Sorry, I was temporarily channelling "Barnacle Bill". I’m not seeing as much about the Enron tapes as I would’ve thought. Here’s what appears to be evidence that the company was knowingly screwing California during the summer of blackouts at the beginning of the Bush presidency. If it’s all true and there’s more to link Ken Lay with direct knowledge of this, it really makes things look bad for Cheney and his task force that year. All the more reason to get him to release the info pertaining to the meetings that he had with Lay and others. I’m very interested to see what the Supreme Court has to say about that and several other issues later this month.
The Reagan remembrance reached a fever pitch this weekend. I haven’t been around for too many president deaths, but aren’t we going a little overboard with this?
It’s customary to overlook someone’s faults when they die, but I think the media is going too far the other way. Most of my teenage view of Reagan was shaped by Bloom County and punk rock. I’m still waiting to see Jello Biafra’s take on the whole thing. The consensus from those with any sense outside the mainstream media seems to be that he had his faults both domestically and in foreign policy, but he’s not nearly as bad as our current elected leader. I wholeheartedly agree. All of the nostalgia over the weekend seemed to gloss over Regan’s neglect of the AIDS crisis, Iran-Contra, the ballooning deficit and failure of trickle-down economics for the poorest of americans, the fact that the Soviet Union was already on it’s last legs before he started spending tons of dough on ridiculous things like the star wars defense program and that it was his foreign policy in both the Middle East and Afghanistan that helped get us into the terrorist mess that we’re dealing with today.
Check out a few opinions from people better informed and more eloquent than I.
I’m sure that I’m not the first one to say or think this in the last 24 hours, but where’re the calls for a constitutional amendment to keep famous musicians/actors from marrying? Haven’t J-Lo, Britney Spears, Elizabeth Taylor, Drew Barrymore, Nicolas Cage and their ilk done much more to cheapen and destroy marriage than any same-sex couple in the last 10 years?
Oddly, neither J-Lo nor same-sex marriages seem to have affected my own. Hmmm…
We visited Dallas this weekend for both my father’s 61st birthday and my 15 year high school reunion. The return trip was a nightmare due to some sort of major accident on I-35 just south of Hillsboro. We were at a complete standstill for an hour and could see the Lifeflight helicopter land and take off from the highway in front of us, but we were too far back to see how many cars were involved or the extent of the damage. I got out the camera and took shots of the traffic behind and in front of us (~600k each).
My brother-in-law spent Memorial Day weekend with us. We took him to Cooper’s on Monday. There’re a few pictures in the Moblog to commemorate the occasion. It was gut-bustingly good as usual. Later that night, The Wife and I went to see A Perfect Circle at the Erwin Center with a few friends. They were really good, although they didn’t deviate much from the two albums of material. I think they only neglected to play two songs off of Mer de Noms and everything off of The Thirteenth Step. Maynard took the opportunity to bash both Schwarzenegger and Bush along with Clear Channel.
I finally took advantage of one of Best Buy’s ridiculous two years – no interest sales and bought a home theater package. It’s a Yamaha receiver with Klipsch speakers. I’ve been delayed in hooking it up as The Wife took mounting surround speakers on the wall as an excuse to re-paint our den. We successfully completed that yesterday, so I should have everything hooked up this weekend. I can’t wait. While buying hardware to mount the speakers, we also got a ceiling fan for The La’s room. It’s supposed to be installed next week. Now all I have to do is get some drywall and seal over the opening for our house fan which we almost never use. It just sucks the A.C. from the house into the attic which is like a furnace this time of year. Anybody have any good dry-walling tips? This’ll be my first attempt on my own. It doesn’t seem all that difficult.
I finally got around to updating the pictures of the week with a few shots from a trip to Pease Park in mid-May.