The Blog of Record

From here.

Some of the other 204 people who were nominated for the peace Nobel in 2009.

Here is a larger list, although it’s not official because the Nobel committee doesn’t disclose the list of nominees for fifty years.

It’s 1 a.m., November 23, 2011, and President Obama and Treasury Secretary Geithner are discussing the causes of the 2011 financial crisis. It doesn’t take them a lot of searching to see what, when and why went wrong.

For President Obama, first things first:

President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he’s already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS’ Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, “Today – Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24.

Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months.”

You mean Barack Obama isn’t getting this one? Did he miss the nomination deadline?

The backers of a $5 million prize celebrating good governance in Africa said Monday they cannot find anyone to award this year.

The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership brings the winner $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 annually for life thereafter.

The prize-giving committee could not select a winner after considering “some credible candidates,” said former Botswana President Ketumile Masire, a board member of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation.

Seriously speaking, though, if they mean their prize as an incentive for African rulers to try something better than the traditional African leadership model of plundering their own countries, they’ll have to come up with much more than 5$ million over ten years. The traditional African leadership style is vastly more profitable than that.

Maybe Obama can engage the swine flu virus, too. It can’t possibly refuse to unclench its fist when a Nobel peace prize winner offers his open hand.

Obama To Enter Diplomatic Talks With Raging Wildfire

You don’t have to be a genius to see that by giving the prize to Obama, the Nobel committee wanted to influence his decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan. Obama is currently deciding whether to send in more troops and make sure the country never again becomes a big terrorist training camp - or to quietly let the Taliban win and hope for the best. With the prize, the Nobel peaceniks are trying to make it harder for him to choose the former course. “Hey Barry, you’ve just won the Nobel peace prize – you won’t celebrate it by escalating a war that Bush started, will you?”

Make no mistake, folks – these people are trying to influence the foreign policy of the United States of America in a way pernicious to America’s vital interests. And they are doing it because they feel that with the current occupant of the White House, they have a good chance.

Oh, and these people don’t care about Obama – for them, he’s just a useful idiot who can be manipulated to help them achieve their real goal: weakening America. If they really cared about him, they’d wait until 2012 with their October surprise.

UPDATE 1: Similar thoughts from Maggie’s Farm: “Taliban Peace Prize For Obama“:

The Nobel committee hopes to influence Obama’s decisions on Afghanistan. Now that he is an internationally recognized man of peace, he is not going to order a surge in Afhanistan. McChrystal won’t get the troops he says he needs.

The White House has been preparing this ground for weeks, suggesting that since Al Qaeda is now weak a Taliban return to power needn’t worry us. We can live with that, they say off the record. The great military thinkers Joe Biden, John Kerry, Rahm Emanuel, and David Axelrod have developed a long-range John Murtha strategy that will operate along the lines of a video game: if you see movement on the screen, push a button.

And with the Taliban back in power, we won’t have to worry about messy elections. But what about those who fought with us? What has the Taliban in store for them? If Afghanistan were not a land-locked country, we could expect thousands of boat people.

But not to worry. When asked about a possible bloodbath following a hasty withdrawal from Iraq, Obama said he didn’t really have a problem with it and its possibility should not determine policy. He won’t have a problem with it in Afghanistan either. After all, we’ve been told, Afghanistan, like Vietnam or Iraq before the surge, was always unwinnable. We’ll accept a certain number of refugees to help ease the short-term sting of conscience over betraying an allly. But as with all vices, repetition makes the practice easier. This won’t be the first time we’ve betrayed an ally.

It will destoy the military, of course, but by the time that becomes clear Obama will have passed from the scene.

UPDATE 2: “The Nobel Peace Bribe”:

The chunk of money awarded by the Nobel people is over a million dollars. Its stated purpose is to influence an elected official, since it’s “aspirational” and not for any achievement.

Don’t elected officials go to jail for taking that kind of money?

It should be called “The Nobel Peace Bribe.”

UPDATE 3: The chairman of the Nobel peace prize committee is a vice president of the Socialist International.

Those courageous souls on the Nobel peace prize committee:

[Nobel observer Kristian Berg] Harpviken said he doubts the Nobel committee will choose any Chinese or Russian dissidents this year because they “don’t want to anger powerful governments.”

“Although the committee takes pride in being independent,” he said, “there are certain limitations on their being independent.”

That does not mean he doesn’t expect the committee to “take daring decisions.”

Harpviken said he believes that “the most likely expression of the committee’s courage this year will be to award the prize either to an unconventional kind of candidate or to somebody whose work is likely to be directly helped by a prize award.”

Profiles in courage from Norway: “OK troops, how do we express our courage without angering any powerful governments, lest they might… well, we’re not sure what they might do to us but… let’s just find a safer way to express our courage, okay?”

UPDATE: The courageous man’s choice: Obama! I guess they wanted to express their courage without being accused of racism, too.

There’s little chance of Obama doing the right thing and turning the prize down, but I hope he at least feels appropriately embarrassed.

People are surprised, but really – was there any chance of Obama not getting the peace prize? He could have invaded Canada – say, for having a conservative government – and they still would’ve given him the Nobel.

Bill Ayers, the Marxist domestic bomber from Chicago who launched Barack Obama’s political career, has admitted what has long been suspected – that he is the real author of Obama’s autobiographic “Dreams From My Father”. He says Michelle asked him to write it for Barack.

Now Ayers wants someone to help him prove it and split the royalties, because Obama, it seems, hasn’t paid him a dime from the millions the book has brought him. Someone needs to take him up on his offer.

Or to do what a commenter to the breaking story suggests:

Buy the book – Dreams, then file a class action lawsuit on your and every other purchaser’s behalf that the book was fraudulently advertised as being written by Obama when, in fact, it was not. (You wanted a book by Obama, not something by Ayers). An attorney who claimed he was involved in the Milli Vanilli debacle said that claim would appear to have merit. The discovery process would be a Blast! (no pun intended)

Notice that this story is not coming to you from a newspaper, whether of record or not. A blogger talked to Ayres and got the admission from him. Were Obama a Republican, of course, the media that will soon be as dead as the trees it kills to print its agitprop would have started investigating every comma in the book the day his face first appeared on national TV.

Click the image to enlarge.

Source.

So far, so good. I hope he can maintain this rate of getting things done for three more years.

I would be ashamed if this man spoke highly of me.

Photo from here.

Former KGB agent Konstantin Preobrazhenskiy on Russia, Iran and what naive goofs the Americans are.

If Obama realy believes the Russians will help him to talk Iran out of nukes if he only throws them the U.S.’s staunchest European allies, Poland and the Czech Republic, he is more naive than Jimmy Carter. It’s even worse if it is just a cover to give him a reason to ditch the missile shield plans that took Bush so much effort to work out with the Czechs and Poles.

“Is it too late to vote for the white guy?” Well, yes, I believe it is.

Obama’s czars: the 32 people who run America (including eight whose thrones were created during previous administrations). Remember voting for them? No? Of course you don’t. You don’t get to vote for czars.

Lots of interesting people on the list. Number 16 is Van Jones, the Green Jobs Czar, who, like the president, started out as a community organizer. Can a communist be a czar? Yes he can:

• 1993: was arrested at the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of cops in the Rodney King beating. “I was arrested simply for being a police observer,” says Jones, who had just graduated from Yale Law School and was working with the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco.

• 1999: was arrested in the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization.

• Excerpt from a Nov. 2005 interview in the East Bay Express:
Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’” Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. “I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.” In 1994, the young activists formed a socialist collective, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, which held study groups on the theories of Marx and Lenin and dreamed of a multiracial socialist utopia. They protested police brutality and got arrested for crashing through police barricades.

Or number 24 – Science Czar John Holdren, a co-author of a book containing this passage: “population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution.”

No. 12 is Energy and Environment Czar – Carol Browner, who has worked for the Socialist International.

No. 23: Regulatory Czar Cass R. Sunstein, who proposed a Fairness Doctrine for the Internet in 2002 and:

• In his 2004 book, Animal Rights, suggested that animals ought to be able to bring suit, with private citizens acting as their representatives, to ensure that animals are not treated in a way that violates current law.
• In a 2007 speech at Harvard he called for banning hunting in the U.S.

The Obama White House is an interesting place.

(Via Ben Dare.)

Shock and awe: the man who created the famous Obama Joker image is not an ultra-right-winger – he’s a 20-year-old college student from Chicago with a Palestinian name – Firas Alkhateeb. 

That’s right – the author of the Obama Joker poster is a Muslim. Still, he is not an Obama supporter - but he’s no conservative, either: he likes Dennis Kucinich and hates Rahm Emanuel for being a “fervent anti-Islam voice in Washington” and a “Zionist”.

The media will go easy on the man – he’s a Muslim, Palestinian and Israel-hater, which makes him a good guy, even if he didn’t vote for Obama. But if the hacks ever find the man who added the dirty word “socialism” to the poster and slapped it on walls in LA, and he turns out to be a W.A.S.P., they’ll have a field day. 

This dog won’t take sh*t from Barack Obama.

This photo reminds me of something…

Oh, yes:

When you are a Democratic president and even the Washington Post says you are a second coming of Jimmy Carter, you know you aren’t doing tremendously well: “What’s Next, Mr. President — Cardigans?”.

Marty Nemko writes:

I received this email from someone who insists on anonymity because it could cost him his job:

“I won’t disclose the company involved for reasons you should be able to divine. I work for a Fortune 500 defense contractor.

Management has been informed by Obama administration officials that we must go to the Federal Register and report that all the people currently working on our largest programs (5-10 years running) will now be classified as ‘new’ jobs ‘created’ by stimulus funding…or else.

‘Or else what?’ you may ask. Or else no new government contracts, plus the current ones may be stopped, that’s what.

Considering this would mean thousands of people instantly unemployed, and management bonus and salaries evaporating, I think you can guess the answer our management gave to these Chicago-style thugs.

Please understand that these programs were already fully funded by various agencies for many more years. The government is taking that funding away, switching it out with freshly minted stimu-dollars and falsely claiming that new jobs were created.

Okay fine. Cook the books and lie about how many jobs the stimulus created, but this begs the question – where did the ‘de-obligated’ money go? You know, the original millions of dollars we already had won and were under contract for?

Inquiring minds want to know.”

I assume The New York Times, The Washington Post and The LA Times are already working hard to verify these claims.