Not sure how close I am to the end with this, but I'm getting there (prior related posts are here, here, here, here, and here)...Do Gooder Of The Year Candidate
Connecticut Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd, for putting a hold on the FISA bill that led to the eventual filibuster (way up on the list for all of this - another related post is here).
Dregs Of The Year Nominee
Harry Reid for this – and he and Pelosi, despite some of their legitimately good work, STILL don’t understand why Congress has lousy approval ratings.
Update: Not really Reid and Pelosi's fault here, but Atrios sums it up well in a single-worded title and text link.
Dregs Of The Year Nominees
The school officials in Cape May County, NJ who suspended a second grader for drawing a picture of a stick figure shooting a gun (here...and by the way, the Inquirer notes that four kindergartners were suspended for playing cops and robbers and using their thumbs and forefingers to “shoot” each other – the NJ School officials who suspended them are idiots also).
Dregs Of The Year Nominee
Glenn Beck of CNN, “the most trusted name in news,” for saying that "[A] handful of people who hate America ... are losing their homes in a forest fire today" (here - the fires burned in Malibu in southern California in late October – with his crappy ratings, why the hell is he even still on the air? And by the way, Atrios pointed out that it’s probably the case that more people in that area are conservative, but that’s too much of a subtlety for Beck to comprehend, I realize - reaction here).
Another Underreported Story Of The Year
The Repugs had problems with states moving up their primary dates also as well as the Dems; according to here, Florida, South Carolina, Wyoming, Michigan and New Hampshire may lose delegates for moving up their primaries.
Dregs Of The Year Nominee
Dem Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who favored immunity for telecoms participating in NSA eavesdropping after taking $42 in campaign contributions from AT&T and Verizon (here).
Stupidest Repug Presidential Candidate (lots of competition in this field)
Frederick Of Hollywood; yep, those insurgents are just “a bunch of kids with IEDs” all right (here...and kudos to Biden for throwing it right back at him)…
Stupidest Democratic Presidential Candidate Spectacle
The furor over the Obama campaign’s decision to allow homophobic recording artist Donnie McClurkin to continue performing for his campaign, thinking that adding the Rev. Andy Sidden, an openly gay South Carolina pastor (hope his insurance is paid up) would somehow balance out McClurkin (still measuring the repercussions here; this does as much damage as any attack on Obama Fox “News” could have imagined - here).
Dregs Of The Year Nominee
Dem Rep. Tom Lantos of California, for telling Dutch representatives that "You have to help us (re: Guantanamo), because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany," according to Dutch lawmakers (here).
And this is the guy who said nothing while Duncan Hunter and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen were yakking about the MoveOn ad during the Petraeus/Crocker hearing – is he senile? And he definitely "hearted" Bushco on its Not So Excellent Iraq Adventure until it went bad, let's not forget.
Update 1/2/08: I'm sorry he's ill, but I'm glad he's leaving (here).
Update 2/11/08: My condolences...
Stupidest Supposed Political Guru Of The Year
Tyler Cowen, for his Rudy “The Angry Ape” Giuliani theory of presidential electability (here - probably works in some circles, unfortunately).
Unjustified Condemnation Of The Year
Radar Magazine here for saying that Keith Olbermann, in a November Special Comment, was incorrect when he said that former Bushco DOJ official Daniel Levin said that waterboarding was torture; Radar reported the following…
"Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision," wrote ABC News's Jan Crawford Greenburg and Ariane de Vogue (emphasis added). "And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use."And in spite of this, the magazine said that Olbermann got Levin’s story “100 percent wrong.” How appropriate that Radar's column is called “The Idiot Box.”
By the way, Mark Bowden of the Inquirer wrote a column last Sunday on waterboarding saying that no one should be prosecuted for doing this to terrorist Abu Zubaydah; this probably wouldn't happen anyway since the CIA seems to be exempt from the requirements our military must observe on this, though the CIA shouldn't be; the Dems are trying to hold the CIA accountable, but a certain opposition political party led by its Chimp In Chief is making that impossible at the moment.
I was really repulsed as I read what Bowden said since it was full of the typical "there was no other way to obtain this information, and we had to get it quickly to fight terra, terra, terra, and those responsible knew they could be prosecuted by those cowardly Dems in Congress - partly true there, though - but those responsible are still heroes, and somebody must have known something or else Zubaydah would not have been made to undergo it" rationalizations.
We are a nation of laws, or we have no claim to prosecute battle against an enemy that apparently doesn't observe them either (and here is another point of view on this - h/t Atrios).
Least Qualified Person To Run A Blogger Ethics Panel
Karl Rove
(Rove also deserves a Liar Of The Year nomination for this and this.)
Dem Turncoat Of The Year
Dianne Feinstein (fresh on the heels of helping to confirm Mukasey with Schumer, she gives us this – h/t HuffPo)…
The Smartest Person in 2007
Iowa waitress Anita Esterday (here)
“Dubya Finally Goes To Combat In Iraq” Citation
Of course, we’re talking about a computer game (here).
Worst Excuse For Malfeasance When His Greedhead Scam Goes Up In Flames
Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide here who blamed “pressure from minority advocates” for the subprime lending crisis generated principally by his company due to its loose (being charitable here) lending standards (and how ironic that Mozilo made this observation at a conference sponsored by the Milken Institute, with this year’s subprime mortgage debacle sharing some of commonalities of the ‘80s junk bond scam perpetrated by the institute’s namesake).
Junk Science Of The Year
A column that appeared here in the New York Times that purported to measure brain activity of respondents to presidential candidates stated that “subjects who had (John Edwards) low on the thermometer scale showed activity in the insula, an area associated with disgust and other negative feelings."
As Brandon Kiem of Wired tells us in this post…
How many people started out with a low regard for Edwards? We aren't told. Maybe it was everybody, in which case the findings might conceivably be extrapolated to the swing voter population of the United States. But maybe it was just five or ten voters, of whom one or two had such strong feelings of disgust that it skewed the average. What about the photographs (that the respondents viewed to stimulate brain activity)? Was he sweating and caught in flashbulb glare that would make anyone's picture look disgusting? How did the disgust felt towards Edwards compare to that felt towards other candidates? How well do scientists understand the insula's role in disgust -- better, I hope, than they understand the Romney-activated amygdala, which is indeed associated with anxiety, but also with reward and general feelings of arousal?Arousal for the Mittster? Eeeeewwwwwww (better not tell Roger Simon, though – he may get jealous).
“Palookas” Of The Year
Jim Kirkham of the American Contract Bridge League along with the United States Bridge Federation here, who thought that an apology from four women bridge players that represented the U.S. in Shanghai in October and criticized President George W. Milhous Bush in the process, “isn’t good enough,” according to Kirkham (they later relented somewhat).
More later...
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