Hard to tell what you mean by your question but this is what I read from Palin in The Anchorage newspaper.

"Well, I'm very, very pleased to be cleared of any legal wrongdoing ... any hint of any kind of unethical activity there," the governor said from her car on the way to a campaign stop in Philadelphia.

I don't see any wiggle room in that statement. Do you?

Branchflower makes a point, early in the report, of pointing out that mishandling of private personnel data by a state employee or official is grounds for termination of their job. I've seen suggestions elsewhere that Todd Palin was seen in possession of Wooten's personnel file, but I haven't found any evidence of that in the report. Has anyone seen something in the report that addresses this question? If it can be shown that Sarah got Wooten's personnel file and shared it with Todd, it's game over.

And get away with it? And have people believe it? I can't do that in my life, and I don't even have a press corps dogging my footsteps.

It's really unsurprising that a campaign flack or even someone like Palin would just lie. I think the real issue is that the media are not doing a better job of exposing it. I've heard the campaign's lie quoted in many news stories now with no mention of the fact that it is a lie.

So, if I were complaining about this I would complain about the news media first and the McCain campaign second.

Well, technically speaking ...

Hey, it's boilerplate to say "they didn't conclude that, and even if they did, which I'm not conceding, they're wrong". Also, based on a quick reading of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act, which is available online (click my sig), I don't see any criminal penalty for violations. I suspect that Rick Davis' fallback is that there were no _criminal_ violations of any kinds of laws or ethics rules.

Your argument is absolutely ludicrous. You can't say "technically speaking" -- as though you're going to be meticulous and literal about the facts, and then completely change what someone said in order to defend them on the ground that they probably meant something else.

He was very clear and emphatic in his statement: "absolutely no wrongdoing found in the report" -- "no violations of any kinds of laws or ethics rules."

For you to come and say: technically speaking, he's right since there is no criminal sanction and he probably meant criminal laws is illogical in the extreme. He didn't say "criminal laws" -- he said the opposite: "no violations of any kinds of laws or ethics rules." That is just a lie.

Indeed, it appears that an employee's designated supervisor is responsible for "mak[ing] a written determination whether an employee's involvement violates AS 39.52.110 - 39.52.190 and shall provide a copy of the written determination to the public employee and to the attorney general." See Sec. 39.52.210., Declaration of potential violations by public employees. Who is the governor's designated supervisor? Is it the legislature, which commissioned the Branchflower report? Or is it the attorney general?

This is utterly irrelevant. Davis made a claim about what the Report said. That claim was a lie.

But that's the thing, don't you see...these people don't have a press corps on their heels either. Instead, they've got a corps that basically only knows the tricks "heel" and "roll over".

Republicans lie. This is what they do. They repeat what they want until it doesn't matter anymore, they're forced to resign, or enough people believe it that it might as well be true. That's the only real trick they know.

This reminds me of the child in school (Palin) who is caught red-handed stealing money (or cookies, or someone's lunch, etc), and without blinking completely denies any wrongdoing, followed closely behind by the blindly irresponsible parent (McCain campaign spokesman) rushing to the school to defend his/her kid at all turns no matter the fact that the teacher, 7 fellow students, and the security cameras all caught the kid in the act. It's the teacher's fault for leaving the money out in the open, or its the principal's fault for running such a loose ship. It's never the kid's fault.

This is really what it comes down to. The abject denials of the kid caught red-handed backed up by the blindly defensive parent who cannot admit his kid has done wrong.

How incredibly sad. The death of the modern GOP simply cannot come soon enough.

and the Republicans are crapping out.

"That parrot is not dead, it's just resting!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTSAFcLXqYY

After all, as Jon Stewart so nicely demonstrated last week, in one sentence, Palin tells us we want the government to leave us alone, and in the next sentence she's demanding the government DO SOMETHING about the financial crisis.

This is an example of duckspeaking that does Palin great credit!

Her crowds certainly see no problem in this. If somehow Obama and Biden vanished from the face of the Earth in the middle of one of Palin's rallies, and Hillary Clinton became the "Democrat" candidate, all the sudden Palin woudl be telling us of how she's been palling around with William Ayers, her birth certificate had been forged, and she'd be blasted as the murderess of her lesbian lover, Vince Foster.

Without so much as a change in the tempo or tenor of Palin's delivery.

I long ago learned that talking head shows are mostly fake - that is, they are scripted. They don't have an actual script, but they are told before the show goes on that they are going to take a certain point of view. That's why hosts don't challenge people like Davis when he outright lies. That's why it's not a surprise to them when someone comes out with some idiotic point that's clearly unsupported.

It's like "Ok, Cokie, you are going to take the 'Obama is an elitist' position, come up with something elitist he does, ok? And Juan, you're gonna play the Race Card. And Joe, you're going to play up the POW angle...."

and on it goes. And the show must go on.

You think these Talking Heads arrive cold?

A few years back I followed a local news story that went national and I happened to be a little bit of an expert on the story and I could not believe how misinformed, disinforming and just palin (oops, I mean plain) stupid the Talking Heads were. They got almost everything totally wrong without batting an eye. Since then, I take everything they say with a kilo of Kosher salt.

This does not apply to newspaper journalists who are (mostly) merely indolent, ignorant cowards.