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Archive of Articles in the "Contests" Category

Name That Tuesday!

[ Posted Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 – 15:55 UTC ]

Today is the first multi-state event in the 2012 Republican primary schedule, and I am shocked -- shocked! -- that the punditocracy has miserably failed to come up with a cutesy-poo name for today's voting.

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More Award Suggestions?

[ Posted Tuesday, December 20th, 2011 – 18:11 UTC ]

Once again, we're tying something new with our annual awards columns, by asking for your nominees in advance. We got plenty of good suggestions last week, and we're hoping to get a few more this week.

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Year-End Award Suggestions?

[ Posted Tuesday, December 13th, 2011 – 18:55 UTC ]

Feel free to suggest anyone or anything you'd like. The only rules of interpretation for what the categories mean are your own. If I think they're the best suggestion I've heard, I may use some of your suggestions in this Friday's column. We'll be returning to this subject next week, for part two, with a whole new set of categories. For now, who would you select for any or all of the following? Post your choices in the comments!

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Call The Newtsplosion Contest

[ Posted Monday, December 12th, 2011 – 16:17 UTC ]

Peggy Noonan, a consummate Washington insider with impeccable conservative credentials, recently came up with a nice turn of phrase to describe Newt Gingrich: "He is a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!' " Back in Newt's heyday, the comic strip Doonesbury portrayed Gingrich as a lit bomb with a short fuse, who would occasionally explode with a bang. Right and Left seem to be in agreement on Newt's resemblance to trinitrotoluene, in other words (or, maybe, "Newtroglycerine"?). Which leaves only one key question to be answered: When, exactly, will this "Newtsplosion" take place?

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Obama Poll Watch -- November, 2011

[ Posted Monday, December 5th, 2011 – 15:34 UTC ]

This month Obama poll watchers got some good news, and some bad news. This was capped off, at the end of the month, by the Washington punditocracy making an incredibly stupid comparison between polling for Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter -- which we will address at the end of the column (complete with a "guess the president" graph quiz, for your amusement).

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Vote For Matt Osborne!

[ Posted Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 – 16:55 UTC ]

Matt was worthy of a scholarship last year, and he is just as worthy of a scholarship this year. I encourage everyone to cast your online vote for Matt right now, and after you've done so, keep checking back on the leaderboard page to see how he's doing in the voting. If he makes it into the top three vote-getters, he automatically will be awarded a scholarship.

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Friday Talking Points [162] -- Budget Standoff Continues

[ Posted Friday, April 8th, 2011 – 16:51 UTC ]

Sigh. What's depressing about the whole thing, to me at least, is how the entire knock-down-drag-out fight is merely the preliminary round. This whole government shutdown walk-to-the-brink-and-stare-into-the-abyss thing is nothing more than the warmup for the next budgetary battles -- which will be much bigger. The entire initial fight is about staking out ground for the next two fights -- raising the debt ceiling, and the 2012 budget. Nobody involved -- not the Tea Party Republicans, not President Obama, not John Boehner, not Harry Reid -- really cares all that much about how this particular round ends up. They're all stuck thinking: "If I give in now, they'll want more later" -- and they're all entirely correct.

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Friday Talking Points [161] -- April Fools

[ Posted Friday, April 1st, 2011 – 16:47 UTC ]

To clarify that title: when you pull a prank on this particular day, you're supposed to reveal yourself as the prankster by yelling "April Fools!" (or even, as a purist might insist, "April Fools'!"). I am not doing so, hence the absence of the exclamation mark. Sadly, my task is today is not to prank anyone (I did that last year and promised I wouldn't do it again), but to catalogue the recent spate of foolishness from our national political arena. A sober list of the fools of April, rather than an excited "April Fools!" gotcha, in other words. Well, maybe not all that sober. You decide.

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Friday Talking Points [160] -- "Name That War" Contest

[ Posted Friday, March 25th, 2011 – 17:27 UTC ]

Anyone who sits in the Oval Office -- no matter what their name or political party -- is going to have detractors. As they should, since disagreeing with political leaders is almost the national sport in America, and always has been (sorry, baseball, but political bickering has been around a lot longer). Sometimes criticism of the president is for very principled and deeply-held beliefs. Sometimes, it is just knee-jerk-ism of the first order.

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Friday Talking Points [144] -- Midterm Home Stretch

[ Posted Friday, October 22nd, 2010 – 16:57 UTC ]

I'm going to (mostly) resist the urge to take advantage of this column's volume number in order to write a really gross column. Numerically, and inventory-wise, a "gross" is (of course) one dozen dozen. Twelve squared.

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