September 2008 archive

Eighteen months ago, when the Department of Interior began talking about removing the gray wolf from the endangered species list, and leaving control of its population to the states, eco-advocates sent out a warning: if this goes forward, wolves will be eradicated. They were sneered at, called alarmists and ignored. Six months ago, on March 28, the wolf was removed from the endangered list in the northern Rockies,

The critics judged right. Nobody who knows the history of the wolf in the United States should be surprised. The government’s decision to delist might as well have included transportation to wolf country and free ammo for a few street gangs. The operative word for what occurred: slaughter. So the feds stepped back in last week.

You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to have your blood boiled by what Julie Cart writes about that slaughter in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Sportsmen” on snowmobiles rampaged through the area. They bragged that they’d shot a wolf. Some had them stuffed:  

And that’s a pleasant way to describe the bailout in the works by the corrupt politicians of the United States, these narcissistic, craven sellouts, who couldn’t bring themselves to stop their own country from invading another and killing 100,000s and displacing millions more, who couldn’t stop their military interrogators and gestapo-like spies from torturing thousands. These moral zeros are about to send something just under a trillion dollars to the scions of finance capital. These latter have lived high off the hog, raking in millions, and in some cases billions of dollars, off a pyramid credit scheme, leaving us — the suckers — to pay up for a generation or more when their con finally went spectacularly bust, unraveling into a wilderness of economic “instruments” and “derivatives” so convoluted and intertwined that no one could ever untangle it.

Palin does not want to be mocked for her claim that she has foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from Alaska. To buttress her foreign policy resume, Palin explained to Couric that “we have trade missions back and forth” between Russia and Alaska. Some may interpret a governor saying “we” as meaning that Palin, similar to other governors, led trade missions overseas. Well, the “we” means that the State of Alaska has a history of grassroots diplomacy with Russia — only Palin stopped any diplomatic missions when she became Governor. The record also reflects that Palin has not traveled to Russia or even met any foreign heads of state until the other day. And, the “back and forth” must be related to some country other than Russia, which is not in the top 20 of trade partners with Alaska. To buttress her missioning claim, Palin then delivers the next mocking point, citing Putin’s need to fly over Alaska to reach DC as part of her national security credentials! OMG, people living near international airports start sending out your resumes for VP because I’m sure some foreign head of state flew over your head!  

Jefferson Airplane – Early Days

Somebody to Love

Last Thursday, both Barack Obama and campaign-suspended John McCain spoke at a session of the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting.  Some have already called John McCain’s comments “the height of hypocrisy.”  Reading McCain’s speech and considering John McCain’s spinning out of control flip-flopping on energy and global warming issues over the past year, it is hard to disagree with this evaluation.