Wardrobe-Gate: The Story That Will Not Die

Patt Morrison, writing for Huffington Post has (gleefully) not let up in terms of going after the hypocracy of Sarah Palin:

Over the weekend, Governor Sarah Palin was backing away from Wardrobe-Gate like, well, like an Alaskan moose backing away from the barrel of a 30-06 Winchester.

She was back to wearing her own clothes, Palin said pointedly. And she had bought a lot of them from her favorite store, a resale shop in Anchorage called ”Out of the Closet.”

That name … it rings a bell in Southern California ears, doesn’t it? “Out of the Closet” is a chain of nonprofit thrift stores operated by and for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. Liz Taylor has donated stuff to it. So have Carol Burnett and Aaron Spelling and the makers of “The X Files” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

I raised questions about this in my weekend blog here and on the LA Times site. Why? Because the OOTC shop in Anchorage, beloved of Palin, makes no mention whatsoever of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation on its website. OOTC’s AIDS charity status is a huge selling point for the California stores. So I posed the question, “Trademark lawyer alert?”

Question answered. At a press conference today, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation did two things…

And two, the foundation’s lawyers are pressing the trademark infringement issue against the Anchorage OOTC, sending off a ”cease and desist” letter about the name that’s been above the doors of the foundation’s AIDS benefit shops since 1990.

“Out of the Closet” is a federal trademark, and yes, that means Alaska, too. As Palin herself noted rather indignantly in a Katie Couric interview, “Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, `Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C. may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?’ ”

If this woman can not even formulate an effective response to such an (ultimately) insignificant issue as this, that does not get her in to deeper doo doo, how the hell does any person capable of rational thought think Palin is capable of holding the office of vice president?