INSTA-POLL: Reader Chris Woods emails: “Is Yahoo Mail the new Watergate Hotel? So now we have a story of some apparently low-level political operatives conducting a clandestine break-in designed to embarrass a political opponent during an election cycle. Is Barack Obama therefore about to become the new Nixon (I mean without the foreign policy competence)?” Well, what do you think?

UPDATE: Reader Walter Boxx emails: “I can’t vote in your Palin email account poll because you left off the only sensible answer. It is a serious issue (not Watergate though) but it will be treated like a juvenile prank by the press. In a day or two it will be off the news.” Yeah, if Obama’s mail had been hacked it would be treated as an outrage and a sign of the growing thuggishness of political discourse, with demands for heads to roll — and, notwithstanding his representations otherwise, I don’t think Nick Denton would have run it, because he would have feared the consequences. But this is different, because Sarah Palin is a Republican.