Ken Salazar offers to "punch out" reporter Dave Philipps for wild horse question

Nobody has ever mistaken Ken Salazar, the mild-mannered, 57-year-old Secretary of the Interior, for Mike Tyson. Except, perhaps, Salazar himself. Taken by surprise by a question about one of his agency's most troubled programs -- the scandal-plagued effort to rid the public lands of "excess" wild horses -- the flustered Salazar apparently threatened to clean the clock of Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Dave Philipps. The exchange went down on election day, during a gathering of Obama supporters in Fountain. Philipps, who recently wrote a revealing piece for ProPublica about how the Bureau of Land Management has moved at least 1,700 wild horses to a Colorado livestock hauler who may have shipped them abroad to slaughterhouses, grabbed a couple of minutes with the Secretary for a quick interview. Philipps asked Salazar about the pending investigation of the horse trader, Tom Davis -- who, as Philipps pointed out in his original article, lives "just down the road" from the Salazar family spread in the San Luis Valley. Salazar said he didn't know much about it. According to witness Ginger Kathrens, executive director of the wild horse advocacy group the Cloud Foundation, Salazar then unexpectedly turned back to Philipps and declared, "If you set me up like this again, I'll punch you out."...more