As you know, this year we’re celebrating the third anniversary of the Golden Duke Awards. The Dukes honor excellence in public corruption, betrayals of the public trust and generally shameless behavior.
If you haven’t yet gotten your nominations in for this year’s Golden Duke Awards, remember, the deadline for nominations is Friday. And if you don’t get them in by then, all chance for fame, honor and gifts and prizes is gone forever. Or at least until next year.
Tonight we announce the judges for the 2009 Golden Duke Awards.
They are …
John Dean
Susie Bright
Jack Shafer
Dahlia Lithwick
Paul Kiel
To find out the six categories in which we’re awarding Golden Dukes this year and for instructions on submitting nominations, click here.
The Family Research Council held a “prayercast” tonight to pray for God’s intercession to stop the health care reform bill in the senate. We made Eric Kleefeld watch.
We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
TPM Reader SD on why he thinks so many people are pissed …
I think people are pissed right now less at the fact that they didn’t get what they wanted, and more at the fact that they feel like their people didn’t really fight for it. Leaders don’t always get what they want. But people recognize when true leaders at least give it a shot. And people judge that leadership by what they say in public and how hard they see them publicly pushing for it. Closed door negotiations don’t count.
Visiting Afghanistan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen told troops: “We can tactically win, but if we’re killing local civilians we’re going to strategically lose.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Yesterday we reported that the US Chamber of Commerce had offered free trips to Hooters for people willing to join their online campaign against health care reform. In such unfortunate cases, often it’s a matter of a major organization dealing with one contractor who subcontracts to another astroturfer and so on down the line. That far removed from the vendor actually doing the work, the major org can plausibly claim that it didn’t sanction whatevrer ad scheme the contractor came up with. But when representatives from the Chamber got on the horn with TPMMuckraker reporter Zack Roth yesterday afternoon they had a very surprising explanation. The Chamber claims that there’s fraud afoot. An unknown entity has been furtively offering trips to Hooters using the Chamber’s good name, though why anyone would have an interest in committing such Hooters fraud remained unclear to us. Zack has the story.
MSNBC paired Howard Dean with Mary Landrieu on a health care segment last night on Hardball, which had the curious effect of forcing Landrieu — a red state Dem who’s been a hard sell on reform — to be a staunch advocate of the Senate bill, which Dean wants to see killed for being insufficiently progressive. It made for a very interesting dynamic and compelling TV as a sitting Democratic senator and the previous chair of the DNC hashed it out.
