Searching through over 24,000 e-mails is a very tall order. I searched a few specific months and also some hot subjects. E-mails related to the Branchflower report, Walt Monegan, etc, were heavily redacted, as were the e-mails about Mat Maid. That was to be expected, so no surprises there.
I've been following the live blogging by Bill Dedman and Sylvia Wood on msnbc.com Open Channel and reading other blogs in order to get an idea about the whole thing. The pro-Palin camp had hopes that the e-mail dump would prove what a fantastic CEO Sarah Palin was during her short tenure as governor. Her amazing "CEO-ing" must be in the privileged log, because I couldn't find much evidence of governing in the e-mails I read. There was a lot of housekeeping, travel arrangements for the children and trying to control her image in the media. Her own e-mails to others contained a lot of "awesome," "sick" and other one liners as comments to stuff other people sent to her. Another hot subject was... coffee!
Ivy Frye seemed obsessed with giving the governor copious amounts of coffee. I searched March 2008 and noticed a number of e-mails about coffee, all from Ivy Frye, so I entered "coffee" in the search box. It returned five pages about it, not all from Ivy. It seems to me that Sarah Palin drank a lot of coffee during her pregnancy with Trig.
That's the humorous part of it. What's not so funny was something Jason Easley noticed and wrote about on Politicususa. While the privacy of state officials was respected, according to an AK statute, the privacy of people who dared criticize Palin was not. Their full names, addresses and phone numbers were left intact. As Jason put it, Sarah Palin put new crosshairs on a number of her past constituents. We all know how charming and respectful the palinbots are...
While reading the msnbc.com Open Channel, I noticed that when they wrote about Mat Maid (@3:57 p.m. AT), they provided a link to a summary about it. I clicked on it and arrived at Palingates! Summarizing such a complex saga paid off in the end. Much of the credit goes to Andrew Halcro, who wrote extensively about it. Although he provided a lot of material, searching his site is not the easiest thing in the world and putting together all the pieces of the puzzle is a daunting task for people not familiar with the topic. I tried to present Dairygate in an easy to follow format so we could make sense of it. The summary linked by MSNBC wouldn't have been possible without the very valuable and exclusive information provided by a trusted (and verified) source in Alaska. Thank you, you know who you are.
I'm sure there are more interesting tidbits to come out, but so far I haven't seen any earth shattering revelations in these e-mails, not that I expected any...
I'll leave you with a screenshot that sums up Sarah Palin's attitude to her children's travel. Even with all the tweaking and the immense effort in the part of her staff, she still had to reimburse the state for some of it.
The last sentence puzzled me. Is she saying she didn't understand the rule, or did she wish it was more understanding (as in accommmodating)? Anyway, wasn't the Governor's House their house?
I'll comment on any other relevant information as and when it emerges, but my feeling about these e-mails is that they won't make a lot of difference. I'm very surprised it took nearly three years to censor this pile of junk. I'm sorry I can't be more optimistic. We'll see...
Coffee anyone?
