Many thanks to everyone who voted. Without further ado …
Malkin Award: With 17% of the vote, the dishonor goes to Senator Rand Paul:
With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. … You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.
Mental Health Break Of The Year: Since the compilation of veterans returning home to their dogs was likely to be a shoo-in, we probably should have left it out of contention, as we did a similar video a few years ago, but here it is with 38% of the vote:
The runner-up, with 16% of the vote, is a beautiful and original video worth giving the spotlight:
Moore Award: Dan Savage's dogged campaign paid off big, as he blew away the competition with nearly 60% of the vote. His entry:
Religious conservatives loved the HPV virus because it killed women. Here was a potentially fatal STI that condoms couldn't protect you from. Abstinence educators pointed to HPV and jumped up and down—they loved to overstate HPV's seriousness and its deadliness—in their efforts to scare kids into saving themselves for marriage. And they fought the introduction of the HPV vaccine tooth-and-nail because vaccinating women against HPV would "undermine" the abstinence message. Given a choice between your wife, daughter, sister, or mom dying of cervical cancer or no longer being to scream "HPV IS GOING TO KILL YOU!" at classrooms full of terrified teenagers, socially conservative abstinence "educators" preferred the former.
Face Of The Year: The self-portrait of the crested black macaque monkey sealed the deal with 29% of the vote:
Yglesias Award: Chris Christie edged out Roy J. McDonald and David Frum for sticking behind his decision to appoint a Muslim-American to New Jersey's Superior Court Bench (video of Christie's full remarks here):
It's just crazy, and I'm tired of dealing with the crazies. It's just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background. I'm happy that he's willing to serve after all this baloney.
Hathos Alert Of The Year: Herman Cain's cringe-worthy and captivating performance of "Imagine There's No Pizza":
Von Hoffman Award: The neck-and-neck race between Jennifer Rubin and yours truly ended with a Rubin victory. Here she is again responding to the Christianist mass murder in Norway:
There is a specific jihadist connection here: "Just nine days ago, Norwegian authorities filed charges against Mullah Krekar, an infamous al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist who, with help from Osama bin Laden, founded Ansar al Islam – a branch of al Qaeda in northern Iraq – in late 2001." This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.
Chart Of The Year: A clear winner, with 28% of the vote:
The Dish 