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Ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin's (R) PAC spent more money buying copies of Palin's best-selling book than it gave in contributions to political candidates, according to new FEC reports.

The papers filed over the weekend show SarahPAC spent $47,777 on copies of "Going Rogue" during the last 6 months of the year. Meanwhile, she handed out just $43K in donations to candidates seeking federal office.

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Palin PAC Spent More On Books Than Candidates

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had her political organization spend more than $63,000 on what her reports describe as "books for fundraising donor fulfillment."

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Sarah Palin Uses PAC to Buy Her Own Book; Political Action Committee Paid More than $60,000 for Copies of 'Going Rogue' in Late 2009. Sarah Palin has been using her political action committee to buy up thousands of copies of her book, "Going Rogue," in order to mail copies of the memoir to her donors, newly filed campaign records show

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Pundits can debate the political costs and benefits of Sarah Palin's decision to step down as Alaska governor, but the monetary advantages of leaving her $125,000-a-year public service post are beyond dispute. Since leaving office at the end of July 2009, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee has brought in at least 100 times her old salary – a haul now estimated at more than $12 million -- through television and book deals and a heavy schedule of speaking appearances worth five and six figures.

That conservative estimate is based on publicly available records. The actual number is probably much higher, but is hard to quantify because Palin does not publicize her earnings.

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Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
signing off

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Males formed 70 to 80 percent of the harvest because young and females with young were protected, and hunters often selected the larger animals, which were males. (ergo, healthy adult males of mating age were the main target, not the elderly or sickly.) The average kill during the first decade of airplane hunting (1951-1960) was estimated to be 150 bears... the average annual kill for the second decade (1961-1972) rose to 260...

hunting with airplanes reduced the number of bears close to villages used as bases for hunting with planes. There was still an incentive for Natives to hunt, however, because hides not taken with the aid of aircraft could be sold. The annual Native kill averaged 13 percent of the total harvest for 1961-1972...

Native harvests decreased to about 25 percent of previous levels during the period when airplanes were used for hunting. This was partly because hunting with airplanes reduced the number of bears close to villages used as bases for hunting with planes. There was still an incentive for Natives to hunt, however, because hides not taken with the aid of aircraft could be sold. The annual Native kill averaged 13 percent of the total harvest for 1961-1972...

1965...During the past 15 years there has been almost a complete shift from Eskimo hunters utilizing dog teams to white hunters utilizing aircraft. At the present time, practically no meat is salvaged from the polar bear harvest aside from the relatively few taken by Eskimos. By the late 1960s, the state felt the need to add more restrictions to control the harvest.

Buyers were required to have permits but there was no limit to the number of permits issued. There were no serious problems with this regulation in 1967 and 1968. By 1969, however, more persons had become eligible to guide and were taking out more hunters. In addition there were violations of regulations by guides who took out more than six hunters.

The author notes that recommendations would soon be going to the state Board of Fish and Game to limit the numbers of sport permits issued each year. Residents are now allowed to take bears at any time and without limit for food as long as cubs and females with cubs are not taken and an airplane is not used. The primary reason for Arctic coast residents to take bears is shifting from a desire for food to a desire for obtaining skins for sale.

Because it appeared that hunting pressure would continue to increase in future years and because it was not possible to enforce the regulations limiting each guide to twelve hunts, the Board of Fish and Game on the recommendation of the Department of Fish and Game, modified the permit system so that a limited number of permits (300) were issued for trophy hunting in 1971.

The Department of Fish and Game is now recommending that the use of aircraft not be allowed for hunting polar bears after 1972.

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And a particularly worrisome aspect of the Palin candidacy is her abysmal record on the environment during her 2 years as Alaska governor, and how that would translate into national environmental policy if she became Vice President. Her environmental record as Governor of the nation’s “last frontier” deserves close examination..

Polar Bears: This summer, Palin filed suit against the Bush administration over the federal listing of polar bears as threatened, saying that her opposition was based on a ‘comprehensive scientific review.’ But when asked to release the scientific review, she refused. Later obtained by the public (from the federal government), the document clearly shows that, contrary to Palin’s assertions, the state of Alaska’s marine mammal scientists agreed with the federal conclusions that the polar bears are in serious trouble due to global warming and loss of their sea ice habitat, and that they would be gone from Alaska by 2050. Palin clearly decided to oppose the listing in order to protect arctic oil and gas development from future legal challenge, then publicly misrepresented the basis for her decision, and then tried to conceal all of this. Having run for office on a platform of honesty and transparency, this behavior was neither. Her extreme position here puts her to the political right of the Bush / Cheney administration. While polar bear numbers recovered somewhat since the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibited sport hunting of polar bears in Alaska, their sea ice habitat is so rapidly deteriorating now that they will with certainty decline. The only 2 polar bear populations that have been studied for a long time are now declining, and most of the rest are projected to decline rapidly as well.

Endangered species – Earlier this year, Palin approved a $2 million dollar state appropriation for a conference on the “economic impacts” of the Endangered Species Act, designed to persuade the public that ESA listings were too costly and unwarranted. Recently she agreed to use the money instead to fund the state’s lawsuit against the Bush administration over the polar bear listing - a likely violation of the state constitutional provisions on appropriation. She opposes additional species listings and other protections in Alaska (including Beluga whales in Cook Inlet here in Anchorage), where many species are at risk due to climate change, habitat loss, overexploitation, and other threats. Alaska has 17 species already listed as threatened, endangered, depleted, most of them marine mammals and birds. And, several other species are currently proposed as candidates for listing: Cook Inlet beluga whales, walrus, ribbon seal, black-footed albatross, Lynn Canal herring, Queen Charlotte goshawk, Kittlitz’s murrelet, yellow-billed loons, as well as several other ice-dependent seals which are under review for listing. The appropriate state government response to the many endangered species in Alaska would be to admit the problem, identify solutions, and work diligently toward the recovery of all the threatened species and their habitats. For the many Arctic Ocean species threatened by sea-ice loss due to global warming, the state needs to advocate urgent reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the collapse of the entire Arctic Ocean ecosystem, and other mitigations (such as protecting polar bear habitat from offshore drilling) to give these species the best chance of recovery. We have an ethical, moral, and legal obligation to protect threatened species and their habitats, and the current state of Alaska denial of this obligation is a profound betrayal of public trust. Our planet is in an extinction crisis, and Alaska has placed itself on the wrong side of this issue – a blunder of historic proportion.

Predator control – Palin approved and expanded the state’s aerial predator control program, where wolves are shot from aircraft and bears (and even bear cubs) are hunted from aircraft and killed upon landing. This year, her state biologists even dragged 14 newborn wolf pups from their den and, having already shot their parents, then shot each of the pups in the head at close range. Last year, her administration offered a $150 bounty for each wolf killed until the bounty was ruled illegal by the courts. Hundreds of wolves are killed each year by this antiquated state program that has no scientific justification whatsoever, but rather is designed to appease Palin’s urban sport hunting supporters. Out of an Alaska wolf population of 7,000 – 11,000 wolves, each year from 1,000 – 2,000 are killed through trapping, hunting, and shooting from aircraft. Under this program, anyone here in Alaska is able to hop in an airplane, find wolves, run them to exhaustion, and then shoot them - all ostensibly to increase moose and caribou populations for hunters. Science has yet to demonstrate a biological emergency in moose and caribous numbers here that would necessitate such a control program.

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Issued this past May, the federal polar bear listing drew on a large body of peer-reviewed scientific data demonstrating that Arctic sea ice coverage during the summer months had declined rapidly in recent years. The data also strongly suggested population declines in the South Beaufort Sea — located off Alaska’s North Slope — and the Western Hudson Bay in Canada. Additional studies have observed declining cub survival rates, as well as declining skull size and overall weight for cubs and adult males, all of which strongly suggest that nutritional and other environmental stresses are affecting the polar bear population.

The bear habitat of the Southern Beaufort sea resembles several others — the Chukchi, Laptev, Kara and Barents seas — where a third of the world’s bears reside. Based on computer modeling that has accurately tracked with recent summer ice data, the informed scientific consensus, described extensively in the 93-page final ruling, suggests that summer ice will diminish optimal polar hear habitat by more than 40 percent by mid-century. Unabated, these conditions could eventually threaten at least two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population.

Governor Palin, as promised, rejected the listing, arguing that it had not relied on “the best scientific and commercial data available.” In a New York Times op-ed piece that appeared in January, Palin deceptively wrote that “state biologists are studying the health of polar bear populations and their habitat” — implying that Alaskan biologists disagreed with the science behind the ESA listing. The state of Alaska, in fact, has not employed a polar bear expert for well over three decades. And as Steiner discovered recently through a federal FOIA request, the state’s marine mammal experts in the Department of Fish and Game actually endorsed the science behind the polar bear ruling as well as with nine US Geological Survey studies that provided additional support to the reigning consensus.

The Palin administration’s pro-development, anti-science approach to polar bears is typical of its overall approach to environmental policy. In addition to its repellent “predator control program,” the state is currently fighting efforts to protect the Cook Inlet beluga whale population, which has been reduced by 75 percent over the past two decades. Such a listing would prove inconvenient to oil, gas, and coal mining interests, which have been allowed to use the inlet as a massive industrial toilet. The listing might also impair the construction of the other “Bridge to Nowhere” at Knik Arm, a project that Palin continues to support, so long as federal funds can be used to build it.

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Sarah Palin’s record on the environment is, in a word, terrible. If you’ve admired the Bush administration’s hostility toward the environment and were hoping for an additional four years of science-free public policy from the nation’s chief executives, the prospect of a McCain-Palin victory in November should send you into peals of rapturous praise. Where true believers hear in Sarah Palin the voice of an authentic conservative, others have discerned the faint soundtrack of circus music she brings to the campaign. Hostile toward data that might compromise her pro-development evangelism, Palin embodies a willful ignorance toward professional science that runs counter to her defenders’ insistence that she is a pragmatic leader. The possibility that Palin, as vice president, might be responsible for crafting a framework for America’s energy policy should set the nation’s teeth on edge.

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