Palin used personal email to communicate with staffers

In case you missed this revealing Mother Jones article...

Friday, at 9 a.m. local time in Juneau, the state of Alaska released 24,199 pages of emails Sarah Palin sent and received during her half-term as governor of the Last Frontier. State officials distributed six-box sets to representatives of a dozen or so media outfits, including Mother Jones. Now the mad dash is on, with journalists reviewing (and scanning) these thousands of emails...

Here are the highlights of what we've found so far:

Details about the emails Palin withheld, including one from Dick Cheney's office and another about Palin's position that the polar bear should not be listed as a threatened species

The time the governor ghostwrote a letter to the editor

A great example of how Palin's use of personal email accounts for government work affected her staff

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/06 ... ve-updates

And this little titbit of information...

Jun 4, 3:31 AM (ET) -By JACK GILLUM

WASHINGTON (AP) - Some of President Barack Obama's political appointees, including the Cabinet secretary for the Health and Human Services Department, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by The Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: Most U.S. agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees' email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom of Information Act more than three months ago. The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay more than $1 million for its email addresses.

The Labor Department initially asked the AP to pay just over $1.03 million when the AP asked for email addresses of political appointees there... But under the department's own FOIA rules... it is prohibited from charging news organizations any costs except for photocopies after the first 100 pages... Fillichio later acknowledged that the $1.03 million bill was a mistake...

Obama pledged during his first week in office to make government more transparent and open. The nation's signature open-records law, he said in a memo to his Cabinet, would be "administered with a clear presumption: In the face of doubt, openness prevails."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130604/DA6MPFHG2.html

It must have been some Obama administration low-level staffers... the EPA and the Labor Department heads responded... "I don't remember, I can't recall and I wasn't involved with the agency on the second Mondays of each month."

the line between official and personal has been getting increasingly blury since the internet was invented by Al Gore.

While I understand the principle of not using public resources for private gain - I think the wall of separation between public and private is becoming downright impossible to distinguish, let alone enforce.

bailey bud wrote: the line between official and personal has been getting increasingly blury since the internet was invented by Al Gore.

While I understand the principle of not using public resources for private gain - I think the wall of separation between public and private is becoming downright impossible to distinguish, let alone enforce.

So... let's not try to enforce? And if you read the whole article, there is good indications that these private email addresses were set up to prevent the citizens access to what is suppose to be public information. The article plainly points out that there was nothing "impossible to distinguish." The email address were not created in a vacuum. They were created so the public couldn't distinguish where the information was available.

All these messages do is affirm my long-standing belief that public officials should not held in high esteem (hardly a profound conclusion).

It's your typical dishonest political bunk.

I have no issues with the conclusion that Gov. Palin is a typical manipulative, self-serving and deceptive person ---- that's what normal politicians are.

What I don't see, though - is the more gratuitous public crimes (embezzlement, fraud, conspiracy, etc.)

I also think Mother Jones over-stated the governor's prospects for the 2016 campaign.