Rand Paul, the Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky, is a big fan. Not only will he quote lyrics from the band on the campaign trail, he also likes to rock out to its music to get his rallies rolling.

No, he isn’t playing the air guitar to “Limelight” like the guys from the movie “I Love You, Man” or anything.

He just has his staff fire up some of the Canadian trio’s music to get the crowd going before the event starts.

And, predictably, just like every other Republican who plays any artist besides Ted Nugent or Charlie Daniels, he got in trouble.

Lawyers from the band contacted the campaign and told ‘em to knock it off….

Usually campaigns acquiesce and move on to the next artist (who will then promptly sue the campaign).

But Paul’s campaign manager — at least in an e-mail to the Louisville Courier-Journal — is talking tough.

“The background music Dr. Paul has played at events is a non-issue,” wrote Jesse Benton. “The issues that matter in this campaign are cutting out-of-control deficits, repealing ObamaCare and opposing cap and trade.”

Might be a non-issue to Benton. Rush’s attorney Robert Farmer sees it differently.

“The public performance of Rush’s music is not licensed for political purposes: any public venue which allows such use is in breach of its public performance license and also liable for copyright infringement,” Farmer wrote.

Damn funny foreigners.

Ann Althouse looks at the lyrics (always a mistake) and suggests that it’s a silly song not worth fighting about.

Sample:

Today’s Tom Sawyer
He gets high on you
And the space he invades
He gets by on you

No his mind is not for rent
To any god or government
Always hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren’t permanent
But change is

Hmmph. Silly song. God rents? God owns.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe Paul couldn’t find some band in Kentucky to endorse him and open for him at rallies. There has to be some local country-rock act looking to build a following.

Failing that, why doesn’t Rand Paul get the other R. Paul to be his opening act?

I get them mixed up all the time anyway.

Republicans should drink some tea
Rove poor choice for state party dinner speaker

(James Wigderson is a blogger publishing at http://www.wigderson.com and a Waukesha resident. His column runs Thursdays in The Freeman.)

It seems like yesterday I started getting emails from people talking about a “tea party” in Chicago. Fifteen months ago, when CNBC’s Rick Santelli suggested everyone gather on the shores of Lake Michigan for a tea party protest in Chicago, nobody suspected the movement would have the staying power that it has had.

However, there are some in the Republican Party who don’t get the tea party movement. It’s one thing to sit around in small meetings and complain how the world is going to heck and congratulate themselves on how sophisticated they are. It’s another thing when the hoi polloi start marching and demanding Republicans actually do something to stop a government running amok. What? You want us to fight?

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg recently described the tea party movement as a delayed reaction to the excesses and failures of the Bush era. I think there’s something to that, and it explains why so many from the tea party movement may be voters who defected from supporting President Barack Obama. For the tea partiers, the last two elections were not so much about the Democratic agenda as they were about firing the Republicans.

Until recently, I thought Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, was starting to get it. When he spoke to the Americans for Prosperity conference in the Wisconsin Dells earlier this year, he seemed to understand the importance of reaching out to voters disappointed with the failure of Republicans to live up to their principles.

That is, until I saw that the Republican Party invited Karl Rove to be the featured speaker at the Chairman’s Banquet at the party’s state convention May 22.

Rove, the “architect” of the Bush administration, is probably a very good public speaker with much to say about the changing political conditions this year. You don’t mastermind two national election victories at a time when the country is evenly divided without gaining some insight into the body politic.

However, for many outside the party, Rove is the walking symbol of all that was wrong with the Bush administration.

While President Bush has seen his reputation grow since he left office, for so many conservatives and activists in the tea party, they see Bush as the one who set the course for “bailout nation” and the spending of the Obama administration. Bringing in the Dr. Strangelove of the Bush administration will hardly endear the Republican Party to what it hopes will be a new constituency in the tea party movement.

How ironic that at a time when President Barack Obama has nominated a crony of limited experience to be a Supreme Court Justice, the Republican Party of Wisconsin invites one of the authors of the Harriet Miers debacle. Maybe Rove can explain to those attending why it was so important to smash the conservative coalition to nominate a friend of Bush and how it relates to the Elena Kagan nomination.

Maybe Rove can take a moment and remind those assembled of Bush’s support for assimilation of the nation’s illegal immigrants and how unpopular that was with the grass roots, even as Rove explains his own opposition to the new immigration enforcement law in Arizona. That ought to go over well with the tea partiers.

Conveniently, while Rove is here, he’ll be stopping off in Mequon to do a book signing. Maybe the Republican Party was able to get him cheap.

If Priebus had called to ask me whom I would suggest, why not Mark Steyn? He’s funny, intelligent, and a regular fill-in for Rush Limbaugh. (He also has a book he’s pushing, so maybe a stop-over for him would have been cheap, too.)

If not Steyn, at least somebody like him to reach out to the newest members of the conservative movement and make them feel welcome to the Republican Party.

Instead, Priebus has chosen to look back in a nostalgia moment at the reason so many tea party activists became angry with the Republican Party in the first place.

It’s not worth raising a protest, but it’s worth lamenting the lost opportunity to demonstrate that the Grand Old Party has changed.

JAMES WIGDERSON

Note: After this first appeared on my Facebook page yesterday (exclusive for my Facebook friends), the state party Chairman Reince Priebus called to let me know that either today or tomorrow they will be announcing Rove will be paired with Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann as the dinner speaker. Fine, and that’s great for people in the Tea Party movement that like her. However, they could have invited her without inviting Rove, too.

The Democrats are going to do all they can to tie the current group of Republican candidates to George W. Bush in the next five months. Why would it make sense to anyone to reinforce that image by inviting Bush’s top political operative to speak? I’m not calling for a boycott, or even that the invitation should be rescinded. But I am suggesting the Republicans still have a ways to go to understand the new political environment.

Becoming an owner in the NFL was never easy. The AFL was founded by prospective owners that couldn’t get in. The first Dallas Cowboys owner, Clint Murchison, had to buy the rights to the Washington Redskins fight song to force that owner to allow Murchison to buy the franchise.

The left will never allow Limbaugh to find legitimacy, the popular culture doesn’t support him, and the NFL shuns controversy. Effectively, Limbaugh has been blacklisted as effectively as anyone in Hollywood under HUAC and McCarthyism.

Should there be some sort of conservative backlash against the NFL? There should be, probably, but there won’t be. The NFL will chug along just fine until the owners find some other way to wreck the sport.

As for me, I’ll still watch. But it’s been less so over the years. The older I get, the less interest I have in professional sports. The commercials are inappropriate for families. The players’ behaviors have reached new lows. The distance between the teams and the fans has never been greater, even if the games are now shown in Hi Def.

Now the NFL is telling another segment of their fan base that they’re really not interested in keeping us around. They would prefer Keith Olbermann to Rush Limbaugh.

I don’t think a successful boycott is likely, but someday the NFL may wonder when it started to lose a significant portion of its fan base. It will have begun when fathers stop looking forward to sitting with their sons on Sundays after church and watching their favorite teams together. It will be when we find that we just have better things to do with our time.