owned since the 1600s, has spent millions to stop the manufacture of counterfeit guitar strings in China. Mr. D’Addario has watched several coordinated raids on manufacturing facilities in China that exist solely to make counterfeit copies of D’Addario, Fender, Martin and other American companies’ guitar strings. On a website, it’s hard to tell the difference between a counterfeit and a legitimate D’Addario guitar-string set. As with the Chi flatirons, the packaging looks identical, but the fake package of guitar strings contains a hologram sticker – just to trick you – and the product inside is horrendous. It is that unbelievable.
“So what do we do?” asks the politician, “Rep. Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, was a prosecutor and judge in Houston [and] serves on the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees.”
Nothing. “Get tough on China.”
Big horselaugh.
American businesses, including guitar manufacturers, downsized and outsourced their manufacturing to Asian labor, effectively turning their US facilities into artisan custom shops for the plutocracy. In this bargain, repeated all across US non-military domestic production, the American companies gave up intellectual property and trained the Chinese to make their goods for the sake of the short term bottom line.
The Chinese are not better workers for the modern and future world economy and they do not have schools where people were trained to make electric guitars. This, lack of training and education, being the argument/excuse/insult so often used to explain why Americans are laid off and obsolete.
The problem is bilateral in its perfidy. China’s leaders are afraid of mass unemployment. They must keep people working and the way to do that is to sell all dry goods to the US middle and lower class. And US corporations have no interest in American labor because, being more expensive, it impinges on profits to the shareholders. They’re content with the US government ignoring mass unemployment.
So now it is only logical that some Chinese, maybe many, would see no point in maintaining licensing agreements with American multi-nationals once they were capable of copying the goods, or making cosmetically adequate facsimiles, on their own.
Comments left on the Chinese sales site, and many YouTube vidoes, show young American men who have no problem buying fakes of US premium goods. Since middle class wages have been destroyed this is a logical development, too.
And American companies, individually and collectively, whether they have engaged in short-sighted predatory behavior or forced into it by the competition, do not have the resources needed to combat the problems brought upon us by the great trade imbalance.
This post has been updated for clarity.
Google is not your friend
Google is responsible for distributing many, if not all, the ads mentioned in this series. In so doing it makes easy money from the benefit of selling counterfeit American products. But there is little any individual company can do by itself to rectify the matter. Google is so powerful it can simply ignore you.
In a related matter, from the wire today:
Google Inc, which has agreed to pay $500 million for accepting ads from Canadian pharmacies to sell in the United States, said in a statement that it should not have allowed the ads in the first place.
The U.S. Justice Department, which announced the settlement on Wednesday said that it represented all of Google’s revenues from Canadian pharmacy advertisements and was one of the largest ever in the United States.
Google said in a brief comment that it had banned advertising of prescription drugs in the United States. The announcement was made in a February 2010 blog post.
“However, it’s obvious with hindsight that we shouldn’t have allowed these ads on Google in the first place,” the statement said.
Howard thought he was gonna be a star on Miami Vice when I was doing this.
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Retraining Camp set to selected Google pix. See if you can guess the two celebrities and the one not so famous one and their substituted pix.
Yes, it’s tricky and a little obscure.
Will be occupied this morning taking someone to LAX — always a huge deal because of traffic and homeland security/TSA.
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It came down to two choices on what to give you. This, or a new video of GOP Presidential Candidate Thaddeus McCotter playing guitar to “Let It Rock” on Huckabee.
Not really much of a contest, really.
It’s called “The National Anthem” for obvious reason.
Sing along. It’s easy.
“Yes I know the rent is steep; But the whores and beer are really cheap!”
Notes, for those interested in what’s under the hood: The drums lift the rhythm from “The Wanderer.” Classic Fender Champ sound, recorded mostly live with a Fender amp and Option 5 Destination Overdrive. Axe — the ol’ ’79 Gibson SG and two harmonicas, one made in Japan, the other in Deutschland. Some Pennsy Dutch voice comedy from old vinyl.
Play it loud.
Tip Jar
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