Maddow and Guest Wonder Why Media is Focused on Weiner – While They Focus on Weiner
June 10, 2011 No Comment
That Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Chris Hayes of The Nation may be perpetuating the Weiner scandal apparently has not occurred to them. Maddow told Hayes last night that she could understand why Republicans were calling for Congressman Anthony Weiner to resign, but she was at a loss to understand why his fellow Democrats in Congress were doing likewise (video clip after page break) — HAYES: I think it's two things. I think, one, is that Anthony Weiner is not the most popular member of the Democratic caucus amongst his colleagues. He is obviously highly visible, very brash, extremely extremely ambitious, everyone knows this. He's not the kind of person who has a ton of sort of close relationships I think on the Hill and so I think that's part of it. The other part is that I think it's just this calculation of, either this should end or he should shut up or we should just move on. I think the impulse is to stop talking about Anthony Weiner, which I think is an impulse that Lord, I share, and I hope most of the country does at this point, that that, you know, just cut it off at the pass and maybe this, then we'll move onto something else. Talk about a peculiar “impulse” — demonstrating how much he dislikes talking about something by continuing to talk about it. Hey, whatever it takes for Hayes to get it out of his system. Followed by Maddow saying this — MADDOW: Well, what explains the media blitz over Anthony Weiner that will not stop? I mean, we had, again, this is an empirical question. We have a source of comparison. Comparatively, nothing about John Ensign and even David Vitter, those scandals, as salacious as they were and much more complicated, interesting, salacious, evil arguably (laughs) than this, got almost nothing, but the Anthony Weiner saga will not end. It's all Maddow can do to keep mulling it over while holding her nose. It's worth noting that Maddow said this on her show last night — after having led with the Weiner scandal for three nights in a row, starting on Monday, the day Weiner came clean, to the extent he did. In fact, more than half of Maddow's show on Monday, the first three segments, was devoted to the scandal. The next night Maddow led again with Weiner, focusing on what she perceived as the hypocrisy of House majority leader Eric Cantor calling on Weiner to resign after Cantor had not done so when then-House colleague David Vitter was implicated in the DC madam scandal in 2007. After weighing in on this, Maddow discussed Republicans' response to the Weiner scandal with former RNC chairman Michael Steele. The next night, June 8, Maddow again led with the Weiner story, thereby helping extend its half-life, and again focusing on Republican hypocrisy in giving Vitter a pass while now calling on Weiner to resign. By the time Maddow show rolled around Thursday night, Maddow apparently decided it was time to stop flogging the GOP for Weiner's indiscretions, if only momentarily. She led with the en masse resignation of Gingrich senior campaign staffers, followed by Romney's decision to skip the Iowa straw poll in August, and a Reuters story claiming Hillary Clinton may leave the State Department to work at the World Bank. After this, the inevitable segment on Weiner, with Hayes similarly perturbed by all the attention it's getting. It wouldn't surprise me if Maddow breathed more life into the Weiner scandal on her final show of the week tonight only 24 hours after asking why the media just can't shake it.
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Footage of Sarfaraz Shah’s shooting likely to further undermine faith in Pakistan’s security forces Pakistan’s security forces are facing criticism after paramilitary troops were caught on camera apparently shooting dead a teenager at point-blank range. The footage, broadcast repeatedly on local television, is likely to further undermine faith in the country’s powerful security establishment, which is already facing allegations it helped conceal Osama bin Laden. The video, captured by a cameraman from Pakistan’s Awaz television channel, shows a youth, identified as Sarfaraz Shah, arguing with paramilitary rangers in Karachi. The 18-year-old appears to plead for mercy before being shot at close quarters. He then falls to the ground and screams in pain as blood pools beneath his legs. Zohra Yusuf, head of Pakistan’s independent Human Rights Commission , condemned the killing as “another indication of law enforcement personnel becoming increasingly trigger happy.” She said the violence depicted in the video was a trend seen across Pakistan that reflected the impunity of the country’s law enforcers. Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, said an inquiry would be launched and the culprits punished. Six members of the paramilitary Rangers, who are controlled by the interior ministry, have since been arrested. Major general Aijaz Chaudhry, who commands the force, described the incident as “deplorable”. “The Rangers have no authority to kill any unarmed individual and they can fire only in self-defence,” he said. “On completion of the inquiry, all those found responsible will be given strict punishment.” The incident is likely to further dent public faith in the government’s ability to control its security forces at a time when the US ally is facing questions about how bin Laden could have hidden for so long without the complicity of intelligence officials. “What we saw on television shows that now there is the law of the jungle in this country and no one is accountable for his action or deeds. This is pathetic,” Mohammad Sultan, a retired soldier, told Reuters. “What we are seeing is visual records of what we have long documented, which is the culture of impunity in the Pakistani law enforcement agencies,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch . “What is becoming clear is that the free for all, the culture of wanton abuse and killing, is becoming untenable in the age of new media and cell phone cameras.” In one media interview, a man identified as Salik Shah, the victim’s brother, said: “My brother was a victim of barbarism, brutality and aggression and everyone has seen it. The innocent young man was begging for his life regardless of whether he had done anything wrong. He was asking to be pardoned by the rangers; despite his repeated requests they did not listen to him, they did not arrest him, instead they were adamant about killing him and in the end they did.” Hundreds of people showed up at Shah’s funeral a day after his death and denounced the Rangers. Some shouted “Rangers, murderers!” and others carried signs that said “Down with the Karachi Rangers.” The video’s broadcast comes a few days after a prominent journalist was tortured to death after reporting claims about al-Qaida. Military intelligence officials have rejected claims they played a role in the killing. Pakistan’s Daily Times newspaper said the military, paramilitary forces, police and intelligence agencies “who confidently violate human rights” should be held accountable for their actions. “The security and law enforcement forces that do not respect the law themselves are inviting anarchy, which arguably is already under way,” it said in an editorial. Last year, a video emerged of two teenage brothers being beaten to death before being strung up on a metal pole in broad daylight as police personnel looked on. Pakistan Middle East Human rights Osama bin Laden Barry Neild guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Coulter: It is Liberals Who Are Smashing Starbucks Windows, Committing Assassination Attempts, Since the Founding of This Nation
June 10, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media Oh goodie. It looks like Ann Coulter has got another book to sell attacking liberals and of course Sean Hannity was happy to have her on the air to give us some Palin-esque history lessons. And to add insult to injury during this segment, Hannity pretends that MSNBC flack that could easily have a desk over at Fox with her usual water carrying for conservatives, Chris Jansing, is somehow a “liberal” because she said something true about Republicans. It’s too bad Hannity didn’t bother to ask Coulter just how many Starbucks the “Founding Fathers” visited on a regular basis, but instead, he just let this gaffe go. HANNITY: In her brand new book, Ann Coulter describes in great detail how the mob mentality of the Democratic Party has helped shape America. And she also warns how the phenomenon is likely to impact politics for the years ahead and the years to come. Now not everyone’s getting the message because after James Carville warned that civil unrest could occur if the economy continues to tank, one left wing news anchor said that Republicans would be to blame should Carville’s prediction come to fruition. Watch this. JANSING: If that does happen though, is it because the politicians on both sides, and I would say the Republicans who have been hammering at the president, that they would bear some responsibility on that? HANNITY: What? We continue now with reaction and much more. The author of the brand new book Demonic, Ann Coulter is back with us. So let me see, liberals screw up the economy, people get angry. They’re out of work and they’re frustrated. So if James Carville’s prediction about violence erupting comes through, who’s fault is it. COULTER: I would just like to say that there will not be violence from conservatives. In two hundred years… HANNITY: But they’re to blame for it. COULTER: …there has not been violence for conservatives, from conservatives. I was writing this book, you know, when Jared Loughner shot up Tuscon Arizona, Tuscon Arizona shopping mall and I told all my friends immediately, I promise you, whatever he is, he’s not a conservative. It’s never happened. It never will happen. This isn’t how conservatives relate to politics. They are the heirs to the American revolution. They’re thinkers, debaters, they’re out reading the Constitution. They’re demanding that Congressmen read the bill. They’re trying to hold members of Congress to the Constitution. It is liberals who are out smashing Starbucks windows, committing assassination attempts against presidents, since the founding of this nation. Maybe Annie is just a little bit off her game since she’s been out of the spotlight for a while. Apparently she didn’t do so well during her interview on Piers Morgan’s show as well — Piers Morgan Asks Ann Coulter A Series of Personal Questions. It Gets Awkward. And classy as ever, here’s how Coulter responded to Hannity questioning her about that interview with Morgan where she elaborated on Morgan’s question on how she would handle having a gay child —
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Talk about demonizing your political opponents, Chris Matthews has literally done it
Continue reading …Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is getting some attention these days since the base of the GOP is very unhappy with its presidential choices so far. Most readers only know about Perry because of his civil war type proclivities: Gov. Perry Talks Secession for Texas at Tea Party: “Texas Can Leave Union If It Wants To” Why they think Rick Perry is someone they should support is beyond me, but whatever. I’ve been on Houston radio a few times and have been told off air that Perry has a lot of problems that the rest of the country doesn’t know about as of yet and I can believe that. But what we do know this side of his state is that he loves his extreme religious right leaders. He’s hosting a prayer rally in Houston called The Response which has its fair share of super Evangelical fringers Right Wing Watch puts together an fact sheet to some of these fringers: The American Family Association The AFA today is led by Tim Wildmon, Don’s son, and its chief spokesperson is Bryan Fischer, the Director of Issues Analysis for Government and Public Policy and host of its flagship radio show Focal Point. Fischer routinely expresses support for some of the most bigoted and shocking ideas found in the Religious Right today. He has: held gays responsible for the Holocaust and likened them to domestic terrorists and Nazis who are intent on committing “ virtual genocide ” against the military, and asserts that “homosexuals should be disqualified from public office ”; said “ we have feminized the Medal of Honor ” by awarding it to a soldier who saved his fellow combatants rather than killing enemies; demanded all immigrants “ convert to Christianity ” and renounce their religions; asserted that Muslims have “ no fundamental First Amendment claims ” and should be banned from building mosques and deported from the US , adding that Muslims are inherently stupid as a result of inbreeding ; claimed African American women “ rut like rabbit s” due to welfare and that Native Americans are “ morally disqualified” from living in America because they didn’t convert to Christianity and were consequently cursed by God with alcoholism and poverty . Then there’s the IHOP group and no it’s doesn’t involve pancakes: The Response’s leadership team includes five staff members of the International House of Prayer (IHOP), a large, highly political Pentecostal organization built on preparing participants for the return of Jesus Christ. IHOP is closely associated with Lou Engle, a Religious Right leader whose anti-gay, anti-choice extremism hasn’t stopped him from hobnobbing with Republican leaders including Newt Gingrich , Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee . Engle is the founder of The Call , day-long rallies against abortion rights and gay marriage, which Engle says are meant to break Satan’s control over the U.S. government. One recent Call event featured “prophet” Cindy Jacobs calling for repentance for the “girl-on-girl kissing” of Britney Spears and Madonna. Perry’s The Response event is clearly built upon Engle’s “The Call” model. Engle has a long history of pushing extreme right-wing views and advocating for a conservative theocracy in America. Engle: is a proponent of “Seven Mountains” dominionism , a movement that seeks to have Christians take control of all aspects of American life, including government, business, entertainment and the media;supports the criminalization of homosexuality ; claimed that universities with LGBT anti-discrimination measures are teaching students to “ accept the mark of the beast ”; is waging a “ spiritual war ” on the Supreme Court to get abortion outlawed in America; prays that Ellen Degeneres will be “converted” from homosexuality. The International House of Prayer, incidentally, remains locked in a copyright infringement lawsuit with the International House of Pancakes . And then there’s the odious Jim Garlow: Most importantly, Garlow is a close spiritual adviser to presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and leads Gingrich’s Renewing American Leadership (ReAL) . Garlow is a principal advocate of Seven Mountains Dominionism , and wants to “bring armies of people” to bring Religious Right leaders into public office and defeat their political opponents. Garlow has a long record of extreme rhetoric. He: when Prop 8 passed in California, claimed that African Americans “ saved us from the bondage and enslavement that would come upon us if gay marriage actually passed in a state” and alleged marriage equality supporters are going to “ totally destroy the definition of the family ”; likened homosexuality to bestiality , saying that if marriage equality is upheld “the next court case could conceivably say that if three people wanted to marry or four people or five people or if someone wanted to marry their dog or their horse”; compared gay adoption to children losing their parents in the September 11th attacks and said that supporters of gay rights are “ almost like an Antichrist spirit” ; told conservative activists that “ your land has cance r” and believes that the “lethal ideological ‘radiation’” of progressives “is killing our nation” and “poisoning us and our children”; argued that legal abortion is responsible for unemployment . So there you have some of the basic haters that are part of Rick Perry’s minions. Now he has Rush Limbaugh on his tail because ” He Supports “In-State Tuition For The Children Of Illegal Immigrants” I’ve written about Texas passing a Dream Act type legislation that has been very successful so since it works and helps immigrants, Limbaugh most be opposed. In 2001, Gov. Rick Perry signed House Bill 1403 into law after the bill passed the Senate with zero no votes. House Bill 1403 by former Rep. Rick Noriega, D-Houston, now called the Texas Dream Act , has proven to be an incredibly successful law providing access to higher education for students who may otherwise be unable to afford the increasing cost of attending college. Texas law currently provides that all students, regardless of immigration status, may qualify for in-state tuition at Texas colleges or universities provided they have lived in Texas the three years leading up to high school graduation and resided in Texas the year prior to their enrollment in higher education. The Texas Dream Act thus recognizes that immigrant students who have been educated in our Texas public schools have strong family, community and economic ties to the U.S. The state then follows through on the investment taxpayers have made in their education by allowing them to pay the same tuition rate as other Texans who meet the residency timeline requirements. These students have been admitted to colleges and universities based on their merit and despite the many obstacles with which they are confronted — a principle every Texan can appreciate. The law is both successful and popular because it reduces dropouts, encourages access to college and comes at little expense to the state. This type of legislation should be celebrated, but since Limbaugh admits that he’s now “center of the universe for the RNC , the nativists are running the GOP so it’s a dark stain for anyone wanting the GOP nomination.
Continue reading …Colbert Rips Romney for His "Business Experience" With Destroying Jobs in His "Word" Segment
June 10, 2011 No CommentStephen Colbert ripped presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a way that we can only hope we’ll ever see anyone in the so-called “mainstream media” do with their constant lies about how he was somehow a “job creator” during his time at Bain Capital. Our own Howie Klein has more on Romney and why this talking point is a joke when Romney pretends that his business experience ever helped to create jobs instead of doing the opposite at his blog — Is Mitt Romney A Job Creator– Or A Job Destroyer? .
Continue reading …Jon Stewart Makes Racially Charged Joke at Herman Cain’s Expense: He Doesn’t ‘Like to Read’
June 10, 2011 No Comment
It would be unfair to call Jon Stewart a racist but when he mocked GOP presidential contender Herman Cain as essentially an illiterate, on Thursday's show, it has to be asked wouldn't Stewart and his cronies at The Daily Show have satirized any sort of conservative talk show host, like a Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, as a bigot if they had joked that President Barack Obama didn't “like to read?” After playing a clip of Cain promising to limit congressional bills to just three pages, Stewart attempted to impersonate Cain and then threw up a mock billboard that read: “HERMAN CAIN 2012 – I DON'T LIKE TO READ” The following excerpt was aired on the June 9 edition of Comedy Central's The Daily Show: (video after the jump) JON STEWART: But while Pawlenty attempts to get us to face the problem inside us, candidate Herman Cain offers real solutions to fictional issues. (Begin clip from June 6 speech) HERMAN CAIN: Don't try to pass a 2700 page bill. You and I didn't have time to read it. We too busy trying to live, send our kids to school. But that's why I'm going to only allow small bills. Three pages. You'll have time to read to that one over the dinner table. (End clip) STEWART IMPERSONATING CAIN: “Bills will be three pages! If I am president treaties will have to fit on the back of a cereal box! From now on the State of the Union Address will be delivered in the form of a fortune cookie! I am Herman Cain and I do not like to read.” (On screen a mock billboard with Cain's face on it reads: “HERMAN CAIN 2012 – I DON'T LIKE TO READ”) STEWART: We'll be right back.
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Draft of speech shows divisions with Ed Miliband on deficit reduction and support for Office of Budgetary Responsibility David Miliband planned to use his first speech as Labour leader to warn that the party’s greatest danger lay in underestimating the challenge of the deficit – and that it was imperative to regain the public’s trust on the economy. The Guardian has obtained a final draft of the speech he planned to deliver if he had won the Labour leadership election last September, instead of losing to his brother Ed. The crestfallen former foreign secretary is said to have recited the speech to his wife in the back of his car on the drive home from party conference. Its disclosure now caps a difficult week for Ed Miliband who has been battling criticism of his leadership and the embarassing leak of emails belonging to the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls. The leadership speech that wasn’t shows David Miliband intended to announce that Alistair Darling, the former chancellor, had agreed to head an all-party commission to draft a framework of rules on public spending and deficits designed to restore lost trust in Labour fiscal discipline. He was to say that “step one” in recovering public trust over the economy “is to recognise what is obvious: that we did not abolish the business cycle. We should never have claimed it. You can’t in a market economy. And public spending plans cannot depend on it. Nor can you write your own fiscal rules, and then be judge and jury for how they are calculated and when they are met.” Miliband has not spoken on sensitive domestic issues since his defeat, and his team has drawn a veil over how he intended to conduct his leadership, even though some of his supporters are still not reconciled to his defeat and remain frustrated at his brother’s performance as leader. David Miliband’s plans for a new fiscal framework and the boldness of his admission that the fiscal rules established by Gordon Brown as chancellor were wide open to manipulation, goes further than anything said by his brother, or Balls. The draft, which circulated in the final days before the leadership result was announced in Manchester, says: “We should have been proposing the creation of the Office of Budgetary Responsibility and we should be campaigning today for its accountability to parliament to be strengthened. There is no point denying those things: they are true.” He planned to tell Labour’s conference that the deficit “is the biggest argument in politics, and the biggest danger for us. George Osborne says we are in denial about the deficit. Because he wants us to be. So let’s not be. It is a test.” He would have argued that “the party will only be trusted when we show in word and deed that the alternative to mean government is lean government”. Re-establishing fiscal credibility withvoters was the prerequisite for political recovery. He intended to say that “however much the coalition government are hated, we will not benefit until we are trusted on the economy, as we were in the 1990s”. In the speech David Miliband intended, in common with his brother, to defend public spending by Darling to prevent the recession turning into depression. The draft shows he was going to back Darling’s plan to halve the deficit over four years. The former foreign secretary has shown no interest in returning to frontline politics, and Ed Miliband’s allies argue he has gone a long way to acknowledge that Labour made serious mistakes in economic policy and regulation. Disclosure of the speech came separately as documents were leaked confirming the degree to which Balls was at the centre of plans in 2005 and 2006 to press Tony Blair to announce a date for his departure as Labour leader. Release of the documents appears to be designed to undermine Balls, and the product of a new split in the circle of former Brownites still influential in the party. Elsewhere in his speech David Miliband was to have said that in the 2010 election “we defined neither the question nor the answer, neither what we are for nor why we are needed. The party faced a mountain of suspicion and mistrust from the public.” He would have proposed creating a new post of party chairman, to be elected by this spring, saying “the party did not need a clause 4 moment, but a clause 1 moment” – a reference to a recasting of Labour party organisation. He intended to allow local parties to offer cut-price membership if they could show they could boost membership. He was also hoping to announce that some loans to the party in the past decade were to be converted to grants. Describing Labour as socialists not statists, the draft promised “no truck with the prejudice of public bad, private good, no hint of complacency when the public sector is bad”. The draft speech also contains a strong emphasis on responsibilities: “We will be the private sector reformers in the name of growth. “No more timidity about the need for effective regulation, no more being outdone on effective welfare reform.” On another contentious issue he intended to say: “The biggest hole in our crime strategy at the moment is around drugs. I do not believe we are winning the war on drugs and and until we do we cannot win the war on crime.” Osborne was to have been accused of having “taken the biggest economic gamble in a generation … with other people’s lives.” It was Osborne that was in denial over jobs growth, “about the lives and livelihoods that depend on a growing economy”. The draft went on: “David Cameron says his economic plan will ‘change our way of life’. What he means is you the nurse your way of life, you the pensioner your way of life, you the aspiring university student your way of life, you the housewife your way of life, you the construction worker your way of life … I guarantee you this: he doesn’t mean his way of life.” David Miliband Ed Miliband Labour party leadership Labour Economic policy Allegra Stratton Patrick Wintour guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …But what about all those terrorists crossing the Mexican border? Er, what terrorists?
June 10, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media One of the incessant mantras we hear from right-wingers demanding we “secure the border” — particularly the Minuteman types and their media enablers — is that the need to do became incredibly important after 9/11, because Islamist terrorists were certain to be crossing into the United States through the desert. That’s certainly what we’ve been hearing constantly at Fox News and its many onscreen nativists, perhaps most notably Michelle Malkin. Remember how Glenn Beck tried to stir up a panic over the finding of a book on Iranian martyrs out in the desert — which just happened to be an English translation? It even inspired Rep. Trent Franks to proclaim: “If terrorists ever come across our border with nuclear weapons… they (could) hold an entire city hostage … This book is a grave reminder of the mindset and intent of the indescribably dangerous enemy we face.” And then there are the politicians who’ve used the claim to attack President Obama, such as wingnut Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County : “”If the majority of regular illegal immigrants can sneak into America, what does this say about the ability of terrorist sleeper cells?” Well, as we’ve been saying about this supposed threat for some time now: They’re barking up the wrong tree : A turning political tide has renewed fears that raged after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – that terrorists will sneak into the country across the U.S.-Mexico border. Nobody disputes that’s possible, but analysts and government officials say terrorists plotting to kill Americans are more likely to use other routes into the country, if they’re not here already. It’s much more common for people convicted in the U.S. of crimes connected to international terrorism to have been U.S. citizens or legal residents, or come into the country on visas. “There is no serious evidence that the U.S.-Mexico border is a significant threat from terrorism,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank based in New York. Claims of terrorist threats on the Southwest border distract legislators and policymakers from addressing long-term solutions to drug smuggling and illegal immigration, said Tom Barry, senior analyst at the Center for International Policy in Washington. “It’s politically motivated,” Barry said, “playing on that sense of fear that certain people are susceptible to.” That’s pretty much what we said awhile back : Meanwhile, if terrorists really want to sneak into the country, they’ll likely do it the way they do traditionally: forge papers and come in through the front gate with visas. That’s how the 9/11 terrorists came in, and it’s fairly simple and easy for them — unlike, say, paying large sums to drug lords to sneak you over in a highly dangerous illegal crossing in the remote backcountry, which is how nativists like Malkin seem to imagine the terrorists are sneaking in. Moreover, if Malkin wants to worry about terrorists sneaking over our borders, she’d be better off keeping an eye on the Canadian border. After all, the only known case of a terrorist caught bringing materiel over the border — the 1999 Ahmed Ressam incident — happened in Washington state, on the ferryboat from Canada. A quantitative analysis of terrorist threats to the U.S. found that there was “no terrorist presence in Mexico and no terrorists who entered the U.S. from Mexico”; but there was in fact “a sizeable terrorist presence in Canada and a number of Canadian-based terrorists who have entered the U.S.” The idea that it’s possible to completely secure the border by physical means is a fantasy anyway. You defeat terrorism with intelligence — not stupidity.
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Thousands of emails, published by the Guardian and US media, offer intimate portrait of Palin when she was governor of Alaska Tens of thousands of pages of Sarah Palin’s emails released on Friday offer an intimate portrait of a politician caught in an almost daily battle on issues ranging from oil exploration to an ethics investigation. The emails, produced by the Alaska governor’s office after a three-year media push under freedom of information laws, show Palin facing a maelstrom of events from the time she became the state’s first female governor in 2006 through to being propelled on to the national scene as John McCain’s vice-presidential choice in 2008. The emails are peppered with the folksy language that have become her trademark, such as “unflippinbelievable”, “holy….”, “ugh” and “thank the lord”. They offer insights into a series of rows from Troopergate to her decision to allow oil exploration in previously protected areas of Alaska. They also cover more trivial issues, such as her attempt to secretly install a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion in Juneau. The Alaskan governor’s office released 24,199 pages of emails and withheld 2,275 pages. Just over 20% of those released contained redactions. One of the emails withheld refers intriguingly to “a meeting with staffer for Vice-President Cheney about gas pipeline and meetings with representatives of Alaska communities about Endangered Species Act”. Cheney, notoriously secret and reluctant to commit to paper, was an enthusiastic supporter of oil exploration. Within minutes of the release of the emails, Palin responded on Twitter referring readers to a semi-official documentary to be shown next month, The Undefeated, about her time as Alaska governor. The email release comes the week after Palin’s highly publicised bus tour of the east coast of the US in which she said she was still considering whether to seek the Republican nomination for the 2012 White House race. Palin’s team saw all the emails before they were published and had prepared a response. Tim Crawford, the treasurer of her political action committee, Sarah PAC, said in a statement that everyone should read the emails. “The thousands upon thousands of emails released today show a very engaged governor Sarah Palin being the CEO of her state,” he said. “The emails detail a governor hard at work,” he said. But critics of Palin claim that, even cleaned up, there is enough in the emails to undermine her chances of winning the Republican nomination. Andree MacLeod, an Alaskan activist who is one of Palin’s fiercest critics and was among those originally requesting the documents, hoped that they would not be used by her supporters to claim she was a hard-working governor. “We do not have a clear picture because a lot of emails are being withheld,” she said. She also questioned the use by Palin of personal emails for government business. Such is the interest in Palin’s prospects of seeking the Republican nomination that almost every major US new organisation sent teams to Juneau for the release. There was a media scrum as about 16 news organisations attempted to leave the narrow government office at once, each carrying six boxes full of emails. The sixth and final box of emails contains material on the investigation into the so-called Troopergate scandal when Palin was accused of dismissing a senior Alaskan official because he failed to act in a way that suited her private family interests. As an investigation was launched by the state legislature into her conduct, she expressed her mounting anger. “I do applogize if I sound frustrated w this one. I guess I am. Its killing me to realize how misinformed leggies, reporter and others are on this issue.” She added: “It’s obvious we could get to the bottom of it all if leggies [legislators] and reporters would just ASK me further questions instead of spending $100g on a fishing expedition.” Her concern about media image rings out many times from the emails. In one exchange, she expresses her displeasure at the way her husband Todd, a snowmachine champion in Alaska, is portrayed in press materials. “Todd asked the picture to be changed a couple of months ago. They’re still using an old snowmachine picture of his,” she complained noting that when she went to a national meeting of state governors, she found that “the other spouses have professional photos and updated bios”. In one email that would have been embarrassing if published when she became vice-presidential candidate, she praises Barack Obama for his energy policy. It was written only three weeks before McCain announced her as his choice. She wrote about Obama: “He gave a great speech this morn in Michigan – mentioned Alaska. Stole ou[r] Energy Rebate $1,000 check idea, stole our TC-Alaska gasline talking points, etc. So …. we need to take advantage of this a[nd] write a statement saying he’s right on.” On the tanning bed issue, Palin is upset over an inquiry about whether she has placed an order for a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion. She denies that there was a work order, but one of her staffers says: “Did Gail at the AK club say that she’d be discreet about your purchase?” Palin, writing to a staffer, acknowledges that she wanted the tanning bed but is more concerned about the potential media damage: “The press from the ADN(Anchorage Daily News) just called about the sun bed. Any idea where this would have come from?” The tanning bed incident came soon after she had championed protection against skin cancer, of which tanning was identified as a cause. Another email appears to lay to rest the conspiracy theorists who say that she was not the mother of Trig and only pretended to have the baby which was actually her daughter Bristol’s. An email dated 2 August 2008 refers to “couple of days off duty when I had Trig, Arpil 18, the day he was born I signed a bill into law and conducted a few state actions while in hospital”. Palin’s critics say she and her allies had stalled a freedom of information request for the emails made in September 2008. But Linda Perez, administrative director to the present Alaska governor and Palin ally, Sean Parnell, denied there had been any obstruction. “It was the sheer volume,” she said. “Nothing else.” The main value of the emails will be in offering insights into her character. Her critics portray her as vindictive, small-minded and paranoid, more focused on celebrity than policy. Her supporters, including members of the Tea Party movement, blame such negative appraisals on a liberal media out to get her, citing bias in their failure to request the emails of Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats. Sarah Palin emails Sarah Palin Alaska United States Republicans US politics Ewen MacAskill Ed Pilkington guardian.co.uk
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