Susie Bright is a feminist sex writer and Editor at Large at Audible.com
Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker.
TPM is pleased to announce the winners of the Seventh Annual Golden Dukes recognizing the year’s best purveyors of public corruption, outlandish behavior and The Crazy.
The awards are named in honor of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who epitomizes the iconic modern scandal.
This year, the Golden Dukes were sponsored by Media Matters, who give out their own annual award called Misinformer of the Year for the most egregious example of misinformation from the media. This year it goes to CBS News.
Our celebrity judges — Julieanne Smolinski, Dan Savage, Hendrik Hertzberg and Susie Bright — waded their way through all 35 finalists in 7 categories, and selected the winners.
Check out the lucky nominees and the reader emails that selected them here. To read any judge’s statements (be sure you do), scroll to the end and click on each judge’s name! And now, without further ado, the winners:
I learned a lot more about the Christie bridge scandal tonight. This from a TPM Reader who must remain anonymous because … well, they play rough.
I’m a longtime reader from Livingston, NJ, hometown of Chris Christie. I’m fascinated by the whole bridge lane closing mess, and I agree this can really hurt him. Because it’s simple to grasp, and it makes him look really mean.
On the surface, it seems strange that a talented, charismatic politician like Christie is making so many mistakes with this. But nobody in Livingston finds it strange at all. That’s because we remember when David Wildstein was mayor.
We’ve had a number of request for a compilation or one easy place to find all the entries to our on-going “Who is Pope Francis?” series. So here they are. We’ll continue publishing them …
Here’s some useful background on David Wildstein, one of the two guys – but I kind of suspect the guy – at the heart of the bridge closure scandal. It’s written almost two years ago in the Bergen Record. So there’s nothing about the current scandal. And it’s generally positive about him – or at least sees ambiguous points in the most positive light. (He and Christie were high school classmates.) But you get the sense of how things could go very wrong. Here’s a key passage right at the top …
Since the Supreme Court ruling in June, the writing has been on the wall for banning of marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples in the United States. Since June the number of states with marriage equality has jumped from 12 to 18. But last week’s lower court decisions in Utah and Ohio leave little doubt that the political fight over gay marriage is now essentially over and that gay marriage will be the law of the land in every state in the country in the pretty near future.
Hrrmmm. Port Authority in no big hurry to produce documents in the Bridge scandal investigation.
As you have heard, we are sending a delegation to your city to personally deliver the Golden Duke Award your Mayor won in the 2013 Golden Duke Awards. It’s a delegation from TPM and the Golden Duke Awards Association not from all of America. But in a broader sense, sure, we are representing all of America. I And we’ve heard from some members of our Toronto readership that you’d like to welcome our delegation when we arrive in your country, teach us your local customs, see what the actual Golden Duke statuette looks like in person and perhaps help us meet your leader to give him his award.
Sen. Ted Cruz is still a dual US-Canadian. But he has “retained counsel” to help him renounce his citizenship and hopes to be 100% American by the end of 2014.