Attention HBO: John McCain, Not Sarah Palin, Lost the 2008 Election

                                                photo credit: sskennel via photopin cc

The smug  chorus on the left (and the right, in some cases) seem to take comfort in the urban myth that Sarah Palin,the VP candidate, cost Sen. John McCain the 2008 presidential election.

Forget the so-called experts. For those who might still be wondering "who is Sarah Palin?," she is the former governor of Alaska and not the media caricature who nearly pulled the Arizona senator across the finish line in November 2008.

McCain surged ahead in the polls after he named Palin to the ticket, only to be undone by the Wall Street meltdown.

Big Hollywood's Joel B. Pollak presents a fine refutation of the conventional wisdom:

But here’s the truth about the McCain-Palin campaign, which HBO’s upcoming “Game Change” film attempts to shroud in fanciful anti-Palin fiction: Palin carried the campaign. She would have led the Republicans to victory had it not been for the September financial collapse and McCain’s disastrous decision to suspend his campaign so that he could vote for the TARP bailout in Washington...

On the ground in New Hampshire, where I volunteered after classes and on weekends, Palin’s nomination had led to a sudden groundswell of support. Where McCain had struggled to fill an arena, lines outside events featuring Palin seemed miles long. She had awakened and rallied the conservative base.

And then, just as quickly, after the bailout vote, support for the Republican ticket collapsed

By the way, how edgy and bold for Hollywood liberals to be coming out with an apparent Palin-bashing movie on HBO. Pollak adds that a Sarah Palin biography that shows how she helped galvanize the Tea Party movement would instead make a worthy film.

We disagree with Pollak on one point. In the economic emergency, putting the campaign on hold with the possibility of cancelling the debate enabled McCain to control the entire news cycle.

As we wrote back in October 2009 about the aftermath of the bailout...

The debate ultimately went forward on schedule, and there the Senator blew a golden opportunity before an estimated 52.4 million viewers to recapture his lead in the polls. First, he failed to explain to the American public why he suspended his campaign in the first place...His second mistake was pledging on national TV to vote in favor the Paulson bill when it reached the Senate chamber.

A Visit to Red Sox Favorite Popeyes Chicken

Do the Boston Red Sox know that Popeyes Chicken is celebrating its 40th anniversary?

We found that out (it's printed on the box) when we visited a local Popeyes franchise for the first time in honor of MLB pitchers and catchers reporting to Spring Training this week.

It came out afterwards that Red Sox starting pitchers spent a lot time chowing down on Popeyes fried chicken, swilling beer, and playing video games in the clubhouse while the team imploded on the field last September.

Okay, the Louisiana-style chicken wasn't bad (and the cole slaw was tasty), but everyone knows that fried food should only be an occasional thing.

At the time, we wondered why no "journalist" who followed the team every day ever wrote about clubhouse gluttony until after the fact:

Who is more lazy--those Boston Red Sox players responsible for the team's historic implosion or the sports "reporters" who only got around to writing about clubhouse dysfunction (including in-game boozing) after the season ended?

In a separate but related issue, Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas recently caught hell for declining to go to the White House ceremony honoring the team for winning the Stanley Cup. Yet Bush-bashing former Red Sox GM Theo Epstein never got any grief for no-showing at the presidential residence after the team won the World Series twice.

Here's what Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr said about this double standard:

Hey Tim, if you want to be left alone by the PC Posse, next time you have a hankering to express your opinion, just bring a bucket of Popeye’s fried chicken and a six-pack of Bud Light onto the bench. The Knights of the Keyboard won’t even notice it until the season’s over.

There's also been no reporting about whether the Sox pitchers, when placing their Popeyes chicken order, prefer spicy or mild.

Addendum: New manager Bobby Valentine just announced a ban on beer in the clubhouse and on plane flights home after a road trip. Chicken is still probably okay, but team nutritionists would likely frown on the fried variety.

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.”