State of Alaska, as speedy and efficient as ever - Sarah Palin's emails

Surprise, surprise! Something that should take ten days will take ninety (adding a few more extensions?):

JUNEAU, Alaska — The state of Alaska wants more time to release emails from the remainder of Sarah Palin's tenure as governor.

In a letter to the attorney general Tuesday, the current governor's deputy chief of staff, Randy Ruaro, said he expects an estimated timeframe for releasing the remaining emails within the next 90 days.

It should be interesting to read the new batch of e-mails and compare Sarah Palin's style before and after she was stung by the celebrity bug.

Alas, we'll have to wait at least another three months...

Sarah Palin's e-mails belong in a different century, just like her ideas

Could the released e-mails look like this?

The state is about to release more than 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails from her time as governor. But officials are also going to withhold another 2,415 pages the state deems privileged, personal or otherwise exempt from Alaska's disclosure laws.

Each of those who requested the documents will be required to pay $725.97 in copying fees. They'll also have to pay hundreds of dollars more for the state to ship them what's expected to be about five boxes of copied emails, the boxes weighing about 55 pounds apiece.

The state says it is providing printed copies because it doesn't have the software to electronically redact information from emails.

I suppose they've never heard of scanners and don't know how to make a pdf. Instead of copying the whole lot for each entity that requested the e-mails, they could have scanned them once, put them on pdfs and hey, presto!

But then they couldn't have charged over $700 from each of these nosy people...

Am I being naive? Was providing five heavy boxes of hard copies the only way to comply with the requests?

No wonder it took nearly three years to produce these e-mails. The copying and collating is done almost automatically (if they have modern machines, that is), then they had to put them in boxes, label them, take them to the post office, etc. But I suspect most of the looong time involved had something to do with running to the shops to buy more sharpies.

Sarah Palin - Venom, Paranoia and Opportunism

An article by Paul Jenkins on the ADN paints an interesting picture of Sarah Palin, even though he criticizes Frank Bailey quite harshly. Jenkins contrasts the "truth" as shown in the film "The Undefeated" and the truer picture that may (or may not) emerge when the long awaited government e-mails are released.

Enter Bannon [the film maker]. Forget the painfully obvious Goebbels shots and ask yourself this: Which of the two scheduled releases -- the emails or the propaganda film -- do you think is most likely to provide the truer picture of the lovely Sarah P.? Which will do her the most damage if she decides to stop playing coy and announce for the presidency she can see from her new house in Arizona?

The emails are going to be -- if released in readable form after passing through lawyers' hands and being scrubbed by the governor's office -- delicious. There likely will be little good news in them for her. Having read only snippets of emails in Palin staffer Frank Bailey's book, "Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin," or "Hey, I Got Emails Nobody Else Can Get and I Can Make Some Dough," the venom, bullying, intimidation, absolute paranoia and craziness of the Palin administration spins off the pages.

I'm afraid that nearly three years is plenty of time to redact, lose and tinker with these e-mails, so there won't be much left to offer a true picture of the quitter governor. The simple fact that these e-mails were not released promptly, considering Palin's very short tenure as governor, tells a good story, even if the e-mails won't. It indicates that she had a lot to hide, open and transparent that she is...

Reminded of her transparent opportunism, I wonder if we'll catch a glimpse of the newest biker chick in town along the Rolling Thunder route.

Rolling Thunder schedule

North Pentagon Parking Lot, Arlington, VA. Opens 7:00 am on the Sunday before the Monday observing Memorial Day.

The 2011 run takes place on Sunday, May 29th.

The run departs the parking lot at noon and takes several hours (from start to finish) to complete. The area police have many streets restricted so the only entry is via the North Pentagon parking lot.

What am I saying? Of course we'll hear something about Sarah Palin at the Rolling Thunder event! After all, Memorial Day is all about her. Everything is about her.

Even Fox News agrees that she's trying to steal the Rolling Thunder.

Open and transparent Sarah Palin

I published a post in the early hours and didn't comment on the topic in detail. I would like to go back to it.

Secrecy in government is nothing new, especially when it involves dodgy characters.

Watergate tapes

Nixon initially refused to release the tapes, claiming they were vital to national security. Then, on October 19, 1973, he offered to have U.S. Senator John C. Stennis review and summarize the tapes for the special prosecutor's office. Independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox refused the compromise and on Saturday, October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered the Attorney General, Elliot Richardson to dismiss Cox. Richardson refused and resigned instead, as did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Finally, Solicitor General and acting head of the Justice Department Robert Bork discharged Cox.

Timeline of the events:

July 13, 1973: Butterfield reveals existence of taping system in the White House
July 23, 1973: Cox requests the tape of June 21, 1972 conversations between Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman
July 23, 1973: Nixon refuses to turn over presidential tapings
October 1, 1973: * Woods transcribes the tape and informs President Nixon of the erasing error
October 20, 1973: Nixon orders Cox to be fired; Saturday Night Massacre ensues.
Mid-October 1973: * Buzhardt learns of a problem with the tape
October 30, 1973: White House releases some of the subopened conversations, including the 18½-minute gap
November 8, 1973: Woods testifies she didn't erase the tape
November 14, 1973: * Buzhardt claims he discovered the tape problem
November 21, 1973: Buzhardt informs the court that 24 seconds of conversation between Nixon and Haldeman is obscured
November 21, 1973: Woods testifies she did erase 5 minutes of tape
November 21, 1973: Sirica appoints Advisory Panel on White House Tapes
January 10, 1974: Advisory Panel determines erasure deliberate
April 1974: More subpoenas for tapes issued
April 30, 1974: White House releases edited transcripts of subpoenaed tapes
July 1974: White House releases the conversations, including the "smoking-gun" tape
August 5, 1974: "Smoking-gun" tape becomes public; Nixon's political support evaporates entirely
August 8, 1974: Nixon announces his resignation from office in a nationally televised speech
August 9, 1974: Nixon leaves office


Sarah Palin in 2006:



Here's a longer one. It can be a bit tedious to watch, but it's full of interesting bits. Sarah Palin talks about transparency at the 00:34 mark. [Todd talks about the fire in her belly at around 2:00.]



Sarah Palin's open and transparent promises didn't materialize. If it takes nearly three years to (not) release her administration's e-mails, how transparent is that? What are they hiding?

Nixon had a lot to hide and Sarah Palin seems to be setting a new record in the secrecy department. In Nixon's case, it took less than a year for the matter to be resolved.

Sarah Palin used the same strategy as the Bush administration when she decided to use Yahoo accounts:

Bush White House e-mail controversy

The Bush White House e-mail controversy surfaced in 2007, during the controversy involving the dismissal of eight U.S. attorneys. Congressional requests for administration documents while investigating the dismissals of the U.S. attorneys required the Bush administration to reveal that not all internal White House emails were available, because they were sent via a non-government domain hosted on an e-mail server not controlled by the federal government. Conducting governmental business in this manner is a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978, and the Hatch Act. Over 5 million e-mails may have been lost or deleted. Greg Palast claims to have come up with 500 of the Karl Rove lost emails, leading to damaging allegations. In 2009, it was announced that as many as 22 million emails may have been deleted.

Were all Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mails preserved? Will the long awaited government e-mails be redacted to the point of being useless? How many e-mails have been deleted by "mistake?" Are pals in Alaska going to drag their feet until July 4, Sarah Palin's Independence Day, thanks to the statute of limitations?

This open and transparent woman (who never did anything wrong, according to herself) hides too much and runs a mile when she spots a real journalist who might ask questions she's not prepared to answer. Guilty, closed and opaque seems to be a more truthful slogan...

Sarah Palin's e-mails... here we go again

Alaska seeks more time to produce Palin emails

By BECKY BOHRER, Associated Press

JUNEAU, Alaska – The state of Alaska wants more time to release potentially thousands of emails that Sarah Palin sent and received while she was governor.

In January, Attorney General John Burns granted an extension until May 31 with the "unequivocal expectation" that all records that aren't privileged would be released by then.

On Tuesday, Gov. Sean Parnell's deputy chief of staff, Randy Ruaro, told Burns that the review would be completed on time. But he said the logistics — including copying and shipping — will push the production and delivery of the emails past Tuesday. Ruaro says if could be June 10 before all records are shipped. Burns was traveling and wasn't immediately available for comment on Tuesday.

Requests for the emails from media organizations and private citizens have been pending for more than two years.

This is getting absolutely ridiculous! What kind of operation do they run in Alaska? This whole thing has been pending since the campaign in 2008. This table shows the worst states for compliance with freedom of information requests. I found it in 2009. Surely Alaska must have dropped to the bottom by now?