Sarah Palin not knowing Africa was a continent. Made national news that one did. Such a juicy story.
Google “Martin Eisenstadt.” Amazing.
Martin Eisenstadt is the pseudonym of an anonymous writer who hoaxed major media organizations, posing as an adviser to the McCain campaign. He claims to be a senior fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy, also a fake...
link
i heard on orielly today that tape exists of the vice presidential debate preperations and the truth will come out in time...
ReplyDeleterose, are you saying that martin eisensdadt is the guy who fed carl cameron and fox news the false information? he claims that 3-4 mccane advisors told him that.......
It's just so ridiculous to plant fake stories on Palin when she is so perfectly capable of producing equally embarrassing ones on her own.
ReplyDeleteAnd it is so ridiculous 9:55 for you to try to sound like you have a brain instead of rocks in your head. Now that is embarrassing. Really embarrassing. What, does a skirt threaten you so very much? How telling.
ReplyDeleteAsk that question to a wolf that is being hunted from a helicopter.
ReplyDeleteDred
59% of voters believe that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be Vice President. 100% of Alaska's wolf population believe that she is not qualified to be Alaska's Governor.
ReplyDeleteDred
59% of us think you are a complete boob Dred. I mean no life other than to stalk Rose. And 100% of us think you ought to get a life.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't you start trying to defend measure T?
OK, I just defended measure T. How do you like me now?
ReplyDeleteDred
Rose, thank you. You did the right thing the other day. I offer my apology. I judged you too harshly.
ReplyDeleteDred
Thanks, Dred.
ReplyDeleteDred,
ReplyDeleteHave you ever watched a wolf pack bring down a baby caribou and the mother trying to defend it?
Actually 8:35 AM, I am a woman
ReplyDeletego fish.
Yes. When I lived in Alaska, the moose would stand on the railroad tracks and run ahead of the train instead of jumping into the deep snow. Several hundred moose were killed over the winter. The salvageable parts of the carcasses were given to soup kitchens and nursing homes. There was much more left that couldn't be given away. So they dumped those carcasses on the calving grounds so the predators, wolves, grizzly and black bears, would scavenge instead of eating caribou calves.
ReplyDeleteIn a healthy large animal ecosystem a natural ratio of 25 to 1 exists between large herbivores and predators.
It is the argument used to support aerial hunting. If you have lived in Alaska you have heard it. But the brutality described is part of nature. Ever seen your dog find a nest of baby rabbits? Have you ever seen a deer, shot up and bloody, with four broken legs run from a group of hunters? It is gruesome. More animals are killed on our highways than die from predation. More animals die during hunting season. There are some states in the mid-west where more than 600,000 deer are killed during a two week hunting season. What percentage of those deer do you think die from a clean shot? How many run off that are never recovered?
Dred
Dread @4:26 PM,
ReplyDeleteAnd your point is?
My Point? What have you got against wolves making an honest living providing for their cute little puppies. What do you think wolves eat, berries? Wolves evolved along side of the great herds of caribou. Without predators to keep their numbers in check caribou would have reproduced themselves until they overwhelmed the carrying capacity of their range. Disease and massive die-offs from starvation may well have destroyed the last caribou before man ever showed up and interrupted the delicate balance that had existed for ages. If you are for hunting predators from a plane or helicopter then you are supporting an unethical practice. Wolf populations were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 early in the last century. Killing off the American bison was a contributer but so were government paid bounties, money paid for hides, and the belief that the only good predator is a dead predator.
ReplyDeleteYou can still walk along the shoreline in S.E. Alaska and find dead bald eagles that have been shot out of trees because there are some who still believe that the only good predator is a dead predator. Before statehood in 1959, bald eagles were treated like vermin. Some commercial fisherman have long held that notion when it comes to competition for "their" salmon, and seals, sea lions, and bald eagles have paid the price for it. It used to be against the law to hunt from a plane. Having signed it into law must make Sarah Palin very unpopular with people who see this type of sport hunting as barbaric. She is not someone that I would trust in a position of power. But I understand that her appeal is to her constituency's baser instincts.
Dred
Even factcheck.org doesn't go for this one, guys....
ReplyDeleteA wildlife group's ad attacks Palin for supporting the shooting of wolves from airplanes. She does, but there's more to it than that.
Here are the bare facts: As a gubernatorial candidate, and since she was elected in 2006, Palin has promoted aerial wolf and bear shooting, which is usually done with a two-seat, fixed-wing Piper Super Cub in winter, when the animals can be tracked more easily. In March 2007, Palin's administration announced that it would offer $150 for the foreleg of each freshly killed wolf, in order to encourage hunters. A lawsuit by Defenders of Wildlife and the Alaska Wildlife Alliance prompted a judge to issue a temporary restraining order to stop the payments, and the state backed off.
Palin also proposed legislation in 2007 that would have allowed aerial shooting, under a "predator control" program, of wolverines as well as brown bears and wolves, and would have eased some of the requirements the state had to meet before approving airborne predator control in a given sector. The bill passed the House but died in Senate committee last spring; Palin has vowed to reintroduce it. So the ad is accurate on that score, as well.
Let Us Prey
If you think the explanation above implies a more complicated landscape than the ad shows us, you're correct. In the first place, while gray wolves are listed as an endangered species in the Lower 48, and great efforts have been made to reintroduce them in some Western states, they are abundant in Alaska. Ron Clarke, assistant director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, says the state is home to between 7,000 and 11,000 of them. Wolf populations in Alaska have bounced back since the 1950s, when federal agents conducted an extensive poisoning and aerial shooting campaign; moose and caribou proliferated as a result, in some cases leading to severe degradation of their own habitats.
Second, it's not for nothing that wolves have acquired their big, bad reputations. Studies indicate that predators (wolves and bears) often take 70 percent to 80 percent of the moose and caribou that die each year in Alaska. Research by the state Department of Fish and Game shows that "a single wolf eats 12-13 moose in a typical year and/or 30-40 caribou, mostly calves." (Whether it's "and" or "or" would seem important, but we'll let that one slide for now.)
Third, the state doesn't refer to the practice as aerial hunting; to Alaska officials, it's "predator control," as you may have noted above. The federal Airborne Hunting Act, passed in 1971 in response to a national outcry against aerial hunting in Alaska, prohibits shooting at or harassing any bird, fish, or other animal from aircraft. Exceptions are allowed if the federal government or a state finds aerial hunting is needed to protect "land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, human life, or crops." In those cases, programs must be developed, individuals must obtain government permits to do the hunting, and state officials must report facts and figures to the feds on a regular basis.
That's the situation in Alaska. If you're just some guy or gal with a small plane, a rifle, a hunting license and a six-pack, you can't take off and go hunting for wolves anywhere you happen to be. Predator control programs have been authorized by the state in five of its 26 game management units, which account for 9.4 percent of the state's land mass. Pilot-and-gunner teams have to apply for permits, and they must provide their own planes.
The program exists in large part because the state's intensive game management law puts a premium on efforts to "restore the abundance or productivity of identified big game prey populations as necessary to achieve human consumptive use goals." The "big game prey" in question are the approximately 1 million caribou and 175,000 to 200,000 moose in the state. Subsistence hunters are a major priority in wildlife management in Alaska, although a subsistence hunter is hard to define. Clarke offered some statistics: About 20 percent of Alaska's population, or roughly 135,000 people, is classified as rural. About 92 percent to 100 percent of rural Alaskans use wild fish for food to some extent, and 79 percent to 92 percent use wildlife. Palin, herself a hunter, might live in too urban an area to be included in these statistics, but she has said she eats moose and other game.
State law is so favorable to hunters that it requires the state to have a hunting season before school starts in fall "[f]or the purpose of encouraging adults to take children hunting."
Rose,I'd be very interested to read what you have to say about Jeff Gannon.Curious to see if you apply the same standard for the Bushco fake.
ReplyDeleteHave I EVER defended anything like this, mresquan?
ReplyDeletewikipedia - James Dale Guckert (born 1957) a conservative columnist who worked under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon as a White House reporter between 2003 and 2005 , representing the virtual organization Talon News. Gannon first gained national attention during a presidential press conference on January 26, 2005, when he asked United States President George W. Bush a question that some in the press corps considered "so friendly it might have been planted."[1] Gannon routinely obtained daily passes to White House briefings, attending four Bush press conferences and appearing regularly at White House press briefings. Although he did not qualify for a Congressional press pass, Gannon was given daily passes to White House press briefings "after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number."[2] Gannon came under public scrutiny for his lack of a journalistic background prior to his work with Talon[3][4] and his involvement with various homosexual escort service websites using the professional name "Bulldog". Gannon resigned from Talon News on February 8, 2005. Continuing to use the name Gannon, he has since created his own official homepage and worked for a time as a columnist for the Washington Blade newspaper, where he admitted to being gay after he was outed as a homosexual prostitute.
Currently, Gannon operates JeffGannon.com, a blog where he criticizes those who exposed him, the "Old" Media and the "Angry" Gay Left, for what he promotes as a double standard."
These kinds of people do more damage than they know.
Just don't google Jeff Gannon images. Be warned.
ReplyDeleteWell I am glad to read that.And thanks for the advice,and I really never had the urge to google his images anyways.
ReplyDeleteThe government permits are hunting licenses by another name. Predator control is aerial hunting by another name. Alaska is 663,268 sq. miles. There is one road that comes into Anchorage from the north and one road leaving Anchorage to its south. Alaska is about the largest piece of undeveloped country you can imagine. You can't imagine it. The majority of the 135,000 rural subsistence hunters are First Nation people that have incomes from native corporate holdings that they got when the state was divided up between federal, state and the three native tribal peoples of Alaska: Athabaskan, Aleuts, and Inuit. These tribes are rich by any standard. They get supplies flown in to their bush communities daily. Fred Meyer in Anchorage takes orders over the phone, boxes them up and sends them out by plane the next day. Subsistence hunting isn't practiced by that many people who rely on it.
ReplyDeleteThe statistics that you supply would have a single wolf gorging on about 24,000 pounds of prime moose and caribou a year. A wolf sleeps about 19 hours a day. It doesn't add up.
With 1,200,000 caribou and moose feeding 10,000 wolves spread out over nearly 700,000 square miles, there is more than enough big game animals to supply subsistence and sport hunting and large predators.
The problem has always been caribou migrations. Wolves follow migrating caribou while subsistence hunting is done near bush communities. Migration routes change over a course of years. One may expect the migration to come like clockwork for 15 to 25 years only to have the migration pattern change, leaving an area and a community with few caribou to hunt for decades. The large predators get blamed and pressure is applied to the state to put a bounty on wolves and to legalize aerial hunting. The largest percentage of privately owned small planes are owned in Alaska. It is how you get around. Plenty of wolves get shot illegally from planes every year. It is pretty hard to regulate in a state that has so much area and such a small population. The need for predator control, so that a larger population of large herbivores can be managed, is not based on fact.
Dred
Dred
Take it up with factcheck, dred. I certainly wouldn't classify them as Palin friendly, though.
ReplyDeleteI do just love it when a bunch of city people start trying to comprehend real life, though.
A friend of mine, who is from Alaska, recommends this cookbook - Cooking-Alaskan
ReplyDeleteWhere else can you find recipes for Canadian Lynx Stew and Sauteed Salmon Steaks in the same place. Or, how about Sea Cucumber Fritters or Spruce Grouse with Blueberries. This cookbook is a mixture of "normal" and exotic recipes for ALL fish, shellfish, game, game birds, and edible plants that are available in Alaska. All of the recipes are excellent and most are entertaining just to read....
dred - you are a joke. It is evident that you have never lived in Alaska. I have. You are so divorced from their reality as to be absolutely ridiculous. And I love the part where you admit you wear a skirt. Pretty funny.
ReplyDeleteWhen you screw around with the ecosystem things get out of whack. Harvesting predators when their numbers get out of whack is important and smart. You are simply out of touch with reality.
Let me suggest a quick lesson. Go to Alaska in August and spend a bit of time down by the river without taking a firearm. Become one with the ecosystem like Tim Treadwell.
What's funny is - the election's over, but the Get Sarah machine lives on, like she was the one running against The One. She who must be destroyed.
ReplyDeletethe question is: who is doing more to destroy sarah palin, mccane's team or obama's team?
ReplyDeleteseems to me like its the mccane crew and the republicans throwing her to the wolves....pun intended...
i havent heard the democrats say one word against her. in fact, i saw that palin is now saying that she trusts obama to handle the war on terror.....carl cameron on FOX news broke most of the rumors, which he got from republican sources.
irony: calling yourself "pro-life" while killing wolves from airplanes......funny how the people who support death the most have to hide behind a fake term like "pro-life"....pure 100% doublespeak....
ReplyDeleteThat is just plain stupid Exrepublican...just plain stupid.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I am not pro-life, but your statement above is absurd.
To say that someone who is against abortion is a hypocrite if they take part in predator eradication or hunting is just bizarre. What, you can't be pro-life and eat meat or protect your land or livestock. What in god's name have you been smoking buddy?
And then you have folks who are pro-abortion but call hunters evil. What its ok to kill baby humans but not the meat to eat.
Nope, I am not pro-life, but I am totally against late term infanticide (just to be consistent) I hunt, I fish, I eradicate predators and feel just fine about it. No hypocracy, just a realist.
12:58PM: Predator populations are tied directly to prey populations. If caribou and moose are over hunted by humans then wolves die for lack of food.
ReplyDeleteI only wear a skirt in your limited imagination.
It is evident that what you know is dwarfed by what you claim to know. If you could convert your IQ to pennies, you might be able to mail yourself a postcard - but not have sufficient funds to send another.
Dred
OK - Dred - Can we have a civilized discussion?
ReplyDeleteSure Rose. Shouldn't be a problem once 12:58PM has been civilized. He needs to go find himself. He will need a loan for postage if he is going to conduct his search via U.S. mail.
ReplyDeleteDred.
Not gonna touch this one......
ReplyDeleteWollf
:) LOL, wollf.
ReplyDeleteFYI - During the campaign, some critics of Sarah Palin ridiculed her efforts to thin the wolf population by shooting them from helicopters, painting her as cruel and anti-nature. The Anchorage Daily News reports that the caribou population might dispute that. Thanks to the limitation of the predators, the survival rate of young caribou has dramatically increased:
Slaughtering wolves on the Alaska Peninsula appears to have had the desired effect — more caribou got a chance to live, according to biologists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
As ugly and as politically incorrect as the wolf killing might seem to some, they said, the helicopter gunning that took place earlier this year saved caribou, especially young caribou, from being eaten alive.
Fall surveys of the Southern Alaska Peninsula caribou herd completed in October found an average of 39 calves per 100 cows. That’s a dramatic improvement from fall counts of only 1 calf per 100 cows in 2006 and 2007.
The state wildlife board needed to take dramatic action on behalf of the caribou in the southern herd. The population had dropped from 6,000 to 500. Wolves and bears had wiped out the offspring for too long, and left alone, the herd would have disappeared altogether.
Unfortunately, critics didn’t bother to find out why Palin’s administration thinned the wolf population by the most efficient manner available to them. Critics of responsible wildlife management seem to live in Cartoon World, where the wolf and the bear and the caribou all become best friends and have adventures together with the plucky little kid from the local village. In fact, the wolf and the bear will eat the caribou until there are none left, and would have the plucky little kid for dessert if they could.
The biggest irony, of course, is that the critics of drilling in ANWR like to invoke the caribou as a reason to block extraction of the vast oil resources in the region. The wolves present a far greater danger to caribou than drilling ever did, but I guess caribou are only valuable as a means to block drilling.
Oh, there you go, getting my dander up....and on a Full Moon, no less.....
ReplyDeleteI am NOT a hunter...I spent entirely too many years hunting the top of the food chain for our Gummint friends.....
Fuzzies are no challenge, and believe it or not I just don't have the heart for defenseless...to me...critters.
That being said, my namesake, and yes, it is to anons of scurrilous nature....my middle name is Malsom, Peskotomahkati for.....yup, Wolf.
I feel my Amerind ties to my Totem Brother, and I love it....but I also understand the need to keep my Pack under control.
The Wolf is the Apache of the animal world....left to his own devices and instinct, he will decimate the herbivores, and then suffer a much worse death than a hunters bullet.
I hate the word slaughter. I hate the fact that my Spirit Brothers are killed....but I accept the reason.....
Don't take a Wolf lightly....respect them, protect them, cherish and listen to them...
But control them.
Wollf
This is absolute nonsense. Caribou are extreme migratory herd animals that have always benefited from the predator/prey interaction it has had with wolves. If you want to keep the caribou herd healthy, stop hunting them all winter from snowmobiles. Do you not understand that caribou hunting season exists to protect caribou herd numbers? Another problem is poaching from the road. Major impacts on herd numbers were being reported in the early 90's from poaching by young military men who could drive from Anchorage to Fairbanks to North of the Arctic Circle to the Brooks Range - caribou country the whole way. They weren't even killing for the meat. Those caribou were left to rot. Not unlike the American bison shot from the railroad after the Civil War. The wolves are not killing all of the caribou. They are not killing more than they ever did. But, you are all to willing to sacrifice them without considering that as long as there have been caribou, there have been wolves preying on caribou. You will say that unlike the lower 48, wolves thrive in Alaska and Canada. But, wolves thrived in the lower 48 in numbers proportional to the once numerous American bison. Wolves did not destroy the bison and wolves will not destroy the caribou. Only one predator has the capability, and is greedy enough, and has the technology and the numbers sufficient to destroy a large predator/prey eco-system. We did it in the lower 48 to the bison and wolves, which far out-numbered the caribou and wolf populations of Alaska.
ReplyDeleteDred