Reason's Tim Cavanaugh and Terry Colon Win First-Place Awards at the L.A. Press Club's Annual Gala

Matt Welch | June 15, 2009

Last night at the 51st annual Southern California Journalism Awards competition, Reason stalwarts (and former stars of the late, great Suck.com) Tim Cavanaugh and Terry Colon both pulled down first-place hardware for, respectively, "When Free Love Died: Why the sexual revolution plays only in reruns" (Best Entertainment Review/Criticism/Column), and "What Part of Legal Immigration Don't You Understand?" (Best Magazine Design). Honorable mentions also went to Radley Balko (Best Magazine News/Investigative Story), the dynamic duo of David Weigel/Julian Sanchez (Best Online News, Feature or Package), and me (Journalist of the Year, Under 100,000 Circulation). As for Drew Carey and the tag-team of Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch, well, we were just happy to be nominated!

Full list of winners here.

From the Dept. of Logrolling in Our Time, at the ceremony Arianna Huffington and Bill Maher took turns blowing kisses at one another from the podium, with La Huffington declaring Maher to be the lovechild of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, I.F. Stone, and Hugh Hefner (I think that was intended as a compliment, anyway), and declaring that in Obama's America, Maher was "challenging the president before anyone else was challenging the president." (A Maherian example from last night: "Yes, we're spending a metrick fuckton of money, but we had to" because Republicans ruined the country, etc.) Maher gets bonus points, though, for his non-racially-transcendent joke about Obama: "He's dropped $2 trillion in just 120 days. Talk about being the first black president!" (Note: this quote, unlike the others, isn't verbatim, though it was likely a bit worse than that.)

Other Maher quotes: "There's a million lawyers in this country–can't any of them figure out a way to put one banker in jail?" And, "When I heard a president quoting Voltaire, I felt like a hockey mom at the state fair!"