Is John McCain a closeted bear lover, because he certainly voted for the bear study he recently criticized at the first presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi, and he attacked the bear study in political ads criticizing earmarks. From FactCheck.org:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain cites three absurd-sounding examples of pork-barrel spending in a recent ad: a “bridge to nowhere,” a study of the DNA of bears and a Woodstock museum.

McCain is known for fighting against earmarks, the other term lawmakers use for funding of pet projects back home. But he appears to have chosen these three because they’re easy to mock, not because he had significant involvement in removing them from the budget.

He never specifically went after the “bridge to nowhere,” and he was absent for key votes on its funding.

While he tried to cut money for several other projects in the same bill, he never proposed cutting the bear study and voted for the final bill containing it.

He wasn’t present for the most important votes on the Woodstock museum, including one on an amendment he co-sponsored to kill the earmark and divert some of the funds.

What is the objective of the bear research McCain has consistently attacked although he supported it?  The aim of the research certainly wasn’t what McCain claimed: a paternity test. From Scientific American:

Currently the front-runner for the GOP nod, McCain also hits the research in speeches on the stump, cracking jokes about bear paternity tests and criminal investigations. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money,” McCain railed last month during a campaign stop in Clawson, Mich. Scientists, however, are not amused: They insist that the study is not only worth every penny but that the $3-million price tag cited in the ad is, in a word, wrong.

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“This is not pork barrel at all,” says Richard Mace, a research biologist with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP). “We have a federal law called the Endangered Species Act and [under this law] the federal government is supposed to help identify and conserve threatened species.”

The grizzly has been listed as a threatened species since 1975 and scientists say that it is essential to get a handle on the population to preserve it. But, according to Kendall, until the feds decided to invest in this grizzly bear DNA study, researchers lacked the funds to conduct research at the scale necessary to get a reliable measure.

In 2002 Kendall assembled a scientific panel with representatives from the USGS, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and FWP, along with other scientific and environmental organizations to determine the best way to measure the remaining grizzly population of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem. It recommended setting up barbed wire hair-snagging stations to painlessly pluck fur from passing bears that would be used for DNA fingerprinting, a technique employed to distinguish individuals of the same species by the differences in their genetic material. This is the only way to accurately estimate population in such heavily forested terrain, where bears are difficult to spot, says Chris Servheen, a grizzly expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In response, the USGS set aside $250,000 to launch the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project; the next year, Congress stepped in to provide additional funding, and from 2003 to 2007 appropriated $4.8 million to the effort, Kendall says.

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