Short Stories, Long Odds

How funny it is that the thing I enabled in MT that only keeps old articles around for ten days would work against me.

There has been lot of news during my lax coverage period, and I am loathe to explain why I’ve fallen off lately. I hate reading these posts and I like writing them even less. So lets skip it all and just say that I’ve been busy, but that my aims and the ultimate goal of saving the United States from itself are at the heart of it all.

To those of you on the Good Angry Young Democrat Email Response Team (GAYDERT), I am disappointed that it stopped when I did, but only until I remember that I started it. Look for that to begin again.

Okay. With that in mind, let’s examine something that happened just this morning – The Supreme Court has declined to hear the case against Massachusetts Gay Marriage. Conservatives have tried to equate the legalization of something as being tantamount to Judicial tyranny, which seems sort of odd.

When I make the argument that when you legalize something it can’t really instate tyranny, I am told it is a weak argument, because, hey, what if we legalize shooting telephone sanitizers or tax accountants or something similar? I cleverly sidestep this idea while rethinking my argument, saying that if we can shoot them, in a way telephone sanitizers and tax accountants have become illegal, right?

I realize it all sounds silly, I’m just saying that when the right makes an analogy (lolz) between two guys getting married and someone forcing me to do something at gunpoint, I think their argument breaks down because Mark and Rick aren’t forcing me to call them “husband and husband” at gunpoint. What’s more than that, it shouldn’t even be an issue, like I said before. If you people would listen we’d be over this by now, and on to gentrification by redistricting or something similar.

I have just received a message concerning the 2006 midterms in Texas. It appears as if Ron Kirk, former Dallas Mayor, is the current favorite for the Dems to go after Kay Bailey Hutchison’s seat if she decides to screw her party and run against Ron Perry for Governor. This wouldn’t be very cool, because Kirk already lost in 2002 to John Cornyn. Barbara Radnofsky, Houston lawyer, is also looking into it with the ever-present exploration.

Sigh.

Since i have no idea what the competition will be like (other than well funded, well organized, and well connected) I can only say that, uh, I suppose Radnofsky is electable. Kirk, I don’t know. I don’t remember much about that race.

Texas readers, hook me up. Boston readers, rent my place.

Okay, so I have been paying attention to the news, but spending last week trying to rent this place in a hurry forced me to fall behind on some school work.

Sometimes, school projects turn into something either interesting, of decent quality, or amusing.

I really liked the way this turned out. 19th century Romantic piano music by force ended up being pretty fun. In this piece is pretty much every kind of chord 1800’s kids used. The culmination of years of music theory study means I can string two weird harmonies together by a close common denominator. At any rate, the piano writing is always a technical struggle. Not as bad as writing for strings, but a grapple.

Here’s the amusing part – straight up ghetto 80’s style Pontiac commercial that I rescored. We had to pick from a large assortment of commercials so I picked the one I could put the cock-rockingest 80’s music to.

Anyways, more politics tomorrow. Someone rent my place immediately, yes.

You have GOT to be fucking kidding me. This guy is a criminal for refusing to name a source in the FBI, yet Bob Novak gets off totally free after revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent?

ARRRRG OMG OMG ARRRRRRG MY BRAIN

Man, I’m getting sick. I’ve been very busy the last few days.

We’re moving back to Texas so I’ve been trying to get our apartment rented by nice folks. Some have shown up. I am hoping they continue to.

A lot of news has happened since I last wrote, so let me give you the heads up on what I think the important bits are:

Arafat dies
We knew this was coming, we were prepared for it, and when it happened, it was greeted with the kind of apathy I expected from the American media. An ABC producer even got fired for making the call to break into an episode of Desperate Housewives to alert the nation that this potentially critical event had finally come to pass.

I think if more people knew how deeply entrenched their country was in the Israel/Palestine conflict, they wouldn’t have had a problem with it. Instead, thousands complained. Sigh.

Powell, Ashcroft, and other, lesser Cabinet members resign:
Usually this doesn’t happen until the second term, but our Administration is not usual. So unusual, in fact, that with Powell being gone and Rice taking his place, there are now exactly zero voices in the Cabinet that have ever taken issue with anything the President has ever done. When Ashcroft resigned so early, a few of us thought it was so he could get appointed to the Supreme Court. It hasn’t happened, and some have told me to lighten up on the conspiracy stuff. I tell you this – there isn’t officially a vacancy yet.

Russia is building new nukes
You heard me right. Who knew that the Bush Doctrine would lead the re-ignition of the Cold War?

Okay, so that’s a little extreme, I know. But why in the hell is Russia building nukes that can defeat our missile defense systems?

Happy Birthday to Gay Marriage
This is a prickly one – today is the one-year anniversary of the legalisation of gay marriage in Massachusetts. I’m divided on this issue – I, from a personal perspective, think it shouldn’t even be an issue, and why shouldn’t two people that love each other be allowed to get married? From a political perspective, I think this was one of the greatest fuck ups in the last 100 years. I, and others, understand that American politics, especially conerning social issues, is a giant ship. You cannot suddenly turn it. Throwing everything to stern and suddenly making a legal issue out of gay marriage in a state decried as a hotbed of Godless liberalism broke the screws off the fight for gay rights. Hence it is going to be dry docked for 10-15 years. I think it would have been far less political and heavy handed to allow civil unions that conferred the same rights on gay couples that straight couples get, and to have left it at that.

It all comes back to language. I’m for gay marriage, but I’m against the way its been gone after in the last 3 years or so simply because something like WTF04 happened. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him suddenly be okay with the idea of fellers kissin’ fellers in God’s house.

A Powell says what?
Just days after resignation, Powell, who is still SecState by the way, would like you to know that Iran has or will have weapons of mass destruction. There’s no news currently about the status of the ultimate smoking gun – weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.

I mentioned that I’m writing for my paper’s holiday shopping guide as the Baby Jesus, and Cowboymonkey suggested a photoshopped composite of my head on the Baby Jesus’ earthly coil. If you doubt his skrilla, here’s something he did some time ago in preparation for the still-in-progress design redux for DTM: