Announcing the People’s Choice Award

The Power Line Prize contest has been a lot of fun, and is, so far, a notable success. My informal metric has been that if the videos, songs, paintings etc. that were entered in the contest receive a total of at least 1 million views and listens, the contest is successful. Currently, we are over half way there. Given that the federal spending/debt crisis will be with us for some time to come, I am confident we will reach the 1 million mark and perhaps far surpass it.

Equally important, our readers’ reaction to the contest has been enthusiastic and sometimes contentious. We have therefore decided that we need to recognize at least one more of the excellent entries we received, based on our readers’ votes. To do so, we have established the People’s Choice Award. The People’s Choice Award of $2,000 will go to an entry, chosen by a poll of our readers, that did NOT receive one of the contest’s four cash prizes.

So let’s recall who has won the prizes so far: the grand prize went to The Spending Is Nuts, by Justin Folk. Here it is, once more:

The runner-up was a song by Jason Nyberg called “Don’t You See?” Here it is again:

There were two third-place prizes. One was a YouTube/Facebook/Twitter event called Mock the Spending, created by Nick D’Orazio. This is just one of the many videos that were produced as part of that 24-hour event:

The second third-place winner was Dawn of the Debt, a professionally produced video on the debt crisis by David Nussbaum which includes zombies that we can safely assume to be liberals:

Those were the cash prize winners. They are NOT eligible for the People’s Choice Award. Based on the judges’ rankings and popular response, we have identified eight entries that will compete for the People’s Choice Award. We will post two of those entries per day, starting tomorrow. Voting will begin on Thursday and continue until Saturday, when we will announce the winner of the People’s Choice Award. So, if you had a favorite entry that did not win a cash prize, get ready: this is your chance to weigh in on behalf of the entry you thought was most creative, interesting or effective. More to come, starting tomorrow morning.

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