Category: Awards

Dick Morris Award Nominee

“Give Pete Carroll about one year before he starts realizing the mistake he just made. By that time, he’ll be wondering why he resigned from USC to become head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. That fat deal he recently accepted — one reportedly worth $35 million over five years — won’t be nearly as capable of insulating his pride from all the abuse he’ll be taking publicly. The players also won’t be embracing him like they have in college. Before you know it, that constant smile that has become Carroll’s trademark will be harder and harder to find.

Regardless of how optimistic some Carroll supporters may be about this news, the man is going to fail in the NFL. He’s already been fired by the New York Jets (whom he coached in 1994) and the New England Patriots (he was there from 1997 to ’99), which is all you really need to know,” – Jeffri Chadiha, ESPN.com, January 12, 2010, on the coach of one of this year’s Superbowl teams.

Moore Award Nominee

“[The extreme conservatives’]  problem is not me and democrats, their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives, who are right to life, pro assault weapon, anti-gay, is that who they are? Because if that is who they are, and if they are the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York. Because that is not who New Yorkers are,” – govern0r Andrew Cuomo, simultaneously illiberal and a gift to the talk radio right.

He has since claimed that his remarks have been “distorted.” But the idea that “pro-life” voters have no place in New York State does not strike me as a distortion, but an insight into the governor’s contempt for those sincerely disagreeing with him over questions to do with abortion.

Update from a reader:

I’ve read the transcript and I don’t think that Cuomo’s comments can reasonably be interpreted to suggest that all conservative Republicans should leave New York. It is quite clear that he was talking about “Republican party candidates,” specifically Republican party candidates that ran against gun-control legislation that was voted for by moderate Republicans in the New York Senate.

Malkin Award Nominee

“The question at the core of the debate of homosexuality is; what do we do with an abnormal person? Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her? Or we do contain him/her? … You cannot call an abnormality an alternative orientation. It could be that the Western societies, on account of random breeding, have generated many abnormal people,” – President Museveni of Uganda, in a letter also appearing to argue that Uganda’s eliminationist anti-gay law might be invalid on technical grounds.

Jim Burroway has some accounts of the confusing developments here.

Malkin Award Nominee

“That was [governor Cuomo’s] anti-gun legislation, which he had promised not to do, but then he had a little convenient massacre that went on in Newtown, Conn., and all of a sudden there was an opportunity for him,” – New York Post columnist Fredric Dicker, on his WGDJ talk-show in Albany, yesterday.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“I think [Pope Francis] is a complicated man. And I wrote at the time of his ascension, because I knew something about his passion/compassion for the poor, that he should not simply be judged on where he stands on gay marriage or abortion, but that we evaluate him also and think about him and the fact that he lives a life of such humility. He wants to feel connected to those at the bottom. My qualm, right now, with the political left is that it is so taken over by sexual issues, sexual questions, that we have forgotten the traditional concern of the left was always social class and those at the bottom. And now we’re faced with a pope who is compassionate towards the poor and we want to know his position on abortion. It seems to me that at one point when Pope Francis said, “You know the church has been too preoccupied with those issues, gay marriage and abortion…” at some level the secular left has been too preoccupied with those issues,” – Richard Rodriguez.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“Like many other anti-Communists and Cold Warriors, I feared that releasing Nelson Mandela from jail, especially amid the collapse of South Africa’s apartheid government, would create a Cuba on the Cape of Good Hope at best and an African Cambodia at worst … Far, far, far from any of that, Nelson Mandela turned out to be one of the 20th Century’s great moral leaders, right up there with Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. … So, I was dead wrong about Nelson Mandela, a great man and fine example to others, not least the current occupant of the White House. After 95 momentous years on Earth, may Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela rest in peace,” – Deroy Murdock, National Review.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“Some advocates of war [with Iran] seem gripped by Thirties Envy, a longing for the clarity of the 1930s, when appeasement failed to slake the dictators’ thirst for territorial expansion. But the incantation “Appeasement!” is not an argument. And the word “appeasement” does not usefully describe a sober decision that war is an imprudent and even ultimately ineffective response to the failure of diplomatic and economic pressures to alter a regime’s choices about policies within its borders,” – George F Will.

Yglesias Award Nominee

“I would like to know that our national home has clear borders and that we hold the people sacred, not the land. I would like to see a national home that is not maintained by occupying another people. I say this even though it’s not popular: we need an agreement now, before we reach a point of no return from which the two-state solution is not an option any longer,” – Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s Shin Beit until two years ago.