Two Weeks Later...

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been more than two weeks since my last entry. That’s by far the longest I’ve gone without saying something. Not that I haven’t had plenty to say — I could do a whole page on iTunes 4 and the new Apple Music Store (in a nutshell: Bravo, Apple!). But realistically, I’ve been far too busy even to take a couple of minutes to put together anything coherent.

Now, things are starting to calm down a bit. Oh, I’ve still got a million things on my plate, but the ones with hard-and-fast deadlines are completed (or nearly so, anyway). And my fears about losing my assistant have been alleviated (more on that in a moment). All in all, my stress level is starting to come down.

And as if the world was just waiting for me to reach that point, last week the Post served up a headline that was just too delicious to avoid comment. I don’t even think I can do it justice, so I’ll just encourage everyone to take a gander at the original stories. First, led by right-wing nut job Tom DeLay, the Texas legislature decided to do a little out-and-out gerrymandering; in this new era, when nobody’s even pretending there’s any civility between the two major political parties, the plan didn’t attract too much notice — it’s just business as usual for the Fascist party... I mean, the Republican party (same difference).

And then all of a sudden, the remaining Democrats in the Texas legislature decide to do something unexpected. They leave the state. While at first glance, this doesn’t seem like a smart move, it completely paralyzes the Texas House: Although the jackbooted Republicans clearly control the House, they need a quorum to conduct any House business — and the Democrats’ surprise departure denies them that. Naturally, being both Texans and Republicans, they started screaming in impotent rage, calling out the Texas Rangers to go bring in the missing Democrats (the asshole in charge, House Speaker Tom Craddick, issued an expectedly vitriolic statement as well). Only one small problem — the Rangers don’t have any jurisdiction outside of Texas, and the missing representatives turned up in Oklahoma. (For a while they thought they might be in New Mexico, prompting Patricia Madrid, that state’s Attorney General, to deliciously quip, “I have put out an all-points bulletin for law enforcement to be on the lookout for politicians in favor of health care for the needy and against tax cuts for the wealthy.”) In the end, there was quite a bit more attention drawn to the issue than before the Democrats’ principled stand.

In other news, the truth has finally leaked: The war in Iraq really was all about oil after all (although naturally, the Bush regime is trying to distance themselves from this uncomfortable truth). The plan — once that pesky U.N. can be convinced to roll over, play dead, and rescind their sanctions — is to have Iraq withdraw from OPEC. Since Iraq has the world’s second-largest oil reserves, this will destroy the cartel’s ability to regulate supply. Don’t get me wrong — I’ve got no love for OPEC — but I have this little thing about being lied to. In light of the annoying inability of Bush’s pawns to find any of the alleged “weapons of mass destruction” (a nauseatingly nonsensical spin-phrase I will use exclusively in quotation marks) — the only professed justification for going to war against Saddam Hussein — the administration is in serious backpedal mode. The sad thing is, with the average American having the attention span of an overly excited golden retriever, the bastards will probably get away with it.

Okay, here endeth the rant. On the personal front, it’s worth noting (see, I promised that I’d get to it) that Adam has now joined the video division full-time. So with any luck, I’ll be able to keep my head above water into the foreseeable future — not to mention being a little more regular in my comments here.