Month: September 2008

Palin’s idea of sport

In her 20 months as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin has worked hard to turn it from America’s last great wild place into strip mall sprawl suburbia, like the lower 48. A key component of her effort is to get rid of predators, wolves in particular.

Palin offered a bounty for anyone engaging in aerial hunts of wolves, paying $150 for each left foreleg brought in. The Defenders of Wildlife sued to end this brutal killing, which is the opposite of sportsmanlike and which was outlawed by Congress 30 years ago. Wolves are either shot from the air or run down with airplanes until they are exhausted and then shot point blank on the ground.

“The Governor is overstepping her legal authority by offering cash payments for each wolf killed by aerial gunners,” stated Tom Banks, Defenders of Wildlife’s Alaska Associate. “That’s a bounty by anyone’s standards regardless of what they call it.”

Palin offered a bounty for anyone engaging in aerial hunts of wolves, paying $150 for each left foreleg brought in

Hoping to boost the number of wolves killed this year by permitees, Palin announced the state would pay $150 for each kill. According to an Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) news release, the bounty was instituted to “motivate permittees to redouble their efforts and to help offset the high cost of aviation fuel, ADF&G will offer cash payments to those who return biological specimens to the department… Permittees will be paid $150 when they bring in the left forelegs of wolves taken from any of several designated control areas.”

Healthy ecosystems need predators. Without them, varmit populations — rodents, usually — explode. Poison is commonly then employed to kill the varmits, taking desirable and domestic species with the rodents, sullying waterways and introducing toxins.

“Governor Palin needs to take a close look at wildlife management practice in her state and restore the use of sound science,” concludes Banks. “She said would heed the will of the public, but it’s increasingly clear she’s only listening to that segment that is willing to sacrifice Alaska’s natural heritage for the benefit of a few.”

Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced the Protect America’s Wildlife (PAW) Act to close a federal loophole that would eliminate Palin’s aerial hunting program, which has also been proposed by Dick Cheney’s friends for the Greater Yellowstone region. Go to the Defenders of Wildlife’s site to see if your representatives have cosponsored the bill, and to sign a petition demanding they do.

If they weren’t Republicans, you could almost feel sorry for them. Inside the GOP convention hall — the ultimate dittohead echo chamber — party faithful in St. Paul seem to be blissfully unaware that a concensus is forming that Sarah Palin, John McCain’s choice for vice president, is irreparably flawed.
To gauge the level of panic in the McCain campaign, note that the news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy was timed to hit the airwaves just as Hurricane Gustav was making landfall near New Orleans.
But the real scandal here isn’t Palin’s thin resume, her ornamental status as what a commenter here described as McCain’s “trophy VP,” the ethics investigation into her personnel practices as governor, her past membership in the Alaska Independence Party, which treasonously promoted secession from the Union, or even the pregnancy of her 16 year old daughter despite Palin’s fervent, if fantastical, belief that abstinence is the only acceptable form of birth control.

The real scandal here is John McCain’s colossally bad judgment in what is universally regarded as any presidential nominee’s most important decision. It borders on an act of criminal negligence for a man who would be the oldest-ever first-term president to nominate as vice president someone as inexperienced as Sarah Palin, a former sports reporter and beauty queen with no foreign-relations experience — who just months ago admitted she had no idea what a vice president did every day.

Choosing Palin reveals that, despite his slogan of “country first,” politics trumps everything with McCain, including the security of the United States. It ought to be a career-killing moment, in the way that former Sen. George Allen’s revelatory use of the racial slur “macaca” ended his presidential ambitions.

[…]

A kick butt and take names lawyer is in charge of defending Alaska Gov. and Republican Vice Presidential pick Sarah Palin in her abuse of power case in her home state. Thomas Van Flein’s first move was to try to have the investigation taken out the hands of the legislature and put under the control of the state’s “Personnel Board” (I guess Human Resources is too fancy for Alaska).

Why would anyone care who looks into Palin’s firing of the guy Palin asked to fire her former brother-in-law, a state trooper? Well the legislature answers to the voters, who elected its members. The Personnel Board consists of three people appointed by…the governor.

To say Anchorage attorney Van Flein seems like a political hack doesn’t do it justice. He has doggedly thrown in Bill Clinton references at every opportunity.

[S]tate Sen. Hollis French, an Anchorage Democrat and former state prosecutor who is project director for the legislative investigation…asked, “Governor Palin has repeatedly stated that she has nothing to hide and that she and her administration will cooperate fully with this investigation. Is your client aware that you seem to be challenging the Legislature’s jurisdiction?”

And Palin’s lawyer’s answer?

“We don’t have any sex. We don’t have any drugs. And there’s no blue dress. Nor are there any shady real estate deals here,” Van Flein said. “In the big picture, I think people are going to be disappointed that this is not a scandal.”

It’s only been a few days and these people are already turning my stomach.