america's sweetheart

The ‘Best’ of Sarah Palin’s E-mail Trove

In the summer of 2008, various media outlets filed requests under Alaska’s open-records law for access to the e-mails of Governor Sarah Palin, and there were so many that they’re only being released now. The batch of 24,000 e-mails sent to and from Palin’s official governor’s address cover a time frame of December 2006, when Palin started as governor, to September 2008. That massive amount of paper is slowly being scanned into a searchable database online, and news organizations are frantically scouring through their contents as if they were the secret diaries of Jesus Christ himself. While we’re not expecting any huge discoveries, we’re hoping for whatever nuggets of folksy wisdom, gripes about enemies in the media, and other random revelations this treasure trove has to offer, and we’ll gather the best ones right here.

• Along with the reams of e-mails are 189 pages listing which e-mails were withheld (PDF). They include one “to Sarah Palin re meeting with VP Cheney staffer about gas pipeline and Endangered Species Act 3/8/07.”

• No context for this, but: “what the hell has happened to the leadership positions of our great states?”

• Here’s a photo of Palin and her husband and what appears to be Elvis.

• Here’s one we found in her July 27, 2008, e-mail, not that we have any idea what it means, although “we didn’t participate in eating the moose meat” could make for a good T-shirt:

• Palin sometimes received annoying advice from people about potential SNL sketches she should do. Huff Po:

• Palin was exasperated that reporters were asking whether she believed dinosaurs and people coexisted, although her communications director seemed to think that maybe they did? Huff Po again:

On Sept. 15, 2008, Palin communications director Bill McAllister sent the governor a list of queries he’d been fielding from reporters covering the campaign. Though the top priority was Palin’s use of personal emails for public business, one of the questions he’d received apparently dealt with Palin’s beliefs regarding evolution and creationism: “Is it your belief that dinosaurs and humans co-existed at one time?”

McAllister told the governor, “I said I have never spoken to you about this,” but then he added, parenthetically, “There is an interesting reference to ‘Behemoth’ in the Old Testament.”

• Palin, naturally, was very excited about the chatter that she would make a good running mate for John McCain.

• This is probably just sarcasm, but there’s also a slim chance it’s totally oblivious? Huff Po:

• Courtesy of Atlantic Wire, here’s an adorable note from a child to Palin, which, as notes from children often do, quickly veers into topics that do not concern Palin whatsoever:

• Less cute: death threats.

• Via John Cook, Palin wrote up a letter to the editor defending herself, and asked her staff to find someone who could send it under her name.

• There were two different options for where to put the tanning bed, apparently.

• Via the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska congressman Don Young sounds kind of scary:

The ‘Best’ of Sarah Palin’s E-mail Trove