If Sarah Palin wants the Media to leave her alone, then why does she continue to use Twitter?

[iris054]

Palin is a perpetual show-off.

Sarah Palin also has a cruel streak. She has 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. There is a video out by Defenders of Wildlife about aerial wolf hunting, available on the Internet - caution: not for the faint hearted.

As if that weren't enough, Palin went on to allow Alaska's Department of Wildlife Conservation to enter wolf dens and slaughter worlf pups. In July of 2008, 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 Alaskan 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.

Glenn Hurowitz

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