No Runny Eggs

Welcome to Day 2 of the NRE 2009 Awards. Today, we honor the person/institution that made the past year at least somewhat tolerable. As a review/preview, here’s the rest of the schedule:

– Jackass of the Year, yesterday
– Dumbest Thing Said, tomorrow
– News Story of the Year, 1/4
– Person of the Year, 1/5

And the nominees are..

Michelle Malkin (from steveegg) – For me, outside of picking Shoebox as he’s taken more of the posting duties, this wasn’t even close. Do you remember the Tea Parties? While Michelle wasn’t the person who started them, she was covering and promoting them before they were known as Tea Parties. Throw in an explosive book on the ObamiNation and a take-no-prisoners approach to both halves of the bipartisan Party-In-Government, and I honestly can’t think of anybody else more deserving.

Sarah Palin (from RealDebate) – Despite some of the nastiest attacks ever devised by the left wing hate media Palin has risen above it all. When others are preaching moderate behavior Sarah Palin is one of the few people willing to stand up for conservative ideals.

Glenn Beck (from Shoebox) – I don’t listen to Beck on a regular basis and I never catch his TV program.  However, would the tea party movement have kept it’s momentum through the year without Beck?  Would the stories, especially about the background of Obama’s czars have come to light without Beck?  Love or hate his style, Beck’s compass always points true north.

The United States Military (silent E) No explanation needed………

Victor Davis Hanson (from Phineas) – Who’d have ever thought a Professor of Classics and Ancient History would be someone the nation should be grateful for? And yet we should be. VDH is a conservative intellectual in the best sense of the words.  His books, essays, and blog posts regularly tie current events to analogous times long in the past, showing us what we can learn from our own history. He reminds us of the proud heritage of Western civilization from the farmer-soldiers of Greece to their modern-day descendants seeking to defend individual liberty and constitutional government from tyrants in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this modern-day clash of civilization, he shows us why ours is worth defending. He is a true national treasure.

We here at No Runny Eggs have decided to make famous (or infamous as the case may be) some of the people and events that shaped the past year. Today, we start with the nominees for Jackass of the Year. We’ll each choose the person who we think was the biggest jackass in 2009. Some of us may agree, some of us may not.

The rest of the NRE Awards schedule is:

• Thank You for Existing, which will be announced at 5 am 1/2.
• Dumbest Thing Said, which will be announced on 1/3.
• News Story of the Year, which will be announced on 1/4.
• Person of the Year, which will be announced on 1/5.

And the nominees are…

Senate Majority Leader “Dingy” Harry Reid (D-NV) (from steveegg) – I was going to go with Wisconsin Governor Jim “Craps” Doyle (WEAC/HoChunk-For Sale), but there is a reason why I decided to wait until the absolute end of 2009 before running the awards. When push came to shove in the Senate, he muscled a way to make PlaceboCare permanent by requiring a 2/3rds majority in either House to change anything the Death Panels rule upon with nothing more than a party-line bought-and-paid-for filibuster-proof 60, and then had the balls to call for civility.

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) (from Phineas) – Hometown pride had me strongly considering Senator Barbara “Don’t call me Ma’am” Boxer, but hers would be an award for a lifetime of jackassery. No, the biggest jackass of 2009 has to be Harry Reid.  Forget the stimulus bill that indebted us for nearly a trillion dollars, and ignore the other budget-busting measures; don’t bother counting the unimaginable cost of the forthcoming health-care reform fiasco; put it out of your mind that he once said visitors to the Capitol smell. (Okay, that was last December, but it still counts.) No, Dingy Harry deserves this award because this Democratic senator is ramming his health-care bill through in the most anti-democratic way imaginable: locking out the minority party and much of his own majority party, ignoring a raft of polls from across the political spectrum showing majorities of the public don’t want this bill, and then trying to shove it through so fast that no one, not senators nor the public, has a chance to even know what’s in the bill.  Is this any way to run a constitutional republic? For this and so much more, Harry Reid should be Jackass of the Year.

Rod Blagojevich (from RealDebate) – This poster child for Illinois politics still refuses to admit any wrongdoing even though he was caught on tape trying to sell a Senate seat.

Al Franken (from Shoebox) –  In less than six months Al has managed to alienate more Senate members and more residents of Minnesota than Harry Reid

The Leaders of the Republican Party (silent E) – Althought there seems to  be a slight turn around as of late, the party consistently ignored the conservative direction it’s members want the party to take. This was quite evident by the endorsement of the VERY liberal Dede Scozzafava in an election in the 23rd congressional district in New York.