Free Republic

Those were the days. It was June, 2011. 24,000 pages of former Gov. Sarah Palin’s emails were released by the state of Alaska. She had resigned as governor nearly two years before, and was by then a happy private citizen. The media were so interested in getting into every nook and cranny of those emails that they facilitated their release, and then crowdsourced processing them. The Guardian even published a guide. “We think it’s important to get the documents out into the world as soon as possible and see what you think about them – just like we did with...

A year behind bars: That's what David Kernell received for guessing his way into the private email account of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008. So that would certainly be the starting point for penalties due the perpetrator of this latest invasion of privacy against the politically powerful. From a lengthy account by The Smoking Gun (that includes private Bush family photos and information, if you'd rather not be party to seeing that stuff): The apparent hack of several e-mail accounts has exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents,...

Fed up with mounting legal bills and rattled by intense scrutiny of her family and work, Sarah Palin was ready to step down as Alaska's governor months before she left office in July 2009. Emails released Thursday, most from the last 10 months of her time in office, show she told her husband in April, "I can't take it anymore" and complained to spokeswoman Sharon Leighow and aide Kris Perry in March that she had been the target of "many frivolous suits and charges since the DAY I became VP candidate." "I can't afford this job," she wrote. The emails...

The state of Alaska has released what officials say are the last of Sarah Palin's emails from her time as governor, according to the Associated Press, which was among the news organizations requesting the records, along with msnbc.com. The AP reports: Citizens and news organizations, including The Associated Press, first requested Palin's emails in September 2008, as part of her vetting as the Republican vice presidential nominee. The state released a batch of the emails last June, a lag of nearly three years that was attributed to the sheer volume of the records and the flood of requests stemming from...

David C. Kernell, 23, was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for intentionally accessing without authorization the e-mail account of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and obstruction of justice, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney William C. Killian for the Eastern District of Tennessee. U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Phillips also imposed a three-year term of supervised released. In imposing the prison sentence, Judge Phillips recommended service at Midway Sanction Center, but noted that the Bureau of Prisons would decide where Kernell would serve his sentence. On April 30,...

Because I am a simple man, allow me to pose a simple question: What the deuce were 30 reporters doing in Juneau last week sifting through 24,000 pages of e-mails written by then Gov. Sarah Palin? Why did a bunch of news agencies spend money to send their people north to Alaska after the state government released the correspondence? Maybe they want to know more about oil shale on the North Slope. Perhaps fishing off the coast of Nome interests them. Could it be urban renewal in Skagway?Sure. We all know the reason why the media barbarians descended on Juneau....

Media: No wonder last week's frenzy over Sarah Palin's old emails went as fast as it came. Not only did it turn out to be the nonstory of the year. It gave objective journalism one of its biggest black eyes yet. We don't remember anything quite like it. The state of Alaska was releasing more than 24,000 — or 300 pounds' worth — of emails that Palin wrote during her years as governor (2006 to 2009). The documents were a matter of public record, we were told, because Palin often used personal emails to cover state business. Whatever the case,...

March 2008. Talking about throwing baby showers and donating the gifts to young Army wives and possibly a crisis pregnancy center. And, um, no. No radio microphone in the delivery room. LOL - Palin: [Bob] Wants KWHL to throw me a baby shower. I say “yes” , if the gifts can go to these young Army wives who don’t have much, they’re far from their families, the dads aren’t there for the newborns first months , etc. And now Ft. Wainwright ‘s aviation unit was notified of a four month extension on deployments. Would u assign someone to work with...

The Sarah Palin email saga produced exactly one bombshell: The mainstream media actually managed to elicit sympathy for Sarah Palin from the showbiz elite. From Jon Stewart’s brilliant rant to the supportive tweets from Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Palin found defenders in quarters where she had previously found nothing but ridicule and scorn. For those of you who were focusing on more important things over the last few days (such as the debt ceiling or the Weiner photos), here’s a quick recap of the Palin email story: After almost three years of legal haggling, the state of Alaska on...

The first thing you thought to ask was: Why didn’t the media ask for e-mails from Barack Obama from the days when he was an Illinois state senator? Or from Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady? For that matter, why haven’t they asked for e-mails from the governorships of Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty? Or congressional e-mails from Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann? But of course, these would be rhetorical questions, because you know the answer perfectly well. The media asked for Sarah Palin’s e-mails because they are on a search-and-destroy mission to find something damaging about her, and...

The writing score of Palin's everyday emails 8.5 compares with Obama's 2010 SOTU speech which clocked in at 8.8. In President Obama's case, his Flesch-Kincaid grade level score was 8.8 for his first State of the Union Address Got that? Palin's everyday emails are written at the same level as one of the most important Presidential speeches given by a President. You know the speech that has several professional speech writers working for months on? Yeah that speech. Palin's emails also score close to MLK Jr.'s "I have a Dream" speech (8.8) and the Gettysburg Address (9.1). Although it's like...

Former Arkansas Governor and former Presidential contender Mike Huckabee sent an email to supporters of his HuckPAC blasting the left and the media for their overeagerness in digging through the thousands of emails from Sarah Palin’s Governorship released recently. Huckabee practically praises them for their ability to distinguish Palin as above the clamor as she could be while fighting off attacks about her family. Using an excerpt from The Huckabee Report included in the emails, Huckabee says; "You almost have to feel sorry for all the reporters and leftwing bloggers who spent the weekend slogging through 24,000 pages of Sarah...

Here's something you don't see every day: Jon Stewart defending Sarah Palin. During a "Daily Show" segment entitled "P-mail," Stewart pounded the media for providing "full team coverage of the arbitrary release date of Sarah Palin's non-urgent e-mails"--and for feeding the former vice presidential candidate's sense of self-importance. "Where would Palin get this notion that we're hanging on every word she's said or written?" Stewart asked, before playing a video montage of media outlets bracing for the release of a trove of 24,000 pages of emails she wrote as Alaskan governor. "Oh right. She got that idea because we are.""For...

Hey, I could get to like this guy (if he wasn’t so mean to Steven Crowder). Most surprising is that Jon Stewart doesn’t even take a back-handed shot at Governor Palin. In fact, he defends her dislike of the MSM by pointing out that the breathless coverage surrounding the unprecedented fishing expedition of 24,000 emails makes her case.

It was probably not the intention of liberal investigative journalists to expose Sarah Palin as a figure far more sympathetic than her public image. Twenty-four thousand pages of e-mail voyeurism reveal a politician who has successfully hidden her virtues behind closed blinds. As Alaska governor, Palin was kind to her staff, responsive to her constituents and protective of her state. She sought God’s guidance in difficult decisions, made time for her family and found media questions on the provenance of her youngest child to be “flippin’ unbelievable.” These revelations read more like a campaign commercial. [snip] Reading through some of...

What a bunch of hypocritical snake oil salesmen. New techniques? It’s called RESEARCH you doughnuts, what Robert Stacy McCain calls shoe-leather.

Some things are so wrong that even some who would never vote for Governor Palin can't stand quietly by as they occur. Nothing led the MSM to these emails. There was no hint of scandal, no tip about corruption. Up till now, what we've learned from these 24,000 emails is only what we already knew: Palin was an effective and engaged Chief Executive of her State and that there are black holes that don't suck as hard as the MSM.

The huge cache of Sarah Palin's emails released Friday offered not only a chance to see what she was writing about during her uncompleted term as Alaska's governor, but also an opportunity to see how well she writes. AOL Weird News brought samples to two writing analysts who independently evaluated 24,000 pages of the former governor's emails. They came back in agreement that Palin composed her messages at an eighth-grade level, an excellent score for a chief executive, they said. "I'm a centrist Democrat, and would have loved to support my hunch that Ms. Palin is illiterate," said 2tor Chief...

It was the biggest non-story story in Washington since Al Gore’s global warming tirades. I’m talking about the release of thousands of emails of former Gov. Sarah Palin last Friday in Juneau, Alaska. The release of emails (printed on paper) had reporters forming lines the lengths of which made the O.J. Simpson trial look like a queue at the local Dairy Queen. News outlets such as The Washington Post publicly heralded their “read 'em here first” status. Never mind that no reporter had actually spent any time and bothered to read them. The editors just wanted to get the “full...

That loud crash you just heard off in the distance was the New York Times finally hitting the bottom of the barrel with an embarrassing but expected thump. Having long ago turned its back on objective journalism to become the mouthpiece for liberal ideology, the Democrat party, and corrupt unions, it was still somewhat of a surprise to see the compromised editors of the paper do something which might cause Anthony Weiner to recoil from its unseemly request. On Friday, June 10th, the State of Alaska released more than 24,000 of former Governor Sarah Palin’s emails. A Democrat recently...