snakes in the grass crying wolf

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I’m glad the Humane Society Legislative Fund has endorsed my guy and hope that endorsement will garner him some votes. But even though HSLF judges that Obama’s record with regard to animal protection is superior to McCain’s (which it is), the real reason for the endorsement is HSLF’s abhorrence of Sarah Palin’s record.

While McCain’s positions on animal protection have been lukewarm, his choice of running mate cemented our decision to oppose his ticket. Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-Alaska) retrograde policies on animal welfare and conservation have led to an all-out war on Alaska’s wolves and other creatures. Her record is so extreme that she has perhaps done more harm to animals than any other current governor in the United States.

HSLF points out that after Alaska had twice made killing wolves and other animals from helecopters and airplanes illegal by public referendum (referendums which the Alaska legislature immediately rescinded), Palin as governor sponsored a successful a campaign to defeat a similar referendum this year, using $400K in public funds. This was in addition to her attempt to reverse the Bush administration’s listing of Polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Spieces Act.

I’m remembering car trips to New Mexico in my childhood, when for miles along the highways I saw the skins of killed wolves and coyotes hung out on the barbed wire fences. There was a bounty for them, though I have never known how much it was. In Sarah Palin’s Alaska, there is a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf. These are details of the lag end of a certain history that involves the slaughter of the North American bison, the burning of the tall grass prairies, and the genocidal removal of Native American peoples from what became the American heartland, so called. In part this year’s presidential election is about two competing narratives of that history, or as Paul Starr points out in The American Prospect, two different versions of America. I had hoped to outlive the old triumphal narrative’s dominance, but it still has great power.

I’m also remembering Farley Mowat‘s Never Cry Wolf, still controversial though it shouldn’t be, and the popular film made from it. Mowat still fights the good fight. There’s a little film about the Alaskan wolf hunt, which you can see here. It’s very sad, and hard to watch in places, though I recommend it because it contains lots of beautiful footage of wolves roaming free, some of which was appropriated for an ad attacking Obama that I wrote about a while back. Here’s a shorter version.

And of course the Bushies continue to cry wolf about the current economic crisis, trying to stampede the houses of Congress into rolling over as they did after 9/11. But it looks as though that tactic may not work this time. There’s growing right-wing opposition to the bailout plan as well as concern on the left, though some of the right’s newfound desire to limit executive power may be disingenuous, as Glenn Grenwald writes in Salon.

Apparently, the same political faction that has cheered on every instance of unchecked, absolute executive power over the last eight years — which demanded that the President, and he alone, decide which citizens, including Americans, can be spied on, detained, even tortured, and that no oversight or disclosure was needed for any of that — has suddenly re-discovered their desire for checks on federal government power. The reason? They say it themselves: with the looming prospect of an Obama presidency, they may no longer be in charge of that Government and these “small government conservatives” have thus suddenly re-awoken to the virtues of checks and balances, oversight and other restraints.

Still, this political turn may provide an opportunity to reestablish congressional oversight in principle. And it’s hard to see that as a bad thing,

snakes in the temple

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Den of Thieves: Yesterday, The Friends of Jake sent me to this little essay on the current financial crisis by Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. On the present consequences of what supply siders now piously call moral hazard, Thistlethwaite quotes James K. Galbraith.

Deregulation has been the public faith of the financial sector since Reagan. Under Bush II, waves of predatory finance in housing were aggressively promoted by Alan Greenspan, by McCain’s closest economic adviser Phil Gramm, and by so-called regulators who systematically subvert the public interest.

Phil Gramm has recently been in the news with a claim that Americans are a nation of whiners. He was referring to folks like me who didn’t think the economy was booming, having seen their property values and retirement accounts deteriorate and having noticed a steady increase in the cost of goods and services while wages remained flat and jobs were lost forever. With regard to Gramm and others whose faith in the sovereignty of markets knows no bounds, Thistlethwaite adds:

Markets are not ethical instruments; they are not “self-regulating.” Markets are driven by the drive for acquisition. Regulations are designed to limit destruction wrought by greed, while not stifling the productivity of markets.

The moral failure here is that those who were charged with protecting the public interest from runaway greed and unfair lending practices instead have shown that they are the ringleaders of the Den of Thieves.

The Public Interest, what a quaint, old-fashioned phrase! Now the public interest must apparently be served by adding another half trillion dollars to the federal deficit, already bloated with the present cost of the president’s ill-fated wars (this says nothing about what Bush’s adventures will ultimately cost). Still, it’s nice to see the president and his lieutenants return to pragmatism and consultation with congress instead of strutting and proclaiming their patriotism on every hand.

Jezus es kufarok (Jesus and the traders): I have to digress now and say that thinking of the biblical background of Thistlewaite’s essay (the story of Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple, told variously in three canonical gospels and the Gopspel of Thomas)* has reminded me of singing Kodály’s great motet based on the New Testament accounts when I was in high school. Here’s just a fragment, part of the central fugue lifted from a performance by The Danish National Radio Choir. You can hear a performance in English here, though it drags a bit for my taste and it’s an abridgement. Of course, we sang the piece in English in my high-school choir.

Memorials: Today’s New York Times carries a review of last Thursday’s Metropolitan Opera performance of the Verdi Requiem as a memorial to Luciano Pavarotti. The reviewer points to Pavarotti’s long-ago recording of the Requiem with Georg Solti as particularly excellent. Here’s a very young Pavarotti singing the Ingemisco with Herbert von Karajan, whom you have to watch a little, unfortunately, but it’s beautifully sung.

The reviewer for last Thursday’s Requiem was Times chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini. Six years or so ago, Tommasini urged Pavarotti to retire, in print. It’s nice that Tommasini’s review of this present concert gives those of us who loved Luciano when he was young an opportunity to remember him at his best.

*I like John Dominic Crossan’s reading of the various accounts. See Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, (New York: 1994), pp. 130ff.

lay that pistol down, babe; don’t shoot that snow snake

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I remember a story, my mother used to tell when we were all younger, and she was still in the world, to the effect that my father would stop and shoot snakes on the roadways in New Mexico because they could get inside your car. Last evening at dinner with friends from North Dakota I learned what snow snakes are and also heard some good stories about canny Norwegians and innocent city folk that it wouldn’t do to tell here, even though this is my blog and I can say anything I please without fear of censorship from Stanley Fish or anybody else.

New Obama ad: Well, my guy is speaking forcefully about the economy, and he has a new two-minute ad that is forthright and direct. I’m grateful to Ben Smith at Politico for the reference.

The comment thread for this ad at Politico is also interesting. Both positive and negative comments echo campaign themes. Read it all here.

Elitism turned: and in what seems like one more chorus of a tired, old song, The Huffington Post is carrying a story today to the effect that Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of Hilary Clinton’s top fundraisers, is switching her support to McCain. Obama is arrogant, says Rothschild, who is “a member of the DNC’s Democrats Abroad chapter and splits her time living in London and New York.” He (Obama) “has a problem connecting with average Americans.” How would Rothschild know?

Palin and Pegler: Robert Kennedy, Jr. notes Sarah Palin’s now infamous quotation from Westbrook Pegler as follows:

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that “some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies.”

It might be worth asking Governor Palin for a tally of the other favorites from her reading list.

But I wonder if Palin knew that she was quoting Pegler or even who Pegler was. I suspect she didn’t.

David Brooks, again: The Huffington Post reports David Brooks to have written that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be Vice President. Well, maybe. But Brooks still can’t give up on the theme that those of us on the left who don’t think Palin is qualified are snobs. “Sarah Palin has many virtues,” Brooks writes:

If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

Sounds like a claim that Palin isn’t qualified because she lacks experience and prudence, Brooks’s main themes. But here’s Brooks’s final paragraph, which seems to take the edge off the critique.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence, but to select leaders who have those qualities but not the smug condescension that has so marked the reaction to the Palin nomination in the first place.

Now that could be a swipe at Obama as much as at Palin, it seems to me. Brooks is no democrat (note the small d); and however elegant his reasoning in most of this piece, and it is (mostly) elegant, he can’t credit the negative reaction to Palin from the left with any validity. “The idea that ‘the people’ will take on and destroy ‘the establishment’ is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right.” How droll. I sometimes think Brooks never met a stereotype he didn’t like.

“If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman.” No sh*t! as my ex mother-in-law used to say. Palin’s actual performance in office doesn’t justify Brooks’s enthusiasm — I suspect he knows it. And in spite of today’s reports of a lawsuit attempting to stop the Alaska trooper investigation, Palin’s own administrations in both Wasilla and Juneau are beginning to look a lot like corrupt establishments, themselves.

Brooks should realize that the candidate whose prudence he should question is John McCain.

it’s all in the past

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I’m inclined to accept this critique of a recent Obama ad alleging that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists. Here’s the ad.

The critique appears in today’s Washington Post, but it isn’t signed and it should be. Not only does the tone of the critique require that its author take responsibility for it, but the piece is written in the first person singular. If verb tenses matter, so does point of view.

And I’m wondering why Ms. Anonymous doesn’t take on this ad, which is far more devastating than the one she reviews.

Of course the second ad meets the usage test, past tense and all. I’m thinking this may be one of those reporterly suggestions of equivalence, even though McCain’s folks only severed their ties with lobbyists in March (if then, as some skeptics point out in the comment thread for this article), and as recently as February (as Anonymous points out) were carrying on the business of their clients from McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus. Still, Anonymous argues as follows:

The McCain campaign has taken a lot of heat from the fact-checking community over the last week for deceptive, at times dishonest, campaign ads. But the Obama campaign is hardly immune from criticism about misleading advertising. A good example: a couple of ads that slam the Republican nominee for employing lobbyists while insisting that “it’s over” for the special interests.

Notice that Anonymous mentions “a couple of ads” but discusses only one specifically. Where’s the other one, I wonder? I think the Obama campaign should correct the verb tenses in the offending ad. It would lose no punch for that. But I also think there’s no equivalence between that ad, or the Obama ad that misstated some facts about McCain’s record on education, and the constant barrage of lies coming out of the McCain campaign.