Palin

I keep hearing that she's ''like us.'' There's this idea that people who hunt and have ''good'' values are somehow this mythological American; I don't know who ''this'' person is, I've never met them. She is no more typical ''us'' than I am, than Obama is, than McCain is, than Mr. T is. If there is something quintessentially or authentically American about her, I sort of feel like, you know what? You ''good values people'' have had the country for eight years, and done an unbelievably s---ty job. Let's find some bad values people and give them a shot, maybe they'll have a better take on it.
-John Stewart on Sarah Palin

"Of course, Sarah Palin's no animal lover. She's put extraordinary effort into undoing federal wildlife protections for polar bears, beluga whales, and pretty much any other animal that gets in the way of the oil industry's plans.

But her wolf bounty really takes the cake for animal cruelty. One of Palin's first acts in office was to put a $150 bounty on the heads of her state's wolves, allegedly with the goal of increasing the moose and caribou population. But this was no ordinary hunt: it was meant to incentivize the aerial killing of wolves, in which private hunters take a small plane and chase down wolf packs until they're exhausted and can't move any more, when they either shoot them from the air or land and execute them at point blank range. Then, they strap the wolf to a plane, cut off the wolf's left forearm, and bring it to the state Department of Fish and Game for their cash reward.

As if this wasn't enough, now Palin's administration is allowing its "Department of Wildlife Conservation" to enter into wolf dens and slaughter wolf pups; in July, her employees went to retrieve adult wolf carcasses they had shot a month earlier from a helicopter and then found the wolves' pups in their den and so dispatched them one-by-one with pistol shots to the head. They then tried to conceal their actions from the public. When they were exposed, they said they had tried to place the orphaned wolves with zoos. Then the zoos said no one had contacted them.

Meanwhile, Palin's government spent $400,000 in taxpayer money on an aerial wolf hunting "education" program to lobby for the program. This is the sort of thing you can expect from Sarah Palin if she gets to be a heartbeat away from the presidency."

-From an article by Glenn Hurowitz