No Runny Eggs

Welcome to the 5th and final day of the NRE 2009 Awards. Today, we name our people of the year. As a review, here is the rest of the schedule:

– Jackass of the Year, 1/1
– Thank You for Existing, 1/2
– Dumbest Thing Said, 1/3
– News Story of the Year, yesterday

And the nominees are…

The Tea Party Protester (from RealDebate) – For the first time in their lives many people are getting off the couch, making their own signs and letting their voices be heard. They’ve been called every name in the book by the hate left and still they come. The country figured out that “Hope and Change” was code for a massive expansion of government debt and an even bigger grab of personal rights from a far left wing that thinks it can provide a better life for the individual citizen than the individual citizen can for themselves.

The men and women in the Armed Services (from Big G)

The Tea Party Movement (from Shoebox) – while this has taken various forms throughout the year, the notion of conscientious objectors from the right has never been seen before.  Without the people in these efforts we would likely have seen health care reform skate through Congress.  Without these people we may well have seen cap and trade enacted.  While clearly the people with the biggest surprise impact in 2009, the true proof will be seeing their impact on the 2010 races.

Sarah Palin (from Phineas) – Don Surber makes a great case, so I’ll let him do the talking. An excerpt:

Ordinary people did read her book and they were impressed. The people who shop at Wal-Mart bought 1 million copies of her autobiography in just 2 weeks. Thousands of them stood in line by the thousands in the freezing nights of November and December just to get her autograph. She is of them — a hockey mom who is naive, unsophisticated and learning just how rotted from within America’s political system has become. She beat corruption in Wasilla. She beat corruption in Alaska. And well, she finished 2009 with a higher approval rating than The Won.

The Honduran people (by steveegg) – When former Honduran President Mel Zelaya tried to set the stage to be El Jefe for Life, the army, Congress, and Supreme Court teamed up to enforce the very-strict Constitutional prohibitions against multi-term Presidents. When the entire world tried to descend upon Honduras to restore their favorite Marxist, the people rose up and said, “Hell no.” When Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Europeans said that they wouldn’t recognize the pending Presidential elections, they went ahead with them and held a rather-clean election.