The Disputed People's Court Episode that You Almost Didn't See

Unsuccessful People's Court plaintiff Claudia Evart went to New York Supreme Court to try to stop this episode of the popular television show from making it to air.  A New York judge declined to stop the broadcast of the small claims court arbitration, however, and it was shown last Friday (we will replace the video below with a more complete and/or better quality version as soon as it becomes available).



If you watched the trial, which concerned a dispute over a custom-made Murphy bed, in real time on Friday or later on your DVR, it does seem like the defendant made out a strong case that he tried to accommodate the customer.

The problem apparently occurred when Evart was prevented from fully testifying that a salesperson said the bed was sold rather than ruined in Hurricane-Irene-related flooding as the defendant maintained.

Judge Marilyn Milian, however, banged her gavel before Evart could offer evidence, if any, of that conversation.

The plaintiff may well have lost the trial anyway, but it would have only taken an additional minute or two more to give the plaintiff a chance to provide corroboration, so what was the rush?

Judge Milian's rejoinders that the plaintiff "always gets what she wants" (how would she know this?) and that plaintiff was "dead" (rather than "out of gas," or "done," etc, as the she usually says) also seem over the top.

The Myth of Moral Justice contends in part that the court system fails to take into consideration the emotional component of a lawsuit. As we wrote in a previous blog posting that reviewed the book, "the litigants simply never receive an opportunity to vent in a public setting. Since many if not all lawsuits contain a strong emotional component, even the winner doesn't 'believe the case is all over and the issues are all settled'...it is fair to say that many litigants often find themselves figuratively (or sometimes literally) gaveled out of order before they get a full chance to express themselves."

Abe the Vampire Slayer

In honor of Presidents' Day, here is the trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, coming to a screen near you this summer.

Sign Petition to Save Nutritional Supplements

                                       photo credit: Clean Wal-Mart via photopin cc
 
Washington bureaucrats (i.e., the real extremists) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have yet to withdraw the controversial "draft guidance" that threatens access to dietary supplements.

Citizens for Health is continuing to collect signatures for an online petition opposing the proposed regs even though the official FDA comment period is over. Some 19,000 health-oriented consumers already signed, and the goal is to hit 25,000 signatures by February 25 ("25 by 25") that will be presented to Congress and the FDA.

If you care about health freedom, and have yet to sign the Citizens for Health petition, please do so here.

Update: The goal of 25,000 signatures has been met. Citizens for Health is now shooting for 30,000 signatures by midnight, February 29.

Underwear Bomber Gets Life Sentence

Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the Christmas Day 2009 underwear bomber, will spend the rest of his life behind bars after being sentenced by a federal judge in Detroit on Thursday:



 And on Friday, the FBI preempted an illegal alien from an alleged suicide bomb attack on Capitol Hill:

 

Study: Nearly Two Million Dead Voters Still on Rolls

Leftists (including seemingly corrupt U.S. Justice Department officials) who claim that vote fraud isn't a problem act like isolated soldiers who many years later still haven't heard that the conflict has been settled.

The Pew Center on the States found in a new report (titled "Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,") that nearly two million dead people are still registered to vote, about 24 million registrations are either "invalid or inaccurate," and 2.75 million persons who are improperly registered to vote in more than one state.

Our lax voter registration procedures are obsolete. The report maintains that "Voter registration in the United States largely reflects its 19th-century origins and has not kept pace with advancing technology and a mobile society. States’ systems must be brought into the 21st century to be more accurate, cost-effective, and efficient."
 
How about as a start deploying similar technology to that implemented by MasterCard or Visa?

The study also provides more common sense justification for photo ID in all states, as Investor's Business Daily explains:

Yet Democrats are pummeling states trying to impose picture ID laws to protect against this kind of fraud. They vetoed such laws in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina.

The Justice Department blocked South Carolina's new photo ID law...

Democrats make two bogus arguments. First, that ballot fraud isn't "widespread" enough to merit the new requirement, as though there's such a thing as a tolerable level of fraud. Second, that picture ID laws would suppress voter turnout among minorities.

In fact, states with picture ID laws go out of their way to make sure everyone who needs an ID can get one. Plus, turnout in Indiana and Georgia swelled after their laws went into effect, and  the Supreme Court already ruled that picture ID laws don't infringe on anyone's right to vote.

Given this, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Democrats count on exploiting an inept and tattered registration system to help them win close elections. If that isn't the case, they should prove it by backing a reform that would do much to protect the sanctity of the ballot box.

Addendum: In a column about the Pew study, National Review's Deroy Murdock writes:

 For its part, President Obama’s Justice Department exacerbates these problems.

As former federal prosecutor J. Christian Adams explains in his superb book Injustice, Section 8 of the Motor Voter Act “requires voter rolls to be kept free of dead and ineligible voters.” As Justice attorneys were poised to investigate eight states rife with non-living and otherwise unqualified voters, top Obama appointees balked.

Adams heard Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes tell headquarters staffers in November 2009: “We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.”

The Real Unemployment Rate is...

                              photo credit: Lester Public Library via photopin cc

Three years later and billions spent on a failed stimulus, is it still Bush's fault?

To put it another way, does anyone with any connection to the real world accept the cooked Labor Department statistics that national unemployment is only 8%?

Even the supposedly non-partisan Congressional Budget Office indicates that joblessness is more like 15% in what it calls "the worst period of unemployment in the United States" since the Depression era of the 1930s.

In a report to Congress released on Thursday about "persistently high unemployment," the CBO summarizes its findings as follows:

The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.

Read the full CBO report here.

 

TSA Scanning: A High-Tech Peep Show?

TSA agents are at it again: