Blue Mass Group

American author Kurt Vonnegut passed away this week at age 84.  He lived in New York City, but was once a resident of our own Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  While there have been official obituaries (more and more) in the press this week, it didn’t seem they quite did justice to the man, at least as I’d been thinking about him this year.  Cat’s Cradle and Galapagos are two of my favorite books.  Yet his last book was a memoir of sort: A Man Without a Country, and I’d like to present some of his quotes from that here, which given Vonnegut’s recurring focus on the future of humanity (both in fiction and now non-fiction) are timely on the eve of the National Day for Climate Action (there are all kinds of public events tommorow around the country).  What was particularly striking to me is that Vonnegut announced in that book that he gave up on humanity at the end of his life, in his own cynical yet funny way.  When I read that last year I wanted to go straight to New York and tell him that it’s not too late for us, there still is hope.  And hope there is: this is the week that Massachusetts and other states successfully sued the Bush Environmental Protection Agency to start regulating carbon dioxide and global warming, an issue clearly important to Vonnegut in his memoir.  And there’s another suit still pending for mercury pollution.  Throughout Vonnegut’s last book, it seems he is keenly aware of his coming mortality, and he has some things he would like us to hear about life, and maybe even some things to laugh at as well.

On the flip side – a few quotes from his recent memoir:

Is this a right of Negro-White couples?

by “John Howard“

So, I’ve got an idea to get mud unions enacted in all fifty states and federal recognition of Negro-White unions:  we have a compromise solution, where Negro-White couples give up the right to attempt to conceive children together, and the word marriage.

I think that Negro-White couples should not have the right to conceive children together, in other words, people should not have a right to create people using anything other than one white egg and one white sperm.  All people should be created equal, and we should not open the door to racial bastardization via Negro-White couples.  It would be too risky, too costly, and totally unnecessary.  Love makes a family, there is no need for Negro-White conception.

So, it should be banned, right?  Not allowed.  Now, that would conflict with the rights of marriage, and wouldn’t be equal to racially pure marriages anyhow, so we should have mud unions that have all the other rights of marriage, but don’t have conception rights.  I think this distinction would make it much easier to get federal recognition for mud unions, and mud unions in all fifty states.

Inspiration and judicial support below the flip.

Why?

This word appears predominantly at the top of one of the pieces of paper, purported to be a set of “talking points” for Alberto Gonzales, whose “token Latino” head the Democrats appear to want on a platter. (See “The President’s Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales,” by Bill Minutaglio.)

That’s a good question, and it certainly bears answering from the Blue side of the isle, in this writer’s “humble” opinion. Why all the fuss? Why do you seek the head of a respected Judge, who literally rose from his humble beginnings in Humble, Texas, to become a respected attorney, judge, and eventually the Attorney General of These United States?

Oops.  Don’t you hate it when that happens.  Just when you think you’ve sucessfully deleted accidentally lost four years of emails implicating you in the unethical firing of US Attorneys, they find some geekazoid who actually knows how those internets servers work.

A lawyer for the Republican National Committee told congressional staff members yesterday that the RNC is missing at least four years’ worth of e-mail from White House senior adviser Karl Rove that is being sought as part of investigations into the Bush administration, according to the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

[...]

In a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, Waxman said the RNC lawyer, Rob Kelner, also raised the possibility that Rove had personally deleted the missing e-mails, all dating back to before 2005. GOP officials said Kelner was merely speaking hypothetically about why e-mail might be missing for any staffer and not referring to Rove in particular.

Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy ain’t buyin it Karl! (more below fold)

The document, published on mass.gov, lays out a series of priorities in six key areas (job creation & economic growth; clean energy; education; health care; public safety; and cities and towns), as well as a list of the administration’s accomplishments in each area. It’s worth a read.  There’s quite a bit of stuff in there that didn’t get nearly the news coverage that, say, the drapes did.  For example: Helping Businesses Grow – Created the Development Cabinet, chaired by the Governor, to enable cooperation on a project-by-project basis among executive departments that are key to stimulating economic growth statewide. Announced initiatives to improve efficiency and effectiveness of environmental regulation, to spur business development while remaining conscious of the environment. Proposed changes include streamlining some environmental permitting and wetlands appeals. Appointed the state’s first-ever permitting ombudsman to help spur economic growth by speeding approval time from two to three years to just six months on development projects. Announced plans to begin modernizing and reforming the state procurement process to simplify how businesses participate and to expand the pool of companies who compete to provide Massachusetts with goods and services. Announced plans for greater support of affordable housing and job creation through [...]

This must have been what forced CBS’s hand in firing Imus: Before the CBS announcement, Imus appeared on WFAN radio Thursday. He lashed out at MSNBC, at the black activists who were his antagonists and at a prominent black Democrat, Harold Ford Jr., who ran for Senate last year with his endorsement. “I mean, Harold Ford Jr. has been disgraceful for his lack of support,” Imus said on WFAN. “Because I endured death threats to support him in Tennessee.” In a statement Wednesday – before Imus lost his job – Ford had called Imus “a good friend and a decent man.” But he also said Imus’s remarks were “reprehensible.” After all this, after his apologies, after arranging to meet with the Rutgers’ team … Imus still plays the victim card?  The decent thing to do would have been to say, “Yeah, I screwed up, and I deserve everything I’ve been getting.” Instead, whiny defensiveness. Amazing. He really doesn’t get it. Speaking of denial and rationalization, here’s our good friend, “reasonable” conservative David Brooks: “You know, most of us who are pundits are dweebs at some level. And he was the cool bad boy in the back of room,” Brooks said. [...]

… that Joe Lieberman’s a jackass? Digby reminds us that for all that Holy Joe was “deeply troubled” by the more raw elements of our pop culture (a sentiment many liberals share, actually), there he was chumming up with Don Imus lo, these many years. Does. Not. Compute. This is one of the myriad reasons I have to ask our neighbors in the Nutmeg State: What the hell were you thinking/drinking when you sent this guy back to the Senate for another six long years? Does this guy really represent your values? Your concerns? Are you really “all in” for as much more incompetent, monstrous warmongering as the President wants? I really, really don’t get it. I predict that sometime next year, Lieberman’s approval ratings will be in the tank; he’ll speak at the Republican convention; and there’ll be a push to recall him somehow — feasible or not.

It looks like Mr. Howard might be right. From the UK Women might soon be able to produce sperm in a development that could allow lesbian couples to have their own biological daughters, according to a pioneering study published today. Scientists are seeking ethical permission to produce synthetic sperm cells from a woman’s bone marrow tissue after showing that it possible to produce rudimentary sperm cells from male bone-marrow tissue. The researchers said they had already produced early sperm cells from bone-marrow tissue taken from men. They believe the findings show that it may be possible to restore fertility to men who cannot naturally produce their own sperm.

Bye, Bye, Imus. “Hmmm, he used da name nappy-headed ho! He can’ DO dat!” (Ebonics, courtesy of the Clintons.) But using that latter slang expression, common among blacks in the `hood, did in a guy who was hired by CBS as a shock-jock, and when he shocked everybody, CBS canned him.

Lose your job for DOING it?!? Uh, Looky here, CBS, if you PAY me to, say, piss on the statue of Vladimer Lenin down in the Fremont area in Seattle, and I DO it, and then you FIRE me, aren’t you being just a liddlebit hypocritical?!?

CBS seems to be having an identity crisis. Maybe worse. First, they decide that their identity is going to be defined, in part, by drastic opposition to the Republican Party, and by identifying with, and supporting, such erstwhile candidates as John Kerry and john-john. Then, fully under the cognizance of the brass, Dan Rathernot slaps the president, during his re-election campaign, with a phony paper he claimed had been vetted, and which, he dramatically intoned, illustrated beyond a doubt, that George shirked his duty as a pilot. Et cetera.

NJ Governor Jon Corzine was in a pretty bad car accident this evening.  Some reports are that he’s in critical but stable condition; several broken bones including a bunch of ribs; still in surgery. Read the latest at Blue Jersey. Our thoughts and best wishes to Gov. Corzine for a speedy recovery. UPDATE: Boy, this was a really nasty accident.  The latest, from this morning’s Star-Ledger: Gov. Jon Corzine remains in intensive care this morning with a breathing tube in his throat and a doctor declaring him lucky to be alive. The 60-year-old governor underwent about two hours of surgery last night to repair multiple broken bones, including 12 ribs and a femur that protruded through the skin of his thigh, following a car accident on the Garden State Parkway in Galloway Township. At 7:30 this morning, Lori Shaffer, a spokeswoman for Cooper University Hospital in Camden, said the governor was in critical but stable condition and remained in the trauma ICU unit…. He required seven pints of blood, officials said, and is using a breathing tube to ease his respiration with the broken ribs, and a broken breastbone. The governor also suffered a broken collarbone and lower back bone [...]