Free Republic

A federal appeals court has rejected a former University of Tennessee college student's appeal against being convicted for hacking former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account during the 2008 campaign. Lawyers for the ex-student, David Kernell, said the felony obstruction of justice statute he was convicted under was so vague as to be unconstitutional. In particular, they argued, Kernell had no obvious notice that a federal investigation was underway before he deleted files from his computer and defragmented his hard disk. However, according to Politico, in an opinion Monday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of...

For the first time, the Justice Department has made public a series of sensitive messages that passed to the highest levels of the agency within hours of an ambush that killed a U.S. border patrol agent along the Southwest border in December 2010, igniting a national scandal over a gun trafficking investigation gone wrong. Justice officials sent the documents to Congress late Friday evening, only a few days before Attorney General Eric Holder is set to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an...

A flack for Media Matters for America, the Soros-backed one-trick GOP-bashing pony, sent an e-mail peddling the group’s latest anti-Keystone XL “study” to the Senate Democrats’ communications director at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Mary Kerr. For some reason, Senate Republican EPW communications director Matt Dempsey with GOP Sen. James Inhofe’s office also ended up cc’ed on the e-mail. Ooops. Their mistake is our gained insight (or rather, confirmation of what we already assumed). Read on: From: Emilee Pierce [mailto:epierce@mediamatters.org] Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2012 09:11 PM To: Kerr, Mary (EPW); Dempsey, Matt (EPW) Subject: Heads up –...

Charleston, South Carolina (CNN) - In what appears to be a last ditch attempt to halt Newt Gingrich's late momentum in South Carolina, a fake CNN Breaking News alert was emailed to state Republican activists early Thursday morning claiming that the former House Speaker pressured his ex-wife to have an abortion. CNN did not send out the email alert. It's not clear how many people received the fake email, though at least two members of the South Carolina GOP Executive Committee, who did not want to be named, were among those who found the missive in their inboxes this morning....

For the better part of a year, I have been saying that the end goal of Fast and Furious was more gun control. Rush Limbaugh has said this, Sean Hannity and other FOX NEWS personalities have said this, and the NRA and Gun Owners of America have said this, among others. (I had a post on Big Government on July 13th dedicated to making this very point.) Throughout this time, I have had a copy of an email that was sent to me back in March of 2011. It’s an July 2010 email from ATF Special Agent in Charge Mark...

It was bound to happen sooner or later. For a crew who uses thug tactics as a matter of course, this should come as no surprise to anyone: "The Obama presidential campaign is launching an effort to collect Republican email addresses by inviting its supporters to submit information about their Republican associates to the Obama 2012 website. The effort in question is found on the Obama campaign donation page, and suggests a little bit of mean-spirited but ultimately innocent fun... Of course, it goes deeper than that. It could be that the Obama campagn wants your email address so that...

Barack Obama wants to have some "fun" at the expense of republicans by asking lefties to give their email addresses to his re-election campaign. Why? So Obama campaign workers can spam your inbox with lefty propaganda. The Obama presidential campaign is launching an effort to collect Republican email addresses by inviting its supporters to submit information about their Republican associates to the Obama 2012 website. The effort could help the Obama campaign build a database that would enable it to target Republican voters during the general election campaign. But, more perniciously, it could also become part of an Democratic effort...

“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″ Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming? And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”? Email 4195 Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. … I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying where’s the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their...

Our Dictator May Be In Deep Trouble...with Chief Justice John Roberts, U.S. Supreme Court. According to sources who watch the inner workings of the federal government, a smack-down of Barack Obama by the U.S. Supreme Court may be inevitable. Ever since Obama assumed the office of President, critics have hammered him on a number of Constitutional issues. Critics have complained that much, if not all of Obama's major initiatives run headlong into Constitutional roadblocks on the power of the federal government. Obama certainly did not help himself in the eyes of the Court when he used the venue of the...

One of the top complaints about wealth distributions holds that the vast majority of the people of the country are excluded from the vast majority of its wealth. Considering the "plight" of all of those 20-somethings at the various occupiers, one could be deluded into believing the truth of the 99% mantra. But what if that wasn't true? Considering there are many branches of the group, let's take a look at its main one, occupying near Wall Street, in New York. Seeing how the occupiers are using other people's food and bathrooms and some living in tents (with others still...

Lisa Fithian–the radical organizer whose role in Occupy was first exposed at Big Government–has apparently confirmed that ACORN-linked organizations are leading the Occupy movement’s next major protest action against banks nationwide. Fox News reported earlier today that remnants of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), the radical community organizing group that collapsed after its corruption was exposed by Big Government, are playing a “behind the scenes” role in organizing the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. The Fox News investigation followed Matthew Vadum’s report two weeks ago at Big Government that ACORN was paying people to attend the Occupy Wall...

Second Solyndra Loan Discussed With Energy Dept., E-Mail SuggestsBy MATTHEW L. WALD Published: November 9, 2011 WASHINGTON — New e-mails released by a Congressional committee indicate that an executive of a venture capital firm owned by an Obama campaign donor discussed the possibility of a second loan to Solyndra, the solar power company that recently defaulted on a $528 million government loan, with the Department of Energy and with his boss. The committee is seeking to show that the donor, George B. Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil billionaire, pulled strings at the White House to get the original loan guarantee. The...

Dear Governor Kasich (http://governor.ohio.gov/): It has been awhile since we talked about the case of Julio Pino – a tenured member of the faculty of Kent State University. Shortly after I last wrote to you there was a Secret Service raid on his home. The raid was meant to ensure that certain veiled threats directed to the Obama White House were not a prelude to some planned act of violence. I thank you for any role you may have played in helping alert the federal authorities. As you may know, Pino is continuing to cause substantial problems in Ohio. I...

Herman Cain and Our 9-9-9 Plan Will Defeat Barrack Obama Dear Patriot, Last night's CNN debate was my first debate as the clear front runner in the GOP primary. I am truly honored and humbled to be in this position. My recent surge in the polls is a clear indication that America's are hearing my message loud and clear. Friends, I am a problem solver, and America needs a common sense problem solver in the White House! But I need your help today. Most of my GOP opponents are career politicians who have established massive fundraising networks nationwide, and the...

Washington (CNN) - Congress isn't getting a glimpse of what's on President Barack Obama's Blackberry - or any more internal White House communications related to the bankrupt solar company Solyndra, which received a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government. On Friday the White House Counsel sent a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee explaining they won't comply with the request because it "implicates longstanding and significant institutional Executive Branch confidentiality interests."

Secret orders forcing Google and Sonic to release a WikiLeaks volunteer's email reveal the scale of US government snooping. Somewhere, a US government official is reading through a list of those who sent or received an email from Jacob Appelbaum, a 28-year-old computer science researcher at the University of Washington who volunteered for WikiLeaks. ... Appelbaum is a spokesman for Tor, a free internet anonymising software that helps people defend themselves against internet surveillance. He's spent five years teaching activists around the world how to install and use the service to avoid being monitored by repressive governments. It's exactly the...

Buried within an ABC News story about today’s release of hundreds of Solyndra-related emails is a reminder of what White House Spokesman Jay Carney said at a press conference late last month after being asked about the involvement of a Department of Energy consultant and Obama fundraiser named Steve Spinner: Carney replied: “It’s my understanding, at least with regard to the gentleman you just mentioned [Steve Spinner], that he had no connection to overseeing the loan guarantee program.” After hearing Carney say that, your first instinct might have been to think, “Hey, Spinner must have a connection to overseeing the...

Top White House advisers and OMB career staffers worried about the political risks from President Barack Obama's Solyndra 2010 visit and also discussed deeper management programs inside the Energy Department's loan guarantee program, according to more than a dozen internal email threads released Tuesday by House Democrats. "There is an inherent risk in highlighting a single company before they have a track record," Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, wrote to Ronald Klain, Vice President Joe Biden's chief of staff, on May "Or even after they have one :-)" Klain replied in a colorful exchange that came just two...

"A refrigerator has never been hacked. An on-line virus has never attacked a cork board." -- from United States Postal Service TV commercial urging people to use mail. Right. And a buggy whip has never had a broken transmission--so why don't we junk our cars? Really, that was the kind of pathetic logic on display in the USPS TV commercial that aired during today's Fox News Sunday. View the video here.

Is is just me that's experiencing the problem, or are others being blocked by Websense? I can't use Yahoo e-mail, or Hotmail. A message appears saying that, "Content blocked by your organization" "This Websense category is filtered: General Email" I haven't changed anything on my computers or my email settings. However, this problem occurs on my XP box and not on my Windows 7 machine.

Dear Friend, Thank you for your message. On behalf of President Obama, we appreciate hearing from you. The President has promised the most transparent administration in history, and we are committed to listening to and responding to you. In order to better handle the millions of electronic messages we are receiving and respond more quickly, we have implemented a new contact form on our website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/ Please note that this web form has replaced comments@whitehouse.gov. That email address is no longer monitored, so we encourage you to resubmit your message through the link above. Thank you for using the web...

The awful launch week for the over-hyped, expected bestseller The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, by controversial author Joe McGinniss, just got worse. Much worse. After a week of universally scathing pans from the reflexively anti-Palin establishment media, McGinniss now faces the fight of his literary life: the accusation that he seems to have knowingly submitted a book to his publisher, Crown/Random House, that was filled with unproved “tawdry gossip” and rumors that lacked “factual evidence.”

I am very curious about one thing. For the last two days, I have been receiving the same message (“personalised” spam) from all my clients who own a Hotmail account (clients I didn’t hear about for years). I am familiar with email account hacking but there is something I don’t get: all my “hotmail” clients, at the same time, with the same message? Doesn't compute for me... Is it on me end? Thanks

Cements ownership of wireless email PATENT TROLL NTP Inc has managed to get the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to order the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to reconsider its findings about seven patents owned by the firm regarding the transmission of email over wireless networks. NTP first hit the headlines five years ago after it won a $612.5m judgement against Research In Motion (RIM). Since then the patents in question have been going through appeals due to the fact that they are extraordinarily broad. The patents essentially cover sending email over wireless networks, something that...

A Washington Times editorial notes that Operation Fast and Furious was “too fast, too furious,” as the gunrunning scandal continues to widen. It was bad enough that more than a half-dozen director-level law enforcement officials and an unknown number of supervisors and managers acquiesced to a plot that armed cartels with more than 2,000 weapons in ATF’s Phoenix Field Operations area. But saying that a combination of groupthink, stupidity, and institutional inertia is to blame for this fiasco is giving dozens of federal law enforcement officers across multiple agencies the benefit of the doubt that they are merely criminally incompetent....

Some friends and I are starting a new blog. (Isn't everybody?). It will be mainly political/financial/constitution. We have not done this type of thing before and need help gathering E-mail addresses for the major (and minor) news outlets. Also addresses for politically active groups around the USA.

The state of Alaska on Wednesday released an additional 54 pages of emails from Sarah Palin's first month as governor. Linda Perez, administrative director for the governor's office, said the emails were inadvertently omitted from the 24,199 pages of messages the state released last month that documented Palin's first 21 months in office.

Van Jones just sent me an email. The note, courtesy of MoveOn.org, invites me to help suggest and rate ideas on how to improve the economy. He writes: I trust my neighbors more than any Wall Street bank, hedge fund, or oil company. I think we all do. But we keep letting the banks and multinational corporations, and their high-priced lobbyists, call the shots in our economy. You know what? I think they're doing a terrible job. Now it's time for us, the American people, to come up with our own vision. So today we're launching a new effort. And...

Yahoo! Mail plans to snoop on your emails. Accepting its updated T&Cs give it the right to read your messages and target relevant advertising. Would you be happy if your emails were analysed in this way? It’s eight in the evening, you’re juggling a glass of wine and a sneaky fag in one hand, while emailing away with the other. You’re venting to your best friend about the latest slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to have befallen your life; secure in the knowledge that nobody’s eavesdropping on your conversation. Well, before you raise your glass in a congratulatory toast...

An outrage.

Years ago I was able to score tickets to see a "debate" between Ann Coulter and Al Franken before he went from attempting jokes to becoming one in the Senate. I wish I could say it was more intellectually stimulating than watching Biden and Debbie Wasserman Schultz wax philosophic about the sexual innuendo derived from Obama "turning the economy around."Truth be told it was a fairly mundane event, Coulter made a lot of good points and Franken cracked jokes that insinuated Coulter was a whore (which was her characterization of it, not mine), which was as much as one...

Palin Emails: A Down Syndrome Baby Will "Expand Your World" Wasilla, AK -- The media has bee intently focused on the personal and private emails former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sent out during her time leading the state and, while they haven’t turned up anything embarrassing, one email about her son Trig is quite touching. http://www.lifenews.com/2011/06/13/palin-emails-a-down-syndrome-baby-will-expand-your-world

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) dodged questions Sunday about releasing papers from his eight years as an Illinois state senator, and his campaign has not answered records requests from the state’s two largest newspapers. [snip] In the Democratic presidential debate in Philadelphia on Oct. 30, Obama said to Clinton: "We have just gone through one of the most secretive administrations in our history, and not releasing, I think, these records at the same time, Hillary, as you're making the claim that this is the basis for your experience, I think, is a problem." [snip] On Nov. 3, the Obama campaign sent...

Okay, you media people have been going about this the wrong way. Now, you need a good pep talk. Before you executives go in Monday morning and start chopping heads over this Sarah Palin email debacle, take a seat around the table and listen up.

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) - There are no bombshells, no "gotcha" moments. The emails of Sarah Palin - more than 24,000 pages of them released Friday by the state of Alaska from her first two years as governor - paint a picture of an image-conscious, driven leader, closely involved with the day-to-day duties of running the state and riding herd on the signature issues of her administration.

ExxonMobil has long been Alaska’s most enduring villain, thanks to the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident that spilled at least 11 million gallons of oil, not to mention the years Exxon spent fighting devastated fishermen and others in court to avoid and delay paying damages. Former Gov. Sarah Palin's emails show how much state officials shared in the general outrage over Exxon’s legal tactics. Having already held the case up in the courts for nearly two decades, winning reversal of billions of dollars in punitive damages by the U.S. Supreme Court, ExxonMobil lawyers in 2008 filed pleadings to avoid paying...

The scouring over, and live blogging of Palin's emails from her time as governor is easily one of the most pathetic things I've seen the media do in my adult life thus far. I couldn't think of a more blatant attempt to distract from real stories, such as Weinergate (and that we now know he tweets to 17 year olds too), or the fall of the Obama's bin Laden bounce....In any case, for the foreseeable future we'll hear from them all things Palin. Maybe they'll even find a recipe for moose gravy. Maybe they'll find themselves in a position...

I posted the following to my old blog way back when the media’s PalinHate was only in Week 3. At the time, it seemed like satire. How young we were then. Misspelling Found in Palin’s Personal Journal By Markos Moulitsas Special to the New York Times Saturday, September 20, 2008; A1 Media Bubble, Sept. 20 — John McCain’s presidential campaign is reeling this morning upon allegations that his running mate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, is a poor speller. The charge stems from a passage found in her personal journal, which was obtained by the New York Times via an anonymous...

You spent three years trying to hide this, Sarah. You failed. The email account of Aug. 29, 2008, the day John McCain announced Palin as his running mate, tells a tale of jubilant shock and amazement from Palin devotees… “Wow governor! Just watched you on TV!” wrote budget director Karen Rehfeld. “You knocked their socks off!” “Can you believe it!” Palin replied. “He told me yesterday — it moved fast! Pray! I love you.” Vice President Dick Cheney called the governor’s office requesting a call back. “Talked to him. Thank you – you rock – i love you!!!” Palin wrote...

The media obsession over Sarah Palin has reached a new low as the State of Alaska plans to release thousands of her email correspondence during her tenure as governor of Alaska: Over 24,000 e-mail messages to and from Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska's governor will be released Friday . We’ll be posting them here, and are inviting you to comment on the most interesting or most noteworthy sections. Please include page numbers and, where possible, a direct excerpt. We'll share your comments with our reporters and may use facts or related material you suggest to annotate the...

There hasn’t been such a mass mobilization of mainstream media resources in anticipation of a single event since President Obama’s inauguration. And The New York Times and Washington Post want readers to help sort through the whole mess. It’s like a contest where the winners get to work for big, rich media organizations for no money. You, too, can be an unpaid intern for a day or two or three. I have no idea what they’ll find, nor how much redaction there will be in the 24,000 pages, but I am certain that the nearly 2,400 pages that are being...

<p>As Washington bureau reporter Matea Gold reported, the state of Alaska is scheduled to release more than 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails Friday from her time as governor.</p> <p>The emails will span the beginning of Palin's term, in December 2006, through Sept. 30, 2008, which is when media outlets requested them. It has taken since that time to fulfill the records request.</p>

More than 24,000 e-mail messages sent to and from Sarah Palin during her tenure as Alaska's governor will be released Friday. Join The Post in digging through them. We are looking for 100 organized and dilligent readers who will work alongside Post reporters to analyze, contextualize, and research the emails. Think of it as spending some time in our newsroom. Our hope is that working together, we can efficiently find interesting information and extract new stories that will lead to further investigation. We don’t know what we’ll find, but we want you to be ready and open for the challenge....

Alaska to release scores of Palin emails FridayThe state of Alaska on Friday will release more than 24,000 pages of emails sent and received by Sarah Palin during her first 21 months as governor. By The Associated Press Originally published Monday, June 6, 2011 at 1:18 PM ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The state of Alaska on Friday will release more than 24,000 pages of emails sent and received by Sarah Palin during her first 21 months as governor. Media organizations and individuals made records requests for the emails in an effort to learn more about Palin and her dealings shortly after...

The state is about to release more than 24,000 pages of Sarah Palin's emails from her time as governor. But officials are also going to withhold another 2,415 pages the state deems privileged, personal or otherwise exempt from Alaska's disclosure laws.

I just got this email, needless to say I'm not gonna open the attachment. On the other hand, Eric Holder may have actually sent this!

Not guilty pleas have been entered for a Wisconsin woman charged with making death threats to Republican state lawmakers.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) — The Oak Ridge National Laboratory hopes to restore limited email on Tuesday after a cyber attack over the weekend. Laboratory Director Thom Mason says officials shut down electronic access to the lab Friday night after a highly sophisticated cyber attack, known as Advanced Persistent Threat, according to The Knoxville News Sentinel. Closing access ensured that no data was extracted from ORNL computers.

"This is one of the most important debates that we can have," President Obama said at the close of his much anticipated speech about the federal-budget deficit. He is absolutely right, although his speech didn't add much to the conversation in terms of specifics. Unlike Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's recent budget plan, Barack Obama's proposed no radical restructurings or curtailments of brontosaurus-size programs like Medicare or Medicaid. Unlike some of the other plans floating about, and there are scads of them, his didn't propose gimmicky new revenue-raising schemes like a national sales tax. Indeed, Obama didn't add much to the...

The U.S. Justice Department today offered what amounts to a frontal attack on proposals to amend federal law to better protect Americans' privacy. James Baker, the associate deputy attorney general, warned that rewriting a 1986 privacy law to grant cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans' cell phones would hinder police investigations. This appears the first time that the Justice Department has publicly responded to a set of digital privacy proposals unveiled last year by a coalition of businesses and advocacy groups including AT&T, Google, Microsoft, eBay, the American Civil Liberties Union, and...