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from helecopters and airplanes illegal by public referendum (referendums which the Alaska legislature immediately rescinded), Palin as governor sponsored a successful a campaign to defeat a similar referendum this year, using $400K in public funds.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,