You have to love this administration's ability to blatantly lieabout the economy, its “irrefutable proof” of Iraqi weapons…whatever, without any concern about being caught. And for the most part, they don't get called on it.

Um, not that any other president has ever, ever lied….

Sure, “Clinton Lied” yields about 5,980 hits on Google. “Bush lied”, by comparison, yields a paltry 1,310.

But Bubba lied subtly by comparison. Dubya's folks don't lie under questioning–they just make stuff up on the fly to prove points, sort of like Reagan's “smoking trees”. Need justification for tax cuts? Can't find an economist's report that backs you up? Invent it! No problem.

There's no outcry. The media mostly just rolls their eyes and prints the lies; maybe they present counterpoints to the statements, maybe they don't, but they almost never come out and say that the president “lied” because that would be…editorializing.

So, now that I can come up for air for a minute (my copy for March is all filed, and I'm between random beatings/editing sessions at the moment), this looks like a good time to reflect on the weekend's theme- music.

My musical-political bent has always been toward DIY (just as it has been in, well, just about everything else for that matter). It's my folk/punk/hacker/potter/desktop-photog nature; I can't help it. So when I saw this, I knew I had to add another string instrument to my now-burgeoning collection. It's a musical instrument for the People; no pretension, no minor chords (well, that cuts out some Woody Guthrie stuff, but Woody would have loved this instrument–open-G tuned guitarist that he was).

I play music for myself. It's a form of meditation, a form of troubleshooting, a form of mental gymnastics; connecting chords together like code, hacking the interface of a favorite riff from a song by Green Day or John Gorka or the Clash or Michelle Shocked. It is also a major mood lifter, just like cracking a tough piece of code, troubleshooting someone's network connection, or punching out the perfect bit of prose is. It's an act of creation. If more people took control of their own entertainment by playing their own music, no matter how good or bad they were at it, then, well, the MPAA and RIAA would be in a heap more trouble.

And that's the threat of iMovie, iDVD, and iTunes. With my Mac added to the mixture, I can record my own music, shoot my own video, and put them on the web, or burn them to CD. If I use the tools cleverly, those three (and my blogging tool) are all I need–aside from my strumstick, my Washburn acoustic, my Ibanez electric, and whatever other instruments (musical or otherwise) I can bring to bear.

It's the end of entertainment scarcity. And the recording, television and motion picture industries are just starting to see what that means to the bottom line.

And speaking of which…

Now on to the most important event of the weekend–the Grammys.

First, let's dispense with what passed for political statements as quickly as possible. Somehow, Fred Durst did not come across as the most articulate spokesperson for peace:

“I just really hope we are in agreeance that this war should go away as soon as possible.”

It almost made me want to go to war just because of his grammar, and the fact that it was the most lame-ass message imagineable out of the most lame-ass person possible. “Go away as soon as possible”? It almost sounds like he was saying,”Okay, Dubya, get it over with already, my portfolio is tanking.”

The general feeling that artists claimed to have that anti-war messages would be edited out was upheld by the sudden change of camera angle when  Avril Lavigne flashed a message inside her jacket (the Washington Times predictably dismisses the move as because of “what must have been an objectionable screed”). Sheryl Crow's “No War” guitar strap was obscured by her improbable bouiffant hairdo (and the fact that she was seriously upstaged by Kid Rock–Upstaged by Kid Rock…I think that says it all).

Okay, other observations of the evening:

Somehow, it escaped me that Norah Jones is Ravi Shankar's daughter. Her sweep was predictable–she's talented, and she's a much more appealing talent to the boomer geezers who make up the majority of Grammy voters than some 18-year old “punkette” (as one paper called Lavigne) or even a more broadly appealing, yet urban Ashanti.

The Clash tribute at the end of the show–Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Grohl, and Silvio…er.. Little Stevie cranking out “London Calling” in memory of Joe Strummer was….well, the Clash were my Beatles, the Only Band That Matters, and seeing the modern pop establishment saluting them seemed surreal, to say the least.

But the whole Grammy show, as many have noted, was one big rudderless ship…much like the recording industry itself