Today is the last day to get in your Golden Duke nominations for outstanding achievement in public corruption, scandal and The Crazy. Instructions for submitting nominations are here (all you have to do is shoot us an email).
A reminder on this year’s categories:
1. Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy
2. Unrefudiated Champion of Tea Party Wackiness
3. Most Outrageous Election Season Fib Issued By A Politician
4. Most Over-The-Top Campaign Ad
5. The George Allen Honors For Best Tracker-Captured Freak-Out
6. Best Scandal — Sex and Generalized Carnality
7. Best Scandal — Local Venue
8. Best Scandal — General Interest
Don’t be left out of the fun. Prizes for the winners! More here.
You may figure it’s true. But here are the polls showing that Sarah Palin is the most unpopular Republican presidential candidate in the country.
Strong storms in Israel this week unearthed a forgotten 1,700-year-old Roman statue entombed along the coast:
The honor of judging the Golden Duke awards is the pinnacle of most careers. Take Rick Hertzberg: presidential speechwriter, New Republic editor, New Yorker editor, and Golden Duke judge. I think we all know which of those he’ll be most remembered for.
Joining Rick on this year’s panel of distinguished judges: the NSFW Susie Bright, comedian Sara Benincasa, Alex Pareene of Salon, and TPM alum Andrew Golis, who is now at Yahoo.
Remember: Your Golden Duke nominations are due today.
The feds aren’t messing around when they tag a public official with RICO charges. That’s the big gun they’ve pulled out on former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
From the looks of it, they have a whole lot against him: text messages (again!); swank trips to Vegas, the Hamptons and the Bahamas; extortion of city contractors; kickbacks. Pretty much all the tricks of big city corruption rolled into one case.
There was some question whether Sen. Murkowski (R-AK) would still be voting for the standalone DADT repeal bill even though it will now come up before the legislation to fund the government. But her office just confirmed to TPM that she will vote to end the filibuster on the bill tomorrow and the actual bill on Sunday.
Brian Beutler runs down the practical implications of last night’s Senate meltdown, for politics and policy.
Remember back during the height of the BP oil spill, Gov. Jindal (R) made a big racket about how a bunch of fuddy-duddy Washington bureaucrats and the Obama administration wouldn’t approve his building sand barriers to save the Louisiana coastline from all the BP oil. The government scientists didn’t think it would work and could well damage the environment. Well, turns out they were right. Jindal got BP to pay some $200 million to build the things but they’ve captured hardly any oil at all. Jindal calls the government report “partisan revisionist history at taxpayer expense.”
To be clear, the desire to try virtually anything at the height of the crisis is entirely understandable. But it’s important to take note of the fact that he seems to have got it wrong.
Nigeria has dropped criminal bribery charges against oilfield giant Halliburton and some of its current and former executives, including Dick Cheney, after the company agreed to pay fines of $250 million, according to the Nigerian government.