I’m not sure of the legalities of what’s going on here. I guess all the e-mails Sarah Palin sent and received while she was governor are public property because she was a public official, or maybe they’re just being released because of all the shenanigans – the firing of trooper Wooten, the
They just don't make crooked politicians like they used to
padded expense accounts, stuff like that – but either way, thousands and thousands of e-mails, more than 20,000 pages worth, have been released. (some haven’t yet).
Will they prove anything? Sarah Palin says no, and probably the vast majority are pretty innocent. The one’s I’ve seen over at Huffpo don’t really show anything we didn’t suspect already. A few spelling errors (canerie instead of cannery) but, really, that can happen to anybody. Todd tried to hit up the Republican Governor’s Association for free basketball tickets but there’s probably nothing illegal about that. Hey, it never hurts to ask. Some are a bit Jesusy, quite a few are self-serving, but the 1st is no surprise from Sarah and the 2nd is no surprise from any politician.
We will see, but I’m not holding my breath. I think that, as with the documents released by Bradley Manning to Wikileaks, the real thing that the government wants to hide is not any specific crime or any specific policy. It’s just that politicians, like everybody else, are e-mailing constantly, and lots of the e-mails are really, really mundane. They talk about travel arrangements, lunch appointments and hairstyles. They wish each other happy birthday and ask about each others’ children without a great deal of sincerity. They don’t have any special economic or legal expertise, they don’t speak in a secret language. In fact, they are not terribly different from the average voter, they are completely dispensable, and they are terrified that the public will find that out.
The fact that so many politicians are getting into trouble over things they’ve said in e-mails, on twitter and stuff like that is an interesting phenomenon, though. I’ve got no sympathy for them. Everybody else has to be careful what they say online, they should have to, too.
It’s not really a new thing. Earl Long, who became governor of Louisiana in 1939, said “Don’t write anything you can phone. Don’t phone anything you can talk. Don’t talk anything you can whisper. Don’t whisper anything you can smile. Don’t smile anything you can nod. Don’t nod anything you can wink.”
It’s not that the new media is presenting modern pols with insurmountable obstacles. It’s just that they aren’t as smart as old Earl.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
It’s simple: while they’re on the public’s dime, the public has a right to know what our bought politicians are doing. An open government is – ostensibly – an honest government. The other side of the coin is when Cheney and co. used RNC-supplied accounts to run the govt in the shadows and claim they weren’t obligated to provide those emails for public scrutiny.
The bigger issue with the release of Palin’s email is that they couldn’t, for the life of them, supply them electronically. Too difficult, or some other cockamamie BS. AK IT has never heard of DVD or other mass-storage devices?