Pluots, Spoons, Cartoons, and High Crimes

what i'm listening to right now: "Amoeba" by The Adolescents
I'm off work this afternoon and the whole of tomorrow, so there is the possibility of some heavy blogging or absolutely nothing at all

My plans of taking a walk down to Whole Foods for some pluots* seems to be disappearing as I'm sitting around waiting for songs to download off of Soulseek. So far, I've downloaded the first Adolescents album, which I got turned on to by a collection of Brian Walsby's cartoons. He's a Raleigh guy since way back in the late 80s hardcore heyday, when The Brewery wasn't a hessian headquarters. I'm loving his cartoons, parts in love with music and snidely making fun of everything about music.

I've been listening to the new Spoon album pretty much non stop. The one thing that I love about them is how everything they do sounds so effortless. How it seems so natural for them to be making the best Supremes or Billy Joel songs you never heard. The ideal of what people who appreciate Billy Joel... what it sounds like to them, we're hearing the same thing when we hear "Big Shot", but one of us hates it. And yet, "The Underdog" on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga sounds like a Billy Joel song, just perfect in every way instead of the trickle down rock economics of Billy Joel, the president of soft rock in the 80s.

*Oh, so I wanted to explain the pluot to the uninitiated. It's a crossbreeding of the plum and the apricot. The pluot tastes like the idea of a plum before you eat it. Sweeter and less watery. The one perk of working at Whole Foods two years ago was the free produce I got to graze during my shifts. That and I could listen to my CDs while I was in the back cutting up fruit trays.

I've been following this whole Attorney General farce very closely, and it's getting SO exciting! So many other things are coming up out of this investigation. The best part of this is that the administration is just getting itself in deeper trouble. Really, if Alberto Gonzalez went out and said that he fired these US District Attorneys, because he could, and he had the power, given to himself by himself when he snuck something into the Patriot Act part II, to replace those people he fired and not get them cleared by the Senate. I'm sure this would be less of a problem for them. And yet, (gleefully for me), AG is a dissembling fool, or plays very well at it. He's catching himself in all these lies, and now, the Senate is getting themselves a Special Prosecutor to look into Gonzalez's perjuring himself to Congress. Which is as much as a crime as perjury in a court. The kind of perjury that Republicans swore the impeachment of Clinton was about.
THEN there's Bush telling his aides to ignore the subpoenas of Congress. Not showing up to testify when subpoenaed is a crime. But not as big of a crime as telling someone not to appear. That's a felony. And, who's committing a felony?! Bush!!! Oh!! This is soooo hilarious! Of course there's the seething anger. Of course, Bush is trampling all over the Constitution. But it just makes me so happy that he's doing it so clearly! There's no amount of "is is"ing that can diffuse this. Bush has clearly committed a felony. Gonzalez has clearly perjured himself. There's going to be a court battle over both of these things. Outside of Bush escorting his aides down to Congress to testify under oath with a transcript, this is going to go to court, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. I've been spending a good amount of time at Talking Points Memo and all of it's satellite sites, and it's done the best job of comprehensively reporting this. (In fact it was the site that broke the whole AG firing escapade to begin with).