Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!

In case you missed it, Part 1 of our "McLaughlin Awards" (named for the television show where we get these categories, of course) ran last week, so check it out.

Also for your convenience, here are all the previous years of these columns as well:

2010 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2009 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2008 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2007 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2006 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]

   Destined For Political Stardom

From the Republican side of the aisle, Chris Christie springs to mind this year. So does Marco Rubio, but then we gave him this award last year (and we're still betting he's on top of every list of vice presidential running mates out there in RepublicanLand later this year).

This year, instead, we turn to the Democrats to find the winner of Destined For Political Stardom. If Elizabeth Warren manages to wrest Teddy Kennedy's old Senate seat away from the Republican usurper, she will indeed be on the road to Democratic stardom. So far, she's been extraordinarily effective on the campaign trail, and she seems to have a backbone of solid titanium.

Warren is the best the Democrats have seen since Bill Clinton at the ability to make complicated subjects easy to understand to average voters. She doesn't talk down to people, but she does talk in language just about everyone can understand.

Her campaign so far has been the populist model for every other Democrat to mimic if they want to catch the wave of anger at Wall Street, and use it to their benefit. Without question, Elizabeth Warren is Destined For Political Stardom.

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President Obama is looking a lot stronger these days. Today, especially, the president emerges as the big winner in the showdown with John Boehner and the House Republicans. But Obama's been looking better and better all month, so Boehner caving should be seen as just the icing on the cake for Obama.

Of course, a big part of the reason why Obama is looking better and better politically is the fact that Republicans are looking worse and worse. The Republicans could easily have claimed the passage of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance payments as their own victory -- if only they had played their cards right. This is no longer feasible for them to even attempt. Republicans, after all, successfully forced Obama to rescind a veto threat -- which nearly always weakens a president (especially when veto threats have been as rare as they have been under Obama's leadership). Forcing a president to eat his own words on a veto threat is usually considered a win for the opposition party.

Not this time. The entire pipeline poison pill part of the bill has been all but ignored by the media, since there was a much more entertaining story to cover: Republican-on-Republican cage-match fighting. Republicans in the Senate passed the bill with an overwhelming 89-10 vote -- far beyond "veto-proof." But because of this show of strength, it only made the House Republicans look small and petty when they refused to go along with the deal cut by Mitch McConnell. As the crisis dragged on, the House Republicans looked more and more like the gang who couldn't shoot straight. One assumes that after they returned to their home districts, they all got an earful from their constituents about their intransigence. Today, Boehner caved to the inevitable as a direct result.

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[The Scene: A cozy room lit with a roaring fireplace. Santa sits at his desk, looking over his paperwork, a smoking pipe and a cup of hot chocolate at his elbow. Head Elf enters the room, and speaks to Mr. Claus.]

"OK, big guy, you keep putting it off, but we have got to get to the Washington naughty/nice list. It's almost time to load the sleigh, and we've got to issue orders to the Toy Room."

Santa sighs deeply. "You're right, I've been procrastinating too long. Well, draw nigh and let's see what they've asked for this year."

Head Elf whips out an iPad. Santa leans over to take a look. "Hey is that the new model?"

"Yeah, Steve Jobs got me a beta unit to play with... nice, eh?"

"Steve's been the greatest help this year, I have to admit. The North Pole is indeed Heaven for Steve, coming up with insanely great ideas for new toys for all the girls and boys. But let's get to it... who's on the list?"

"Barack Obama asked for..."

"Let me guess: a second term?"

"No, no, he asked for a quickly-falling unemployment rate for America. In his letter, he says he wants America back to work, and he figures the re-election will take care of itself if we can get unemployment below 7.5 percent by the election."

"How the heck am I supposed to wrap something like that, much less get it down the chimney? Never mind... who's next?"

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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.

Here are the categories for the second installment of our year-end awards. The column will run this Friday, instead of our usual talking points of the week. So put on your thinking caps, review the year that was, and let everyone know who (or what) you'd nominate for the following awards.

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American troops are, finally, out of Iraq. The war is technically over. Our men and women in uniform will be home for the holidays. This is all good news, and is worth celebrating by a nation weary of decade-long wars.

As with everything to do with Iraq, the end of the war isn't without its own controversy. Voices from the left ominously warn that with thousands of security contractors remaining behind, the war isn't really over. Voices from the right ominously warn that the war is being "lost" even though most Americans are beyond caring how they're exactly defining a win or a loss at this advanced date.

I'm going to set these arguments to one side, however, since I don't think either one is immediately resolvable at this point (more time will be needed to see whose predictions come true, to put it another way). I'm also going to set aside the emotional question of whether Iraq was "worth it" or not (which is highly subjective, depending on how you personally define "worth it"). Instead, to mark the milestone of the last American troops to leave Iraq, I'd like to take a wider view and look at the entire region, post-Saddam and post-Arab Spring.

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For the next two Fridays, instead of our usual nonsense here, we bring you instead our year-end awards columns. The categories for these awards are presented as an homage to the television show The McLaughlin Group, because they thought them up in the first place.

At this point, it seems 2011 was the "year of the primary debate," since the precedent set by Republicans this year for seemingly having a debate every week for six months will likely be followed for every election cycle to come. But that's just because it is fresh in everyone's mind -- a lot of other things happened this year which bear mentioning, so let's get right to the awards.

As always, if you disagree with any (or all) of my picks, feel free to make your own in the comments. The categories are completely open to interpretation, and don't forget that there will be a "Part 2" column next week, so I can likely squeeze things I forgot in there.

For reference, before I begin, here are the previous iterations of this column, should you want to go even further back upon Memory Lane:

2010 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2009 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2008 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2007 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]
2006 -- [Part 1] [Part 2]

   Biggest Winner Of 2011

As always, we're tempted to just hand the award to Wall Street and be done with it. Seems like they emerge winners no matter what else is happening (sigh).

We could also give it as a generic, for the idea of "running for president as self-promotion" -- an idea whose time has obviously come. The list of characters who used a run for the president as a clever method to sell books or television shows is quite impressive this year, in fact, and includes Donald Trump and Sarah Palin (even though neither one actually ran), as well as Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich who both shoehorned a run for the Oval Office into their pre-scheduled book tours.

Or we could define the award category as "the biggest absolute value of a win" and hand the award to Representative Kathy Hochul, who captured a seat in the House of Representatives (NY-26) that had been held by Republicans since the Civil War.

But instead we're going to interpret it more literally, and not politically. Militarily, in fact. The Biggest Winner Of 2011 was a combination of the Libyan rebels and N.A.T.O. airpower. You won't hear the line "airpower alone never wins wars" much in Washington anymore, one assumes, after the spectacularly quick victory by an untrained group of rebels in combination with high-tech precision bombing by the allies. No matter what happens to the actual government of Libyan in the future, the victory of the rebels, taken alone, has to be seen as the biggest winner of the year. From our point of view, this was about as good as war gets -- no American boots on the ground, no American fatalities, and the entire cost was nothing more than a rounding error in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Win-win, all around. Except for Ghaddafi, of course.

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Two hundred and twenty years ago today (perhaps I should say "eleven score years ago...") America ratified the Bill of Rights -- the first ten amendments to our Constitution. Today we're all supposed to celebrate this achievement in American politics by making full use of our First Amendment rights of free speech (and, for me, the press).

Instead, I'd like to gently point out that the same Founding Fathers that achieved this monumental milestone in government (some of them, at least) were the same ones who tried to eviscerate these same basic protections -- within seven years of the Bill of Rights' ratification.

I speak, of course, of the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Within the first decade of Americans enjoying the Bill of Rights, one political faction tried to silence its opposition by instituting severe government censorship on newspapers and printers. "The press" is the only industry specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. It was the only private enterprise to be singled out as a basic human right. And -- in peacetime, no less -- it was the first to be attacked politically. In times of war, America almost always throws a large portion of the Bill of Rights out the window (see: every war we've ever fought, pretty much), but the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were passed when America was, technically at least, at peace.

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'Tis the season to once again draw nigh and engage in our annual ridiculousness over the "War on Christmas," it seems. My fellow Huffington Post blogger Jeff Schweitzer has a rundown on what this all means, for anyone unaware that such a conflict is happening in America -- or, at the very least, in the minds of some Americans.

But just because the modern-day "War on Christmas" may not, in fact, exist does not mean that such a war never existed in America. The subject of Christmas was indeed at the heart of a previous bitter political dispute, but you've got to go pretty far back in time to find it. All the way back to the New England Puritans.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded, as we all know, on religious intolerance. Yes, you read that right. Contrary to what we are all taught as schoolchildren, the colony was not, in fact, founded on the principles of tolerance in worship. Far from it. In fact, the Puritans were actually fleeing such religious tolerance in the Netherlands (because they were, quite rightfully, afraid their children would be so influenced by this tolerance that they'd leave their parents' stiff and intolerant religious sect -- which the children simply wouldn't be able to do in the New World). To make sure they wouldn't be tempted by such intolerance in their new home, they went about legislating their version of Christianity to rule over the colony.

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Hot on the heels of yesterday's contest, we're once again going to our readers for suggestions. This Friday and next Friday will be our annual hijacking of the year-end awards categories from The McLaughlin Group. So it's time to review the year, and come up with some names to fill the following slots.

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!

Biggest Winner of 2011

Biggest Loser of 2011

Best Politician

Worst Politician

Most Defining Political Moment

Turncoat Of The Year

Most Boring

Most Charismatic

Bummest Rap

Fairest Rap

Best Comeback

Most Original Thinker

Most Stagnant Thinker

Best Photo Op

Worst Photo Op

Enough Already!

Worst Lie

Capitalist Of The Year

Honorable Mention

Person Of The Year

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

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?

Seeing how it's an interesting test of political prognostication, and seeing as how we haven't done one in a while, we're going to hold our very own "Call The Newtsplosion" contest. First we're going to outline the possible impact on the presidential race in a few wide ranges (so we all understand what the Newtsplosion's timing will mean), and then we're going to throw the contest open to all commenters at the end.

So, ready to play? Here we go....

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