Sunday, June 12, 2011

Like cat-nip for Palin-haters: Washington Post & New York Times ask for readers' help in analyzing Palin emails as Alaska governor, but here in Hallandale Beach, Mayor Joy Cooper's email about city issues are off-limits to residents, taxpayers and small business owners




A version of this blog post below was sent out as an email on Thursday to the Usual Trusted Sources in the Sunshine State and from Coast-to-Coast.

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Up in the Northeast corridor, the Washington Post and the New York Times among other MSM -along with ProPublica- are sounding the dinner bell for Sarah Palin-haters by asking their readers for help in analyzing Palin's emails as governor of Alaska, a place that 99.99% of them have never been, which you'd think would naturally make a difference in analyzing information and giving others some proper context.

(One of my maternal uncles, now living back in Texas, was a teacher in Nome in the '70's.)

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New York Times
Caucus blog
Help Us Investigate the Sarah Palin E-Mail Records
By Derek WillisJune 9, 2011, 1:36 PM-



On Friday, the State of Alaska will release more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin’s e-mails covering much of her tenure as governor of Alaska. Times reporters will be in Juneau, the state capital, to begin the process of reviewing the e-mails, which we will be posting on nytimes.com starting on Friday afternoon E.D.T.


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Washington Post
Fast Fix blog
Posted at 10:56 AM ET, 06/09/2011
Help analyze the Palin e-mails
By Ryan Kellett

Over 24,000 e-mail messages to and from former Alaska governor Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska's governor will be released Friday. That's a lot of e-mail for us to review so we're looking for some help from Fix readers to analyze, contextualize, and research those e-mails right alongside Post reporters over the days following the release.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/help-analyze-the-palin-emails/2011/06/08/AGZAaHNH_blog.html

Archive of Sarah Palin emails: http://documents.latimes.com/sarah-palin-emails/


On the chance that you haven't been following things this weekend, above, the Palin email fishing expedition has largely backfired and The Politico is even saying so publicly.


Meanwhile, closer to home, in case you forgot, thanks to Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) head Nicki Grossman's sister, Broward Circuit Judge Patti Henning, Hallandale Beach residents STILL can't see the govt.-related emails to and from Mayor Joy Cooper's AOL email account that she has intentionally used for YEARS to shield them from public view, despite the fact that it was known years ago that all government-related emails are supposed to go thru the city's email system.
Link

As South Florida Sun-Sentinel columnist Michael Mayo accurately noted two years ago, when he was the only journalist in all of South Florida asking reasonable questions about what on the face of it seemed like an open-and-shut case involving the clear provisions of the Florida Constitution and the Sunshine Laws, HB taxpayers even got the privilege of paying for the mayor's mendacious lawsuit, to boot, which makes a mockery of the spirit and letter of the law.

That Oct. 29, 2009 story titled, Why are taxpayers footing Mayor Joy Cooper's lawsuit bill?, included these two gems of clarity:

If the Feb. 17 e-mail sent from Mayor Joy Cooper's personal America Online account was private and not subject to the state's public records law, as Cooper and the city maintain, then why did the city hire an outside law firm at $185 an hour to initiate a lawsuit?
If you accept the premise that her e-mail, which had the subject line "Mayor Cooper's Update," was not connected with city business, shouldn't Cooper have hired her own Link
attorney to go to court to clarify the issue?
http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2009/10/mayo_why_are_taxpayers_footing.html


Mayor Cooper
didn't (and still doesn't) care about appearances, which is why, then-as-now, she does what she does and dares someone to stop her, which has been her standard M.O. the entire seven-plus years I've lived here, all of which has been with her as mayor.

My friend Michael Butler, creator of the fact and financial-based website Change Hallandale, http://www.changehallandale.com/, stood-up to challenge her efforts and all he got for his concern for the larger community was hassled -and a legal bill that HE had to pay for.

Here's a partial list of who foolishly ignored what Michael did to hold public officials accountable and force them to do the right thing:
The Miami Herald, Channel 4 News, Channel 6 News, Channel 7 News and Channel 10 News, The Daily Business Review, et al... You know, the thing they always say everyone needs to do?
(Cooper's now doing the same thing with the Golden Isles overlay proposal that will clearly violate homeowners rights as spelled out in their deeds. She just doesn't care. She wants everyone to do what SHE wants. Period.)

Now that she is the elected head of the Florida League of Cities, if you want me to believe that all the email she receives from her out-of-town colleagues or special interest groups in Tallahassee urging her to pass resolutions of support for one thing or another at HB City Hall, supporting League (or parochial pet projects) as a template for others to emulate, is the official one that ends @hallandalebeachfl.gov, you are going to have a very, very difficult time convincing me, because I'm sure she's still using that AOL account for such purposes so we will never know.
Why would Joy Cooper change her spots NOW?


My favorite response about this biased effort regarding Sarah Palin came from someone who wanted to know why the MSM didn't ask their readers to do this for the minutiae of Obamacare when it would've mattered, since it was clear that many congressmen were going to vote for it without ever reading it, which I'm sure includes Kendrick Meek, whom nobody misses and who has largely disappeared from the scene.
I'll bet he still hasn't read it.

Not that South Florida's lapdog news media ever asked him, on-camera.
That's the sort of journalism usually practiced in South Florida now -
strangely incurious and content to let questions go unasked.

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