I’ve men­tioned my appre­ci­a­tion for Yves Smith’s naked cap­i­tal­ism blog often, but for those of you who haven’t been fol­low­ing along at home, here’s a selec­tion from her com­men­taries on recent eco­nomic events.

+ On Obama’s appoint­ment of Tim Gei­th­ner as Trea­sury Sec­re­tary (Smith wanted Paul Vol­cker for rea­sons she explains here):

The prob­lem is that the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion has so low­ered stan­dards that some­one who is com­pe­tent is applauded as a good choice, as in ide­ol­ogy and past record are ignored if you have a respectable back­ground and are not a patron­age choice. Com­pe­tence is a min­i­mum stan­dard, folks. What does the can­di­date stand for? The MSM ducks that issue, choos­ing to char­ac­ter­ize Gei­th­ner as a tech­no­crat. That is incom­plete and inaccurate.

+ On the pos­si­bil­ity of a default on U.S. debt or a deval­u­a­tion of the dollar:

The news that Hillary Clin­ton may be our next Sec­re­tary of State has trig­gered all the expected reac­tions in all the expected quar­ters: Clin­tonites are secretly ecsta­tic, polit­i­cal reporters are not so secretly sali­vat­ing, and many Obamaphiles are won­der­ing, in a word, WTF?

If the appoint­ment hap­pens, every­one agrees, it will owe much in inspi­ra­tion to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 Team of Rivals. The book’s sub­ject is Abra­ham Lincoln’s Cab­i­net, to which he appointed three of his rivals for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion of 1860, and Obama’s fond­ness for both the book and its ani­mat­ing idea is well known. Back in May he described Team of Rivals as “wonderful” and spoke admir­ingly of how Lin­coln “basically pulled in all the people who had been run­ning against him into his Cab­i­net because what­ever, you know, per­sonal feel­ings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get this coun­try through this time of crisis?’”

The Boston Globe recently asked Good­win what she thought of the Clin­ton possibility:

Goodwin…said Obama’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Clin­ton for sec­re­tary of state is anal­o­gous to Lincoln’s select­ing William Seward for the same post in 1861. Seward was con­sid­ered the favorite for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, as Clin­ton had been for this year’s Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion. Though ini­tially dejected from the loss, Good­win said, Seward even­tu­ally accepted Lincoln’s offer to join his Cab­i­net and the two men devel­oped a pro­duc­tive friend­ship. “The par­al­lel with Hillary is almost eerie,” she said yesterday.

The deal isn’t done (though Politico’s Mike Allen is report­ing it’s close) and yet that hasn’t stopped the election-​deprived pun­di­toc­racy from feed­ing a frenzy about what the appoint­ment would mean for Obama, for Hillary, for Bill, for the Repub­li­cans, for Iran, etc., etc.

But there is, I submit, a more impor­tant ques­tion that needs our atten­tion: if Hillary Clin­ton is going to be the new William Seward, what’s going to be the new Seward’s Folly?

I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis.

Ben Smith links to an inter­view that Sarah Palin gave to Hugh Hewitt this after­noon. In it, after attack­ing Barack Obama for his views on abor­tion, she refers to

my posi­tion of just want­ing that cul­ture of life to be respected, and not want­ing gov­ern­ment to sanc­tion the idea of ending life.

Are we allowed to ask, then (or would it con­sti­tute more “gotcha journalism”?) if this means that Palin opposes the death penalty as well? From what I’ve seen around the inter­net, she would seem not to, but if you don’t want “government to sanc­tion the idea of ending life” doesn’t that mean you don’t want gov­ern­ment to sanc­tion the idea of ending life?

And yes, I know that the Repub­li­can Party has tried to hijack the phrase “culture of life” from the orig­i­nal sense in which Pope John Paul II deployed it. The pope did use it to oppose abor­tion but also to oppose the death penalty (and euthana­sia, and stem cell research). When the Repub­li­cans imported it into their 2004 plat­form, how­ever, they explic­itly endorsed the government’s right to impose the death penalty.

None of that really mat­ters, though, since in the second part of that sen­tence Palin is unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally clear about the role gov­ern­ment should (not) have in ending life. Do I believe that Palin really opposes the death penalty? Of course not, though it would be one of the few good things I could say about her if she did.