Today marks the final day of 2007 and, all in all, it was a pretty good year for The Palmetto Scoop. We got a lot accomplished (going from a mere thought to a Newsweek-syndicated blog in less than eight months), we made a few friends, we broke some big stories, we covered some significant events and we didn’t forget to piss some people off along the way. And with a much bigger year ahead, we felt it only fitting that we send off ‘07 with the obligatory “year in posts” post.

So here are our Top 10 most viewed posts from the year that was 2007:

#10. TPS Video of the Day 7/25 (July 25)

Our “Video of the Day” series began as an attempt to bring a little fun to the end of a long day. Our readers always enjoy the clips and we enjoy finding them. But they rarely meet the criteria to be in the “well-read” category that the next nine posts fall into. That is, with one surprising exception.

On July 25 we came across a great YouTube clip of the famous scene from the movie Patton in which Gen. George S. Patton rallies his troops in front of an enormous American flag, only he was ranting about “Iraq and the modern world situation” in this one. The video has now earned it’s creator more than 1.5 million YouTube views and it put this post in a very shocking tenth position on our countdown.

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#9. Still think it was a mistake? (Sept. 23)

There were few stories as enjoyable to write about as the soap opera of Lauren Caitlin Upton, or Miss Teen South Carolina as she will be forever known. She was beautiful, charming, stereotypically local, and downright stupid. Or at least that’s what everyone thought.

But less than a day after the video of her painful response to an easy question about maps at a national beauty pageant went viral, we predicted that Ms. Upton would cash in off the mistake. Cash in big.

We even went a step further and said that she was in fact the one fooling us with this whole charade, and that her “everywhere like such as the Iraq” meltdown could very well have been a premeditated attempt to earn fame and possibly a small fortune.

And less than a month later we got to say “we told you so” in this post when she inked a modeling deal with billionaire Donald Trump worth a reported $25,000 per day.

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#8. Help find Kyle (Nov. 13)

A friend passed along the story of 24-year-old Kyle Fleischmann and asked if we could do our best to help. Moments later the story was up on TPS and in the inboxes of TPS Report subscribers, friends, family and any e-mail address we could find.

It’s been more than a month now since Kyle disappeared from a Charlotte bar, and extensive search efforts have yielded few results. His family created a tribute video for Kyle in a renewed effort to discover what happened to him.

Visit www.helpfindkyle.com for more information.

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#7. Mitt’s Mastercard commercial (May 29)

This was simply a story of mistaken identity and it was too good to pass up. At a fundraiser in Atlanta, Mitt Romney confused former Georgia Lt. Gov. candidate Ralph Reed with our own Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer — although he was originally reported as confusing him with the religious right’s Gary Bauer.

And Romney had experienced similar identity problems in the past.

Apparently, one of the few things Romney is consistent with is confusing his allies. As we noted at the time:

Flight to Atlanta: $638.
Mitt Romney Fundraiser: $750.
Handshake with Ralph Reed: Your Soul.
Mr. Romney? Mr. Bauer. Mr. Reed? Mr. Bauer. Mr. Bauer? Mr. Romney. Mr. Romney? Mr. Reed. Mr. Bauer? Mr. Reed. Mr. Bauer? Mr. Bauer.
Confusing Ralph Reed AND Gary Bauer with Andre Bauer: PRICELESS.

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#6. Former Gamecock football star named in federal investigation (June 8 )

By far the biggest story to hit the University of South Carolina’s football program this year was the fall of legendary fullback Rob DeBoer. We received a tip that he had been implicated in a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit for his involvement in the virtual music store BurnLounge, and we ran with it.

Our coverage beat every other blog and newspaper in the state, including The State, and as a result the post earned a huge number of hits and had more than 50 comments. DeBoer was inevitably asked to step down as a sideline reporter for Gamecock football and is still named in the FEC lawsuit.

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FORMER STAFFER: “WE GUTTED McCAIN IN THREE DAYS, AND WE CAN DO IT AGAIN”

COULD TASTELESS TACTICS OF 2000 BE PREVIEW OF WEEKS AHEAD?

The worst kept secret surrounding the ugliest wave of campaign sleaze tactics in South Carolina’s presidential primary history is that Sen. John McCain’s 2000 White House ambitions were derailed by clandestine operatives of now-President George W. Bush’s campaign. Although everyone involved in that year’s election was certain that J. Warren Tompkins — Bush’s top advisor in the state (pictured above on the left in the only known photo of the surreptitiously nefarious consultant) who is now leading Mitt Romney’s efforts in South Carolina — was behind a dirty whisper campaign of push polls and anonymous attacks that persuaded voters McCain was a liar, a hypocrite, a philanderer and a jerk, there has been little evidence to prove it.

That is, until an upcoming PBS documentary uncovered a never before printed quote from former Tompkins campaign staffer and current lobbying partner Jason Puhlasky that reportedly offers a “direct admission” to the sordid events of eight years ago. Courtesy of FITSNews, here’s an excerpt from the documentary in which Upstate Beat publisher James Shannon recalls a Republican event during the 2002 gubernatorial campaign where Puhlasky allegedly confessed culpability:

I remember (the quote) quite explicitly. It was at a backyard barbecue at the home of Edwin Foulke, a local attorney (who was) then the chairman of the Greenville County GOP… a number of candidates were there that day, including [former Lt. Gov. Bob Peeler] and former Congressman Mark Sanford, who had been largely unknown outside his former Charleston-area House district when he filed for governor. After languishing in fourth place during the early primary campaign, Sanford was starting to move up though the consensus was that if Peeler did not escape the primary without a runoff, his likely opponent would be Atty. General Charlie Condon.”

Puhlasky (whom I had never met before that day) spoke confidently of their ability to dispatch Condon in a runoff, and in fact Condon (whose nickname was “Crazy Charlie”) had some exploitable flaws.

“Isn’t it a little risky just focusing on Condon?” I asked. “What if Sanford makes the runoff?”

Puhlasky grinned and said “No problem. We gutted McCain in three days, and we can do it again.” [Emphasis added]

The reference was to the infamous “push poll” tactic, first seen in a 1978 Congressional election between Democrat Max Heller, the progressive mayor of Greenville, and Republican Carroll Campbell, a state senator looking to move up. Using the cover of a third candidate, Lee Atwater devised a scheme to call voters. Those who expressed a preference for Heller were asked, “Would it change your opinion if you knew he was a foreign-born Jew who doesn’t accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior?” As crude as it sounds, it worked. Heller’s double digit lead disappered the weekend before the election and he lost.

I’ll be interested to see if this quote ends up in the documentary, which airs Jan. 4 at 8:30 p.m. on South Carolina Educational Television (SCETV). But either way, Romney needs to distance himself from this kind of stuff immediately.

By keeping Tompkins on his payroll for the final weeks of this state’s primary, especially after such a slam-dunk admission of guilt by someone directly involved, Romney is essentially saying that he’s fine with the unconscionable style of campaign filth peddled during the 2000 election. Worse than that, his failure to disassociate with Tompkins’ firm — which has already been busted for anonymously smearing rival Fred Thompson — could be a warning that we can expect similar or possibly worse attacks in the final days of the primary election.

And this time, Tompkins’ victims might include more than just McCain.

The third presidential endorsement from a prominent South Carolina blogger came Sunday when Voting Under the Influence announced that it was backing Republican Mike Huckabee’s White House ambitions. The Palmetto Scoop was the first to endorse Sen. John McCain two weeks ago and Earl Capps announced his support for Rudy Giuliani a few days later.

That means we’re all still anticipating possible coveted “blogdorsements” from FITSNews and SCHotline.  I don’t know about you, but the excitement is almost unbearable.

It hasn’t received much coverage, but there’s a tug of war going on between state governors and President Bush over who should have authority over National Guard troops during times of emergency. Until a 2005 spat between the federal government and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco following Hurricane Katrina — after which Congress passed a law giving the president more control — state governments had exclusive control of Guard units when responding to hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters.The 2007 defense appropriations bill would repeal the power shift and restore control to governors, but Bush is expected to veto the bill.
So of course, our own governor felt inclined to weight in.

“It was a dumb idea fortunately extinguished,” said South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, a leader on National Guard matters for the National Governors Association. “We didn’t think it made sense at the time, and I think we will be better off for it.” [...]

”It was in essence a real power grab,” Sanford said. ”The presumption has always been, from an operational standpoint, that people who are local probably have a better sense of how to deal with a problem than somebody 500 miles away.”

Sanford said that for example, his state holds exercises and conferences during the year with the National Guard and emergency responders on dealing with a hurricane disaster.

”How dumb would it be to … have somebody come in who has not been part of any of that and say I’m in charge now,” Sanford said. “That’s exactly what this proposal would have done in the event we are hit by a hurricane.”

I don’t get to say this very often, but Sanford is right here. Governors definitely need to have a chance to command military forces, especially during times of crisis. How else are we supposed to train our future presidents?

I mean, just imagine if Bush hadn’t had eight years to practice being Commander-in… oh wait, that didn’t work out so well.

The Dallas Morning News wrote Wednesday that Barack Obama is having a difficult time connecting with African Americans in South Carolina, even though many people believed such support would be inevitable for the first serious black presidential contender in U.S. history. And now it turns out the event that may have earned him the largest number of backers in the state, a 30,000-plus campaign event at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia featuring famed talk show host Oprah Winfrey, may have actually done more harm than good.

Winfrey’s website has been buzzing for weeks with angry postings about her involvement in the Illinois senator’s campaign, something Hollywood, which always keeps its eye on the public mood, is bound to notice — this is a town, after all, that measures success by weekly grosses and daily TV ratings.

One posting on her site, Oprah.com, accused the talk diva of being a traitor. (By Thursday, that message string had attracted more than 12,000 views.) Another poster told Winfrey to “stop pushing Obama down our throats.” (There were 3,000 hits logged on that one.) Another said: “Do you really know Barack Hussein Obama? Scary & something we have to take into consideration!” (There were more than 4,000 views for that.)

“First of all I want to say that I am a HUGE Oprah fan,” one poster wrote. “I love what she stands for. She is a strong woman changing the world. However, I have been extremely disappointed with her recent touring with Barack Obama. It is a manipulation and an abuse of her power and influence on the American culture.

“Let the American people form their own opinion, Oprah.” [TINA DAUNT - LA Times]

The first indicator of Oprah’s “price tag” on Obama’s South Carolina campaign will be a pair of candidate-less town hall meetings to be held Friday and Saturday in Bamberg, Dorchester, Chesterfield and Clarendon counties.  The meetings are an attempt to reach out to rural voters and a good turnout would prove that Obama has the support base necessary to win on Jan. 26.  Of course, a bad turnout would have the opposite impact.

Regardless, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder noted that Obama has a “not so secret weapon” that could help him pick up or secure some last minute votes in South Carolina — his wife Michelle.

For black voters – especially black women voters — in South Carolina, the two biggest concerns they voice about Barack Obama are (1) the fear that he’ll be a martyr and would get shot and (2) the conviction (or fear) that conviction that white people won’t vote for him, thus balkanizing his candidacy and setting back the cause of civil rights for a generation. [...]

A turning point may be have been a big Michelle Obama speech on November 20 in Orangeburg, where she told hundreds of black voters that she’s “so tired of being afraid” and didn’t want her daughters to grow up being afraid. She speaks of her proud, South Carolinian grandfather, who taught her that “my destiny had not been written before I was born.” Her family “gave her the strength and courage to overcome the doubts” that she faced as a young girl growing up on the south side of Chicago.  [MARC AMBINDER - The Atlantic]

So the question inevitably become, “Can one major Obama backer make up for ground lost by the involvement of another major Obama backer?”

A day after White House hopeful Mitt Romney launched a television ad attacking rival John McCain on immigration and taxes, the Arizona senator is fighting back. The McCain campaign leaked a six-month old advertisement to Slate Magazine that attempts to, as Slate put it, “hang Romney with his own words.” They had apparently shelved it for a situation such as this.

I’m not sure how this will play or if it will ever reach the airwaves in South Carolina or anywhere else, but this is the largest show of force I’ve seen from McCain in response to Romney’s bullying.

And it’s interesting to note that the guys who made the ad, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer, now work for Romney. I bet that’s pretty awkward.

It seems like I can’t mention Ron Paul without droves of his cyber-trolls emerging from the woodwork to spew endless paragraphs of campaign propaganda. So after seeing the above clip of the Revolution leader confirming that he doesn’t believe in evolution on the website of my fellow Ruckuser Outside the Beltway, I’m actually interested to hear what the Paulites have to say.

OTB opined, “Until and unless someone proves that this clip has been edited or doctored to make it sound like he’s saying something he isn’t, this will have to be considered the end of the Ron Paul ‘Revolution.’” I’m not sure I agree with that, because that statement implies that Paul’s supporters possess the ability to think logically. And they obviously don’t.

What will most likely happen is that they will flat out ignore this, or throw around the usual conspiracy-laden red herrings.

No, this has nothing to do with Georgia fans. And yes, I realize I rarely say anything nice about Clemson University.

But being a huge supporter of biofuels, a groundbreaking project to convert peach waste into a hydrogen-based biofuel being conducted by a Clemson researcher has caught my eye. As a member of the South Carolina Biomass Council — don’t be jealous, you too can join — I understand the dire importance of developing alternative fuel sources.

Caye Drapcho is investigating a hydrogen-producing bacterium called Thermotoga neapolitana that has a taste for peaches, especially rotten ones. “This microbe produces gas byproducts that can contain as much as 80 percent hydrogen, though typically it produces hydrogen in the 25 percent to 30 percent range, which is still impressive,” said Drapcho.
The microbe is said to flourish at temperatures slightly less than the boiling point of water and in mineral-rich, deep-ocean heat-vents near volcanoes. The South Carolina Peach Council is funding research by Drapcho and graduate assistant Abhiney Jain.

South Carolina harvests more than 200 million pounds of peaches annually. About 20 million pounds of the peach harvest are discarded yearly, according to the Peach Council. Peach waste has substantial organic value with a high percentage of sugars that can be converted to hydrogen gas by bacteria.

The great thing about biofuels is that they come from a whole host of relatively cheap sources; often the byproduct of the waste from every day items like trash, crops, debri, animal waste, and so on. Biofuels basically solving recycling problems and energy problems all in one.

But then again, I don’t know if I’m quite ready to stop making the friendly government heads of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela filthy rich for an expensive, destructive product that will disappear in the next 50 years.

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Photo: Biofuel