The voting is going on for the finalists carefully selected by our blue-ribbon panel. If you haven't voted yet, just pick a category and test your judgment against the current totals. Click the following links to vote for the 2009 Malkin Award, Moore Award, Yglesias Award, Poseur Alert, Hewitt Award and Mental Health Break Of The Year. Also – for the first time – Face Of The Year and Cool Ad Of The Year are on the ballot. Among the various contenders for the prizes, a roster of the big names in political and cultural discourse: Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, Gore Vidal, Erick Erickson, Michael Goldfarb, James Wolcott, Lee Siegel, Leon Wieseltier, Diane Sawyer, Katha Pollitt, Newt Gingrich … and Michelle Malkin.
We're giving readers a week to pick the winners for these prestigious prizes. The winners will be announced this time next week. You picked many of the entries; we just marshalled the very best/worst for your selection.
Much of successful political leadership, like all human relations, is about making people feel good. This was an art in which Mr Blair excelled, his path smoothed by a benign economic environment and an unfailing readiness to reject tough choices in domestic policy.
Mr Cameron will have no hiding place. He must tell the British people that in 2009 their long weekend ended; that if the nation is to regain prosperity in the third decade of this century, during the second it must change its ways and pay awesome bills. On Mr Cameron’s watch, economic bombs will start exploding. To persuade the country that these are not his fault, but the result of past follies and delusions that are no longer affordable, will require the skills not merely of a good politician, but a great one.
Jeff Weintraub examines the source of the very sensible idea that people should prep end of life decisions in advance: a Republican subsequently browbeaten by the shameless GOP leadership.
This update is from the executive recruiter in the construction industry who flirted with the idea of fleeing to the affordability of Ireland or Iceland. Original post here. The reader writes:
Not long after I wrote you last April, it was announced that we were losing our dental insurance, our matching 401(k) contributions, even our parking passes. There was another round of layoffs across the board, from recruiters to admin and IT staff. The company was trimming fat wherever it could. The problem was, they were starting to cut into muscle! I still have great love and respect for the company, and its leadership, but the whole atmosphere was just depressing in a Glengarry Glen Ross kind of way. And that's no fun. So in July I made the leap: unplugged the headset, rented out my house, and left to travel around South America. (I'm single, mid-thirties, no kids).
Five months later, and I'm still here in Peru . . . trekking in the Andes, exploring the Amazon, having all kinds of weird and wonderful experiences. I suppose I'll have to go back and get a real job again eventually. I could go back to headhunting, but last month one of my former associates told me they are considering filing Chapter 11. So for now, I am merely living for the day. I get by without a lot of frills, and I don't even have health insurance . . . but life is an adventure again, and it's pretty freakin' great.
"President George Bush should immediately issue a blanket pardon to all members of his administration who have engaged in the war on terror, both formulating policies and implementing those policies. We must not allow the left, working on behalf of our enemies, to lead Barack Obama down this most dangerous road. The best way to stop that is for the current President to deny any ability to prosecute American heros who have kept us safe for eight years," Erick Erickson, January 11, 2009.
"We are no longer a nation of laws. […] When the men and women who run this nation, which is supposedly a nation of laws not men, choose to ignore the laws and bribe the men, the people cannot be blamed for wanting to dissolve political bands connecting them to that government," – Erick Erickson, yesterday, on Harry Reid's provision in the healthcare bill that would require a supermajority to change any regulation imposed by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards (aka "death panels").
The Daily Dish nominates not Ben Bernanke but Neda Agha-Soltan. Neda was just one young woman, eager to protest the coup that rigged and then stole the June elections in Iran. She was shot in the street by the coup regime, as shown in the grueling video above that electrified the Iranian people. Wiki tells us that
Ned? (???) is a word used in Persian to mean "voice", "calling," or "divine message," and she has been referred to as the "voice of Iran."
The most remarkable event of this past year, it seems to us, was the uprising for freedom, sanity and peace in Iran. We witnessed it thousands of miles away but the miracle of technology meant we also lived it alongside those far braver than we will hopefully ever have to be. Neda remains the symbol of that uprising and her awful secular martyrdom will never leave the psyche of the Iranian people.
We saw them this year as we hadn't before: like us, eager for change, confident in their own capacities, able to see through the lies and the certainties and the violence that marks the vicious regime they live under. We saw this movement as a spontaneous revolt against transparent injustice, but also as a response in a way to the American people, who also rose up in 2008 to demand new leadership, less confrontation, and less fundamentalism in government.
Next year will be a crucial one.
As the Ashura holiday approaches and as the death of Montazeri has infused Iranians with yet more courage to face down the neo-fascist goons who police this comically inept regime, the Green Movement faces yet another test. Will this revolution follow the last one, building and building, growing ever more radical, as the illegitimacy of the current order slowly exposes itself? Or will it be crushed slowly by the fatal combination of violence and religion?
The Dish stands with the great people of the ancient civilization of Iran. This too shall pass – the idiots and bigots, the anti-Semites and Islamists, the murderers who think God blesses torture or that nuclear weapons somehow represent achievement, the fundamentalists who send poor, uneducated thugs to brandish clubs in the streets and terrify whole neighborhoods after dark.
It's been a bewildering decade as our two civilizations have clashed and as we have seen more and more of one another. We have seen one another as enemies, as aliens, as strangers, as threats. But we have also seen one another as fellow fools and cowards, fellow heroes and family members, fellow activists and Tweeters. But I never thought, on 9/11, that this blog, almost a decade later would end a post with the following words of solidarity and hope:
Politico profiles Daniel Lippman, a curious new character on the journalism scene:
The 19-year-old sophomore at George Washington University has become the Washington press corps’ independent fact checker, copy editor and link distributor extraordinaire. […] Lippman mops up after the Beltway’s hacks so consistently that it’s a wonder he hasn’t yet flunked out of college. Scarcely a wanton apostrophe or misspelled name will appear in a story without Lippman’s quickly issuing forth an e-mail.
His beneficiaries include AP writers, HuffPo's Sam Stein, Adam Nagourney, Fallows, and, yes, the Daily Dish. A big tip of our hat, Daniel.
I have to nominate "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas." It was written for the classic musical Meet Me In St. Louis, a depressing tune in which Judy Garland tries to cheer up her distraught family forced to move from their beloved St. Louis home when the father gets a promotion in New York. And in the context of the film, yeah. It's pretty depressing. Here are the original lyrics, changed to become slightly more upbeat after Garland complained it was too depressing:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last,
Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last, Next year we may all be living in the past Have yourself a merry little Christmas, pop that champagne cork, Next year we will all be living in New York.
No good times like the olden days, happy golden days of yore, Faithful friends who were dear to us, will be near to us no more.
But at least we all will be together, if the Fates allow, From now on we'll have to muddle through somehow.
The Dish 