Palin’s suit vs. Times is still alive

You bet’cha!

Former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin may get the go-ahead to continue with her lawsuit against The New York Times.

An appeals panel hearing oral arguments in the case Friday hinted that they may revive Palin’s suit over an error in a Times editorial on gun control.

The three 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges said the procedure a lower court used to toss Palin’s defamation suit was unusual and a breach of normal protocol.

“This is such an unusual proceeding,” Judge John Walker said Friday. “It seems to me we’ve ventured into the territory of a trial.”

In August, Judge Jed Rakoff had dismissed the case after a hearing in which The Times’ editorial page editor, James Bennet, testified about writing the piece that linked Palin’s political rhetoric to to the 2011 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Ariz.

Palin’s attorney, Elizabeth Locke, had argued on appeal that Rakoff ’s unorthodox procedure robbed the former candidate for vice president of a chance to more thoroughly attack Bennet’s credibility.

Times attorney Lee Levine said the paper hadn’t asked for Rakoff to handle the case the way he did.