Apparently Spunky Palin is not pleased with Maverick McCain’s decision to move campaign resources out of Michigan and has expressed her displeasure in a quick email. Spunky is also annoyed with Katie Couric, but Mav soldiers on. He is mostly annoyed with Barack Obama, it seems.
Meanwhile the House of Representatives have passed the Wall Street Bailout bill aka The Rescue. Here are a couple of background pieces on the financial crisis — best I’ve seen.
All the news services have carried the story. The bipartisan bailout of the nation’s largest financial institutions has failed in the House of Representatives by 13 votes. According to CNN:
The measure need[ed] 218 votes for passage, but it came up 13 votes short of that target, as the final vote was 228 to 205 against. About 60% of Democrats voted for the measure, but less than a third of Republicans backed it.
John Carney, at ClusterStock, followed the vote as it developed and the stock market plummeted. House leaders held the question open for a short time hoping to persuade some members to change their votes.
Republicans supplied less votes than Democrats had expected, convincing Democrats to vote against the bailout bill so as not to put their seats at risk. Both parties [tried to negotiate] vote trading, with the Democrats arguing the Republicans should get at least 9 more of their members to vote “Yea,” bringing the Republican favorable votes up to signficiantly. At issue, many on the Hill believe, how many seats each party should put at risk by voting for this deeply unpopular bailout.
In the end, however, it was all for naught. During the voting, the DOW fell 700 points, finally closing down 777.68. Huffington Post calls the vote “an extraordinary gamble on the future of the global economy.”
According to the Associated Press, Barack Obama has called on the House to “get it done,” arguing that the country needs to avert crisis in the short term: “Democrats and Republicans in Washington have the responsibility to . . . make sure that the emergency rescue package is put forward that can at least stop the immediate problem we have.” Meanwhile, Republicans, who defeated the bailout, are blaming Nancy Pelosi.
I love it. Republicans with their feelings hurt! Though in fairness many Republicans apparently voted against the bailout because it violates their free market ideology, and I’m reading a deal of comments from like-minded folks, saying in effect: “Let the banks fail.” I’m guessing that Americans who are steadfastly opposed to the bailout think the crisis is being overblown in Washington. Apparently, President Bush has called a high level meeting to discuss what to do next, and John McCain is blaming Obama, having taken personal credit for the bailout bill before the vote failed.
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,
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.