Category Archives: Politics

The sinking White House

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Josh Marshall on the importance of the congressional elections this fall:

…when you think about this coming election, and the stakes for the White House, you need to figure that that’s all come about without any independent, let alone antagonistic or hostile, investigations into the key issues that have led to this souring view of the president.

Would the president look better after a new look at the Iraq intel bamboozlement that wasn’t controlled by Sen. Roberts? How about an investigation into the executive branch side of the Abramoff scandal? What about a look into the Plame affair? What about the folks in Rumsfeld’s office who knew about Duke’s corruption but looked the other way?

I couldn’t agree more. In a usual scenario, at least one house of congress is in the hands of the opposition party. So when a White House oversteps its authority, they are rightly investigated, reports are issued and the public gets a solid idea of what is going on. In short, if Republicans lose big enough in November, it’s going to get worse for Bush, and we’re going to start getting more of the truth.

Cover Flow

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I’m kind of a “little app” addict. I have a folder in my applications folder called “Dragged Apps” that has all of my little applications. Most serve an important purpose in my work. But every now and then I find an application that doesn’t do anything functionally new, but just looks amazing. Cover Flow is one of those applications.

Cover Flow takes all of your iTunes album art and makes a magnificent jukebox-like display of the covers. You drag a slider to skim through your albums, and then double click an album to start playing it in iTunes. If you don’t have the artwork for a particular album, Cover Flow searches Amazon or Google for the artwork and loads it. Awesome.

Check it out.

This rocks!

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My brother’s band, Day One Symphony, have made it onto the iTunes Music Store! Their last album, AVICIOUSCIRCLE is available for $6.93. Being a frequent visitor to the iTMS, it makes me feel special to see it there.

The one downside is the enhanced material isn’t included in the download. I’d love to see a way to deliver the enhanced content to downloaders in the future. That has always been my vision. Although on AVC, the enhanced content we created topped out at 100MB. So, we’ll have to get it smaller before it can be delivered via iTunes.

You can buy AVICIOUSCIRCLE on iTunes by clicking this button.
A Vicious Circle

in flux…

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First off, if you come here often (all 2 of you), you no doubt have noticed things are in flux. Also, you’re probably pissed because you come here a couple of times a week (an hour? a minute?) and there hasn’t been much to read. Yes, I’ve been away from “the view” for awhile while I worked through the Powerbook issue (vol. 2 coming soon!) and did some tech support work in Los Angeles. However, I am back and happily up and running on a new computer. It took me more time to get set up on my new computer because over the past 2 months I had performed the same setup on 3 Powerbooks and on my G4 because of a hardware issue. I was getting quite tired of the process, so I took my time with it on the new Mac. I found I do have a saturation point when it comes to spending time in front of the computer. Although it is 400x higher than my wife’s saturation point, which is why she laughs at me a lot.

So, right off, I’ve been itching for a site redesign and expansion for quite some time. Version 1 (henceforth referred to as ‘the Apple site’ for its banner image) has served its time, and now it is time to expand. Luckily WordPress, the blog software I use, has a huge number of themes available online. Ultimately, I will move to a home-brew design of my own. I’m happy to tweak the work of others for temporary design shifts.

In addition to design changes, I want to expand the site to include sections for other things I do. What else do I do? Well…things. We’ll see what comes about, but I do want to make things easier to find around here, so look for those things in the weeks to come.

Lastly, I’m thinking very hard about what this site is about and whether I should narrow my focus going forward. Up until now it has been mostly a random collection of thoughts that stem from my personal experiences covering, well, any topic I felt like.

But I’m finding that my interests have shifted, and maybe my writing should reflect that. I don’t think the web at large needs more people copying and pasting news articles and then adding two paragraphs of attitude-laden comments. Not that the attitude is bad, and I don’t think I am capable of keeping my attitude out of my writing. Especially with the current state of affairs in this country’s government. Which brings me to my last point.

Nobody wants to talk about politics.

Bold statement, huh? I don’t think so. I think the Bush administration represents the biggest threat to American Democracy as any administration in history. There is ample proof for my belief and most of it has been pointed out in easy to find news stories. But, no one is really interested in talking about it. In the past 3 months, I’ve been met with every variation of “Let’s not go there” you can think of when bringing up the “culture of corruption” in D.C. I understand the frustration, but not the apathy. The political process is constant and requires participation from everyone. We may hate what the Bush administration does, but not saying anything about it empowers them. As a liberal, I find the apathetic mindset particularly threatening because the constant, fervent work by right-wing conservatives to maintain the failed policies of the Bush administration never stops. They are working very hard right now (as if you couldn’t tell. Cough…FOX News) .

Politics doesn’t just happen every 4 years. We have mid-term elections in November and the ability to take control back from the destructive political powers that are holding American values hostage. This year is not a year to spend day dreaming about 2008. The Democratic Party needs reasonable people to open a dialogue with each other to guide them into a common sense message for November. They’ve proven that they cannot do it without our input.

You get my point. And maybe you’re mildly offended by it. My answer to that is, I’m sorry, but what are you going to do about it?

As it relates to this site, my thought is that I will be shifting my focus from simply reporting to more synthesizing. I find that I’m less interested in the individual stories and more into what they mean in a larger context. I’d like to challenge myself write more about what things mean.

What do you think?