Country royalty has weighed in on the presidential race — Hank Williams Jr. (known to the kids as the “Are You Ready for Some Football” guy) released a song earlier this week praising the virtues of the current Republican ticket. It’s stuck with a yawner of a title (“The McCain/Palin Tradition”), and the lyrics are laughable as ideology (read ‘em below the break), but I submit to you that this song is a masterful adaptation of fleeting campaign talking points into the strict conventions of country music. And Ol’ Bocephus truly gives it his all, pulling off some rap-worthy verbal contortions to get the lines to rhyme and the syllables to fit.
I grant that it’s no “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,” the ditty that propelled my distant (and doomed) ancestor into the White House, but it IS a real good country tune — some rock-ish studio flourishes here and there, but its heart is a solid swinging beat and a spare root/fifth bassline (I played along a couple of times), layered over with good fiddle and steel guitar parts and of course Hank Jr. Not exactly his daddy, and it sure ain’t his boy Hank III (whom you gotta go see if you haven’t — imagine country music played by terrific musicians with a fiendish punk-rock intensity), but Bocephus can sleep well, knowing he has done his political convictions proud.
[Right after I finished this, I realized that "The McCain Palin Tradition" is a remake of a real tune -- so of course the music's well developed. And I'll tell ya, it makes the whole thing even MORE impressive, since how many of us have the verbal agility required to turn a song about drinkin' partyin' and smokin' dope into a REPUBLICAN campaign song?]
Calling McCain voters: “Yes, ‘Eleventh Hour’ is sort of like a cross between ‘CSI: Miami’ and ‘Touched by an Angel,’ if you can wrap your head around that unholy duo.”
With three weeks to go before the election and their candidate down by double-digit margins, the Republicans have come out with all guns blazing against…a nonprofit with no direct connection to the Obama campaign. Why has ACORN — an organization that among other things works across the country to register voters — become such a target? We’re talking about a multi-front war: besides words from McCain and Palin themselves, and conservative bloggers and talking heads on cable news, we’re seeing a comprehensive and centralized assault online.
Check out PalinAsPresident.com, a great use of Flash to present a satirical view of Sarah Palin occupying the Oval Office — make sure your sound is on and just start mousing over things. Note that patient exploration will be rewarded (sometimes more than once), watch for the dinosaur, and be sure to click on the deer. The site looks as though it went up quickly, since the domain was registered last week and updated on Monday, suggesting that it was redirected to point at the Flash site that day. Nice work! Thanks to Kevin Gilnack for the tip.
Commercial advertisers have been experimenting with advertising in video games for a couple of years now, but Barack Obama has now given in-game ads the Presidential (campaign) Seal of Approval: he’s been running get-out-the-vote ads in the XBox Live racing game Burnout Paradise for days now. It was first reported last week on the site GamePolitics (though these pictures seem to predate that article) and spread once picked up on GigaOm (thanks, tPrez). Take a look at how the ads appear in billboards integrated into the game (photo via this guy).
This weekend saw a fascinating juxtaposition on e.politics — Sarah Palin branding ads on the same page as the fairly frightening Sarah Palin art article from last Friday. The ad (reproduced below the break) was a skyscraper banner running at the bottom of the right-hand column of the page, and it linked to a Sarah Palin bio page complete with a couple of video clips.
Hell of a season, eh? We’ve just about had everything — from lipstick on a pig all the way to a full-on financial panic, with two ongoing wars and the lingering effects of an oil-price shock playing in the background. Too much too much — the last couple of weeks, I think I hit the point of information overload and could no longer integrate it effectively. It got so bad that came a point where emails and voicemails were stacking up, and I even missed a press contact! (which arrived at 5:30 on a Friday and was almost doomed to be missed, but for a shameless self-promotion operation like the one we run here in the e.politics bunker, that hurts). I even started watching cable “news” occasionally, no doubt to get a dumbed-down view of things — cable is the perfect antidote to the internet’s glut of information, conveying almost none, sanitized for your intellectual protection.
With a three-day weekend behind us, the markets not behaving insanely (at least, not at the exact moment I’m writing) and the American electorate (unbelievably) apparently preparing to make what I think is the right choice, let’s take advantage of a brief lull in consulting work (next big project’s fixin’ to start) to get caught up on the online politics world again. In the hopper: a slew of half-started pieces that just need a little love to get them back on their feet again, plus ideas sent in by readers and/or shameless self-promoters, and even a few all-new developments to dissect. Should be fun — let me know what you see that we’re missing, and don’t forget that guest articles would be a most welcome addition to the site.
Mmmmmmmmmmm satire, my favorite! And quick turnaround time, too. But wait, there’s more — a third panel in the series is waiting for you at the corner of 18th and Wyoming.
Even in the Early Days of epolitics.com, back when we powered the servers with wood, coal and fuel-grade mummies, plenty of people were already predicting the demise of email as a marketing/communications tool. More than two years later, it’s still a popular hobby among online experts (hi, Jeff!). I understand the logic behind the idea of a slow fade for electronic mail, and I’m sure that those predicting it are at least partially correct — as a communications channel, email’s gained so much competition over the past few years that any other trend would be hailed as an online miracle.
Man, these things are coming fast now — the second presidential debate is tonight, and watch parties are popping up all over DC (I’ll be at Left Bank again, after a Care2 happy hour @ Local 16). For those of you scoring at home (and we hope you are), you can always join in the virtual fun: if you’re not live-blogging or polishing your wisdom into 140-character nuggets on Twitter, you can always factcheck the candidates in realtime at Ameritocracy.com. Afterwards, there’s the breathless wait for follow-up emails from the campaigns (“ooh, what did Santobama send me THIS time — a fundraising plea or a volunteer opportunity?”), plus the chance to relive the whole experience via transcript, video and commentary on the Post site the next day.
Question: how are we going to fill our time after November 4th? This election year has been a spectacle, an extended sporting event, an obsession, a flat-out, dopamine-bursting ADDICTION for millions of people in this country and even abroad, and we’re all likely to suffer some kind of king-hell letdown over the few weeks after the vote regardless of who wins. Oh well — the struggle for survival in the post-apocalyptic hellscape Sure To Result from the Current Economic Crisis will no doubt have its own charms.
Hey y’all, I just broke down and bought a Platinum Badge for next year’s South by Southwest — I’ll be there for the full 10 days of celebrating creative culture via music, film and the internet (plus there are all the parties, and what they lead to).
Taking on the full sweep of SXSW is a little like trying to take a sip from a firehose, and in the past, it’s crushed many a man lesser in body and spirit. But I’ve been in training for this kind of hell-bent epic of hedonism, social frenzy and barbeque for, oh, my entire adult life (sorry mom), and I expect to return alive, if not entirely intact. See you there! Badge prices go up again in November, and hotels are going fast, so hustle up.
Filipinos Draw Power From Buried Heat. Guess what? The U.S. used to have a world-leading geothermal power program, but the Bush administration shut it down in 2006 and scattered the scientists to the winds. Thanks, guys!
The Europeans sure know how to throw a party — for this one, they arranged a fireworks display at a cost of several hundred million dollars (wait about 30 seconds).
The Jules Verne was the first of a series of robot resupply ships built by the European Space Agency, and it docked with the International Space Station under its own control back in April. Its mission completed, and loaded with trash, the Jules Verne undocked several weeks ago and flew to its demise — an intentional reentry over the South Pacific. This was a relatively big ship, about the size of the Apollo capsule/service module combo that went to the moon, with a consequently impressive burnup (any resemblance to any current economic system is pure coincidence).
