Ann and Nancy Wilson are pissed at the Republican Party and have fired off a cease and desist letter to the McCain/Palin campaign.
Specifically, the Heart women are upset that the GOP has used their classic "Barracuda" as a theme song for Sarah Palin. TMZ obtained a statement from Heart's rep, who says "The Republican campaign did not ask for permission to use the song, nor would they have been granted that permission."
The statement goes on: "We have asked the Republican campaign publicly not to use our music. We hope our wishes will be honored."
At least they still have some standards: they'll let "Barracuda" play in mini-van ads but not for Barracuda Palin.
Heart was my first ever rock concert waaaay back in 1978 (!) on the Dog and Butterfly tour. The last tour with the original line-up, before the intra-band relationships ended. Fleetwood Mac survived that but Heart was never the same. I was 14 and had the biggest crush on Nancy for ages.
The opening act was Player of "Baby Come Back" one hit wonderhood, and I hope they're making good money from the mop ads.
Heart's Nancy Wilson felt compelled to personally respond. "I think it's completely unfair to be so misrepresented," she said in a phone call to EW.com after the speech. "I feel completely f---ed over." She and sister Ann Wilson then e-mailed the following exclusive statement:
"Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women. We ask that our song 'Barracuda' no longer be used to promote her image. The song 'Barracuda' was written in the late 70s as a scathing rant against the soulless, corporate nature of the music business, particularly for women. (The 'barracuda' represented the business.) While Heart did not and would not authorize the use of their song at the RNC, there's irony in Republican strategists' choice to make use of it there."
So it's gonna be a culture war, another God guns and gays election.
We got a nice helping of red moose meat last night from Sarah Palin, who as I expected nailed the delivery. We'll have to see if that persona of a kinder gentler Ann Coulter, mocking and contemptuous, is the role she'll stay in. She'll fire up the base, all right -- on BOTH sides.
The first two major national politicians of my generation (I'm 2 years younger than Obama and two months OLDER than Palin) are on the stage and I can't imagine two people more opposite. It's not just the issue positions or the obvious male/female and black/white. It's the cultural symbolism. Wasilla vs. Chicago. Prius vs. SUV. Harvard Law vs. University of Idaho. Jay-Z vs. Gretchen Wilson. Wal-Mart vs. Whole Foods, as the Sioux City Journal's Bret Hayworth notes:
A family member related a customer service station experience this morning at a major retailer (don’t think too hard).
A woman came up to the counter, telling the clerk that she wanted a magazine removed from the shelves, since it painted Palin in a negative light. Very agitated, her voice rose and got higher as she related her beef about the mag. The woman said she chooses that store specifically because the political left is critical of that retailer, so as a conservative she considers it her family’s store.
The only thing I think Obama and Palin have in common is basketball.
This Kos diarist makes an interesting point as to why Palin and ROOdy kept nailing "community organizer":
Used the way the GOP speakers used the words tonight (i.e. with a sneer), community = ghetto and organizer = activist.
It essentially was a coded way of pointing out Obama's work in, with and for the black community (see? even I'm doing it) on the South Side of Chicago. Also the fact that his work involved helping low-income people stand up for their legal rights, as opposed to a GOP-sanctioned "real" job like business owner or career military officer (or moose hunter.) They were trying to put Obama back on the same level as Jesse Jackson -- i.e., the black protest candidate -- and mocking him for it.
To cut right to the nasty, they were using "community organizer" as a euphemism for "poverty pimp."
And, as a special bonus, to a GOP audience (country club division, at least) organizer = union. What could be worse than a black, radical activist union organizer from the South Side of the Chicago?
A coded way of saying the eighths word you can never say on television?
So it's gonna be a culture war, another God guns and gays election. I like our odds in that. The Republican base may have maxed out in 2004, driven as much by ballot issues as by Bush, while the Democrats yawned over John Kerry. This year looks more like the expand the electorate election that Democrats have been fantasizing about since the 26th Amendment moved the voting age to 18,
The danger, as usual, is that if the campaign gets negative, that expanding electorate gets turned off, which is exactly what the GOP has been good at for the last 15 years.
But the pendulums are swinging on the social issues and Obama's been good at staying on message. Watch for this one to be the biggest ever.
Last night the punditocracy was calling tonight's speech a make or break for Sarah Palin. She'll pass the test, but it's the wrong test.
They've set the bar low on exactly the item where the bar should be high: a speech. There's absolutely no question that Palin will come off, at first impression, as articulate and intelligent and impressive. (And, as Joe Biden might note, clean, unless she's been field dressing a moose beforehand.) She'll get rave reviews, I can hear them now: "A home run, Palin hit it out of the park."
Of course she will. That's the one thing we know she can do.
But that first impression is exactly the wrong test. The Palin problem isn't in the meeting, it's in the getting to know.
And she'll certainly be able to memorize the talking points in time for the Oct. 2 debate with Biden, where the bar is set so low that they'll try to call it a tie if manages to avoid the Dan Quayle moment.
(That's my two word answer to the question "do running mates matter?" Remember, Lloyd Bentsen was on the losing side of that election.)
No, the real test won't be a set speech or a structured debate -- it'll be the first press conference, when she gets to extemporaneously, at length, with followups, explain her views on Alaska neo-nationalism and why she tried to get the Wasilla librarian fired, along with many other issues relevant and irrelevant. (Leeeave... Bristolll... Aloooooone!)
My guess is she'll do exactly ONE of those, then get shipped off to the small markets in the GOP base states. Which is what she's there for.
A 2012 nomination calendar that could help keep Iowa first in the nation was one of the few items that quietly passed during Monday's abbreviated session of the Republican National Convention.
Iowa's role is not directly addressed under the Republican rules adopted Monday, since the caucuses are a non-binding straw poll.
Like the Democrats, Republicans appointed a commission to study calendar reform. This is the first time Republicans have deferred final calendar decisions to a post-convention body. The big difference is that the GOP has required its commission to keep New Hampshire and South Carolina first in the primary calendar. The Democrats have given their commission a clean slate.
Another difference from the Democrats: The Republicans made their rules stick, enforcing the 50 percent delegate penalty that it imposed on Michigan and Florida for jumping ahead in the schedule. Democrats initially punished those states by taking away all their delegates, but first gave back half, then all, the delegates.
Republicans also punished New Hampshire and South Carolina for jumping ahead. Democrats in those states changed their dates, too, but only in order to keep their place in line.
The GOP commission "pushes back the calendar and it slows it down — and that's a big gift for us," Tom Rath, a New Hampshire delegate and member of the convention's Credentials Committee, told the Associated Press.
Republicans had hoped to push the process back even more and put New Hampshire and South Carolina in late February 2012 with other states starting in March. But the McCain campaign chose not to fight that fight, and it's now expected that the early states, including Iowa, will vote in January 2012.
That might have a ripple effect into the Iowa Democratic caucuses, as historically the Iowa parties have prioritized keeping the caucuses on the same night. In late 2007, Iowa Democrats seemed to be leaning toward a Jan. 5 caucus until the Republicans trumped them with a Jan. 3 date. The Democrats then quickly followed suit.
Michael Barone reports that the bipartisan effort is now happening on the national level, with Republican National Chairman Mike Duncan and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean talking on the issue.
The calendar process will likely be driven by the party that loses the presidential election, since it's likely that the incumbent president will face a smooth, low turnout renomination.
Olbermann noted that W is the first sitting president not to attend his party's convention "in several decades," so of course I need to answer the trivia question. It was LBJ in `68. The Secret Sevice advised him not to attend -- good advice as it turned out.
Before that it would have been FDR in 1944, and much before that it was considered bad form to attend.
I've been (moose) stewing about the Palin pick through a couple days of writer's block and concluded that McCain accomplished at least one thing: a big distraction.
I'll admit it. I was sucked in by Babygate and I feel icky. But in this Nancy Grace world, the notion that the religious fundamentalist governor of Alaska might fake her own pregnancy to cover up for her daughter isn't all that crazy.
It isn't true, either, and the buzz probably pulled the news of the daughter's actual pregnancy out of the McCain-Palin camp. Because even though the rumor itself isn't mentioned, they make a point of noting that Palin's daughter is five months pregnant, putting it BEFORE the birth of Palin's new baby.
I certainly don't wish this insane level of scrutiny on this girl, who didn't choose to live a life this public. And I'm the father of a teenage mother myself, so I'm not going to critique Sarah Palin's parenting. But neither would I inflict my values on Sarah Palin's daughter, the way Palin would inflict her values on my daughter.
The McCain camp, of course, blamed a familiar target:
A senior McCain campaign official said the McCain camp was appalled that these rumors had not only been spread around liberal blog sites and partisan Democrats, but also were the subject of heightened interest from mainstream news media.
"The despicable rumors that have been spread by liberal blogs, some even with Barack Obama's name in them, is a real anchor around the Democratic ticket, pulling them down in the mud in a way that certainly juxtaposes themselves against their 'campaign of change,'" a senior aide said.
The bloggers! I hate the bloggers! Go git `em, Sarah!
The bloggers, of course, are having a field day with the vetting that McCain didn't do. Too much of a field day with Babygate, though apparantly that floated around the Alaska political world for a while before Palin hit the national stage. But it's increasingly clear that the Palin vetting is happening NOW, via the media (old fashioned as well as the hated bloggers) and opposition research. HuffPost:
On Saturday, a Democrat tasked with opposition research contacted the Huffington Post with this piece of information: as of this weekend, the McCain campaign had not gone through old newspaper articles from the Valley Frontiersman, Palin's hometown newspaper.
How does he know? The paper's (massive) archives are not online. And when he went to research past content, he was told he was the first to inquire.
"No one else had requested access before," said the source. "It's unbelievable. We were the only people to do that, which means the McCain camp didn't."
Does Palin have a Macaca moment out there, or will it be a death of a thousand cuts? This Kos diary lists 100.
The real issue is that McCain apparently made a snap decision without all the facts.
Here's what I, with no inside knowlege and just a gut impression, think really happened. McCain's man crush on Joe Lieberman was so obvious I wanted to scream "get a room" whenever the two were on TV together. It was clear that Johnny Mac really wanted Lieberman as VP, even going so far as to check election law to see if a registered Democrat could be on the ballot as a Republican.
Late last week the higher ups in the GOP must have told Johnny Mac that Joementum was impossible. He'd have a floor revolt on his hands, and probably not even be able to get Joementum through. A floor defeat for the nominee on the critical matter of his running mate would have been fatal to the party's already tough chances. They told him so and tried to talk him into Mitt (who McCain clearly loathes).
So McCain got pissed off, as he's known to do, and just tossed out the only name he hadn't crossed off yet. And in a sense he got lucky, because McCain's possibly petulant naming of Palin almost inadvertently won the base over.
But Desmoinesdem notes that not all the evangelicals love Palin; a fair number think she should be home with the babies. That's in interesting ink blot test, as is this argument (down in the comments) from an Alaska woman with long Palin watching experience:
To both men and women she makes a “wow!” first impression. She is beautiful -- and she, more than anyone else, knows her primary appeal is her appearance and she focuses a lot of attention and time on this.
If she’s working from a mostly memorized script or telepromptors she can come off sounding articulate.
But here’s what happens -- she’ll be asked a question that she clearly doesn’t know any specifics about and you can watch her pull out a 2-3 second delay wherein she is working feverishly to figure out what she is going to say. But during that little momentary delay she’ll sigh, or cock her head, or bat her eyes, or twist her lips, or some other kind of delay tactic.
Men and women respond very differently to this. Women see right away that she simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about.
Men, on the other hand, watch this, and it has enough of a feeling of mild flirtation -- that they just eat it up. It’s like some sort of weird eye candy for their soul, this little drawing her audience in to this playful exchange with, usually it involves her eyes. It’s so weird, and if I hadn’t watched this thing play itself out over and over and over the past years, I would think a post like this was crazy.
But. But eventually the guys wake up. Eventually they realize that, no, Sarah is not a conservative (fiscally, at least) and that Sarah is not ethical (remember - she’s the only sitting governor under investigation for abuse of power in the Republic); Sarah, with her track record of calling people she doesn’t like, “haters,” and “dumbass,” and giggling like a school girl when, on a radio show, the DJ’s called a cancer-surviving grandmother she doesn’t like a “bitch” and a “cancer,” and no, Sarah’s hasn’t run the “open, honest and transparent” government she touts.
So, no. Sarah Palin isn’t the paragon of virtue she’s being touted as. She’s not the reformist. She’s not ethical and honest and open and transparent.
And when men wake up to the reality of who Sarah is, there is this weird sort of self-loathing phase they go through; it must be akin to what the morning after feels like to some guys. Especially men who fall hard for the Sarah line - when they have their wake up call, it can be painful to watch. Men don’t like to feel they’ve been had. Well, none of us do, I suppose.
Like I said, an interesting ink blot test.
But this Alaskan has made up his mind. The party of oil nominates... the governor of an oil state who wants to take polar bears off the endangered list because, well, they get in the way of the oil wells. There's a definite drill, drill, drill subtext to the Palin nomination.
Normally, membership (the registration records -pdf- have been released and she never was though her husband was) in the secessionist Alaska Independence Party would be a deal breaker, but it will probably go over well with the guys with Confederate flag decals on the mudflaps. Finally, Howard Fineman thinks it helps in Exurban America, "where the country that traditionalists think existed decades ago still exists – and where people fervently want it to exist." Oh, yeah, Fantasyland, with Palin heading up the local Junior League. At least Fineman acknowledges that with $4 gas Exurbia may be on its last legs.
But in the end, it comes back to that baby. Let's be real, on the fundamentalist social issues, John McCain is like Reagan or Bush 41. He says the right (wing) things, but those issues aren't the priorities. Well, now, in the person of little Trig Palin and in Bristol Palin's ole fashion shotgun wedding (perhaps backed by Maw's actual shotgun), the evangelicals have living proof of the absolutism they want. Welcome to Gilead.
