Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

A Senator Walker would also be an insult to reason, rationality, and decency.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Everybody saw this coming.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Second rate reporter says what?

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

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The Palin Dump

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Alaska finally released 24,199 pages of emails from Sarah Palin’s term, and news organizations are crowdsourcing their reviews. Here’s a round-up of the different places to search emails. McClatchy has a backgrounder on what’s been found so far, and her local paper is live-blogging their findings. The Times has a searchable database of scanned emails. Mother Jones instigated the dump, and here’s their explanation of how it came to be, and their roundup of interesting emails.

Reader Interactions

34Comments

  1. 1.

    alwhite

    The local fish wrap had an article, I didn’t notice the byline, that had several bits pulled out in large type. Each and every one of them was in actual English and either made Palin look like a good mom a good governor or set upon by evil media. I chose not to read the story.

  2. 2.

    Fred

    Oh for fucks sakes. WGAFF!

    Those emails have been redacted by her former staff anyways so I’m sure the stupidity has been taken out.

  6. 6.

    4tehlulz

    The e-mails indicating that she thought that greenhouse gas emissions were a problem should make some of her fans’ heads explode.

  7. 7.

    Fred

    Shoot me now. Why do people care about this twats emails from 3 fucking years ago? And oh btw, her lawyers have been going over them (after her former staff went over them) with a fine tooth comb taking out anything remotely embarassing. Apparently about 10% of it has not been released.

    So once again…WGAFF!

  8. 8.

    Nylund

    I thought one of the things “sketchy” about Palin was the fact that she used private emails to conduct business? These are just the “public” ones, right? So its not even the “right” account to look at if you want to look for something “off.”

    That, and the redacted bits makes me guess that nothing much will be found.

  9. 9.

    MikeBoyScout

    Oh the Humanity!!

    Can Sarah count on your support as we look ahead to 2012?

    Taking national tours for a family vacation to educate you all on the story of Paul Revere and all our great historical fathers there in the heartland of what we call as America that is defended by our brave sons who fight Islamic terrorism in the course of this great battle for freedom which was started before by those who understand and stood for our values to keep us safe and set free the spirit of business and can do thinking do not come cheap.

  12. 12.

    El Cid

    Newt Staffers: ‘We Didn’t Sign Up To Be Hucksters For Products’

    Senior staffers demanded that Gingrich focus on pressing the flesh and fundraising and stop touring the country promoting film projects with his wife. At one point Gingrich was so focused on film premiers and book signings, one senior staffer emailed the team: “We didn’t sign up to be hucksters for products for sale”
    __
    But sources say Callista controls the schedule. They say she refused to allow the candidate to attend a Memorial Day Weekend parade in key early primary state South Carolina unless a film screening was set up in the state.

  13. 13.

    Valdivia

    I saw yesterday that Wiegel is doing the heavy lifting in trying to make this a ‘poor Sarah’ moment, implying Obama should release all his emails. Why hasn’t Obama released all his emails yet? Sarah did!
    shoot me now.

  14. 14.

    dmsilev

    @Nylund:

    I thought one of the things “sketchy” about Palin was the fact that she used private emails to conduct business? These are just the “public” ones, right? So its not even the “right” account to look at if you want to look for something “off.”

    I took a look through some of them yesterday, and they do include messages to/from her Yahoo account (“[email protected]”).

  16. 16.

    Mark D

    @dmsilev:

    What they said on Maddow last night was that anything coming from an official account to her personal one, or from her personal to an official account, was included.

    Anything from a personal acct. to a personal acct. was not.

    Not sure what Alaska’s open records laws are, and I’m sure this is common by folks on both sides of the aisle, on the state and federal levels, but … well, welcome to modern politics mixed with modern technology, I guess. Unless there’s the push to crack down on this stuff, it’ll just get worse.

  17. 17.

    gnomedad

    @Valdivia:

    Why hasn’t Obama released all his emails yet? Sarah did!

    Yeah, I’m not feeling all warm and fuzzy about where this is leading.

  18. 18.

    Valdivia

    @gnomedad:

    I saw it briefly mentioned on CNN and then saw Wiegel batting the drum. Prepare yourself for this going on forever.

  19. 19.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @El Cid:

    “We didn’t sign up to be hucksters for products for sale”

    Um, that’s precisely what a campaign staff does. Package a product and offer it to a marketplace that consists of voters.

    Oh, they didn’t mean it literally. Oh, OK. Well, I guess the paid operatives have a point, then!

  22. 22.

    Trakker

    The real winner here is… Anthony what-his-name, you know, that guy who was in the news last week. Can’t remember, oh well.

  23. 23.

    Davis X. Machina

    The woman’s still just the answer to a trivia question.

    You can go to your local animal rescue operation this afternoon and for less than the price of a tank of gas, get a life-long companion with a better chance of winning the GOP nomination, never mind seeing the inside of the White House anwhere but on TV.

    She’s irrelevant.
    Albanian lek exchange rate irrelevant.
    Pittsburgh-Pirates-pennant-race irrelevant.

    (Actually that’s not fair this year, the Bucs are hovering around .500)

  24. 24.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    There was alleged to have been much state business conducted among yahoo accounts, intentionally. Wonder why? There is currently an action to require the state to acknowledge other staff’s yahoo accounts as governmental and release them pursuant to the public records request. Legally I believe those are clearly within the purview, and spirit of public records laws, but a court in Alaska may determine that since they are not explicitly set forth in the statute, it won’t so characterize them. Even if they were obviously created and used to circumvent the law.

  25. 25.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    There was alleged to have been much state business conducted among yahoo accounts, intentionally. Wonder why? There is currently an action to require the state to acknowledge other staff’s yahoo accounts as governmental and release them pursuant to the public records request. Legally I believe those are clearly within the purview, and spirit of public records laws, but a court in Alaska may determine that since they are not explicitly set forth in the statute, it won’t so characterize them. Even if they were obviously created and used to circumvent the law.

  26. 26.

    Cain

    @El Cid:

    I intend to work on a Palin dump this morning myself.

    Don’t strain yourself. I found that patience works best. Put on head phones.. eventually everything gets out.. but it requires PATIENCE.

  27. 27.

    AxelFoley

    Who the hell would want to read her ramblings, anyways? Like others have said, that shit’s most likely been heavily edited.

  28. 28.

    sukabi

    there is one interesting little tidbit from that dump…

    1:44 p.m. EST (David Corn): Those Palinwatchers who suspect she may not be Trig’s mother might be interested in this email Palin sent on August 2, 2008:

    J- how is it reflected in my TAs the couple of days I was “off duty” when I had Trig? April 18, the day he was born, I signed a bill into law and conducted a few State actions while in the hospital (and that should be recorded for the record)… but are there a couple of days in there that show I wasn’t in the Anchorage office? I didn’t see any…

    thought the “official” story was that she was in Texas at a governors conference and took a plane back later that afternoon while she was in labor, stopped in Seattle for a layover, flew into Anchorage where she hopped in a car and drove a couple of hours to Wasilla and her hospital where she had Trig…

    what a busy woman… had time in all that to stop in her office, sign some bills and other things BEFORE getting to the hospital…. AMAZING WOMAN!!! Un-Fu^king-Believable!

  30. 30.

    dj spellchecka

    i liked this “math is hard” trivia point:

    Politico notes that when media outlets first requested Palin’s emails during her 2008 vice presidential campaign, her office “pegged the price for producing them at $15 million. The fee eventually fell to $725.97.”

  31. 31.

    Liberty60

    @El Cid: You beat me to it- when I saw that on Memeorandum, all I could think of is John shouting-

    BECAUSE HE’S A GRIFTER!”

    I almost…almost- feel pity for the poor wingnut staffer who volunteers to work on Newt’s campaign to bring about…what, positive social progress?

    Nope, maybe a stronger and more secure middle class? HAHAHA….

    no seriously, they joined to…

    Then the light bulb goes on above his head and he realizes this entire show was a fucking grift.

  32. 32.

    I have issues with Baltimore

    From the Mother Jones article, apparently there were a lot of “technical issues” in getting the emails collected and printed:

    At the end of January 2009, the senior assistant attorney general in charge of the review noted in a memo, “Unfortunately, we have made little progress.” He reported that his department had been unable to “batch-print the email records in the format provided” and that each email had to be opened individually and converted to a PDF file.

    Throughout the months, the state reported various glitches. For instance, at one point its techies realized that the format for state employees’ email addresses had changed during the period in question from @[department].state.ak.us to @alaska.gov. Consequently, IT staffers had to collect data from twice as many accounts as initially anticipated.

    If the IT staff in the Alaskan state government couldn’t figure this out, why didn’t they go to one of the local universities and hire some undergrad CS major to write a couple of shell scripts to do all this in less than a day? I mean, just look at the turn-around time from when the emails were publicly released to when the media got them online in a searchable format.

    Wait…did I just inadvertently make an argument against big government?

  33. 33.

    Davis X. Machina

    If the IT staff in the Alaskan state government couldn’t figure this out…

    Have we any reason, using recent history as a guide, to hold any expectations for the basic competence and independence of Alaskan state government?

    They could be the rest of Todd’s snowmobile club…

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