JAMES INHOFE WOULD NEVER MAKE IT AS ONE OF THE BARENAKED LADIES

All the great political art from Oklahoma is by PhotoTune

When I was general manager of Sire I worked for a madman, Seymour Stein. I remember this one time he called me and demanded I pack my bags and meet him in London... immediately. He had signed some Canadian band and he wanted me to meet them and they were playing in London, not far from where he lived. Convenient for him; I lived in L.A. But he was the boss and... well, he wasn't asking me to meet him in Minsk or Lagos. When I got to the club, the crowd was spilled out onto the streets, hundreds of people. How did all these people in London know about some just-signed band with a demo tape and a weird name? The band was Barenaked Ladies and the demo, The Yellow Tape actually went on to become the first-- and only-- indie tape to ever go platinum in Canada. I still couldn't understand why the were this big in England.

I started asking people. No one was from London or Liverpool or Manchester. Everyone was from Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver. Later, as we started breaking Barenaked Ladies in the U.S.-- and it was a long hard process that went on for years and years-- I always noticed that wherever there were Canadians, the band did well. Basically we broke them out of American cities with lots of Canadians.

Today I went to meet Andrew Rice and his wife and two sons when they were visiting his wife's relatives in Venice. They had invited a few dozen people and Andrew explained why he was running for the U.S. Senate back in Oklahoma. I met a lot of really nice people and when I asked where they were from I wasn't hearing a lot of people saying Venice or Santa Monica or West L.A. or Beverly Hills. It was mostly Tulsa, Boise City, Ada, Norman and Lawton-- and, of course, Andrew's hometown of Oklahoma City.

Someone I met from Tulsa told me a very interesting story about Oklahoma Secretary of State Susan Savage. Well, actually the story is about Oklahoma's crazy U.S. Senator, James Inhofe. And it isn't another "crazy Inhofe" story. This one is a "nasty Inhofe" story. I mean everyone I've ever met from Oklahoma has been polite and courteous; so this one kind of surprised me.

While Susan was mayor of Tulsa her daughter Emily's 8th grade class went on a school trip to Washington, DC. The school had arranged for the kids to meet a member of the Oklahoma congressional delegation. It turned out to be Senator Inhofe. When he came forward to address them he asked if Emily Savage could raise her hand. Nervously, she did.

"Emily's mother is the mayor of Tulsa," the senator told her classmates. "I try to work with her and do what's right for the people of Tulsa but Emily's mother believes in killing babies."

When Emily got home and told her parents what happened they thought she must have misunderstood Inhofe. Susan called the teacher who had chaperoned the trip and was aghast to learn that Emily didn't misunderstand anything. She called Inhofe and told him that if he ever came near her daughter again or said anything to her she would seek a restraining order in court. Which is exactly what the long-suffering folks in Oklahoma should do in November.

I signed off on the budget for this BNL video so I'll take it on myself to dedicate it to Senator James Inhofe in the hopes that he'll learned some manners and common decency and comes to understand that child abuse is not something we expect from our elected representatives: