October 9, 2009 archive

Michael Steele: “Where’s Bush’s Nobel Prize?”

Cross posted at Daily Kos

In an hastily-arranged press conference which just ended at the National Press Club, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele condemned the Nobel Committee for awarding the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama of the United States.

Steele offered the following remarks



Hajo de Reijger, Politicalcartoons.com (The Netherlands)

:: ::

“The Nobel Committee has done a great injustice to all peace-loving people around the world by prematurely awarding this prestigious award to someone who is totally undeserving of it.  In fact, the person who is a deserving recipient was the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush.  Remember him?  His vision, governing philosophy, and far-reaching efforts to promote peace and cooperation amongst various nations should have resulted in him, and not Barack Obama, being selected for this international honor.”

More of Chairman Steele’s expanded remarks below the fold.

Ponies for Magnifico!

After two years of simply RELENTLESS blogging in his series 4@4, Magnifico is hanging it up. Please go give him so love in his last (for now anyway!) edition of his great series.

Ek will be taking over for him with his own brand of je ne se quois, but no one can replace the je ne se quois that Magnifico brings to le Table!

He has been here from the get go and his creation and dedication to 4@4 has been remarkable. As has been the perspective and emphasis he has brought to the series. We are losing a member of the family, but we were blessed to have him, so let’s concentrate on that….and not on the fact that his leaving will leave a giant gaping gap in all of our lives, the bastard!!!

(oops, did I say that out loud?)

Thanks you Mags! and Bon Chance!

Four at Four

  1. The LA Times reports the Pacific Ocean ‘dead zone’ in Northwest may be irreversible. Unlike other “dead zones” that are caused by agricultural and other pollution, the vast oxygen-depleted “dead zone” off the coast of Oregon and Washington is permanent and was brought about by the changing climate.

    “I really think we’re in a new pattern, a new rhythm, offshore now. And I would expect [the low-oxygen zone] to show up every year now,” said Jack Barth, professor of physical oceanography at Oregon State University.

    The National Science Foundation released a “multimedia report that said the number of dead zones worldwide was doubling every decade. According to the report, in the Pacific Northwest “the areas of hypoxic, or low-oxygen, water that long have existed far offshore began to appear closer to land in 2002, a phenomenon that may mean they are even deadlier to sea life that exists near the ocean floor.”

    “What we’re seeing is changes in the oxygen content of the water and the winds that drive the ocean and cause that flushing,” Barth said, calling it a “double whammy.”

Four at Four continues with foreclosures, derivatives, climate change, and my farewell.

CENSORED: Glenn Beck’s Exposé On Murdoch’s China Connection

When a courageous speaker of truth emerges from the forest of lies that is modern media, the risk is ever present that censorship, suppression, or worse could occur. Sadly, that is the case today. Glenn Beck produced an episode of his program that continued his valiant search for communists burrowing into the woodwork of America like subversive termites eating away at the foundation of our national home. However, this episode has mysteriously disappeared. Fortunately, I have acquired a transcript (h/t Esquire) of the “Lost Episode” that reveals perhaps the most insidious enemy of freedom yet unveiled by Beck.



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The Nobel Clue Stick

WhhhaaaaaP!

Nothing better to help the inheritor of Imperial American War Machine that is engaged in two foreign wars and is assiduously ignoring years of torturing people to death remember his responsibilities to Peace and to the world than hitting him with a big old Clue Stick with a shiny Gold Medal tied to its end.

Could this affect Obama’s current decision on how many Brown People to kill in Afghanistan? On when to finally withdraw the War Machine from Iraq?

We surely hope so, right? Just a little nudge, nudge there from the ‘descendants’ of the guy who invented dynamite?

And it looks like Obama is accepting it in that spirit, saying he intends to use the award as a “Call to action.”

So I applaud the Nobel Committee for this blatantly proleptic choice.Instead of honoring someone for work the have already done in the past….they are striking a blow for Peace in the future.

‘Witch’s Brew of Toxic Chemicals’

For those that seem to have a problem with the facts of how we humans live and readily do damage to our environment, and really seem not to care, that around us as well as adding to what everyone else has done making it a global problem, this post, and the links etc. that it contains, may educate you some, and this is only about what our military does, knowingly or not, and corrects or not.  

A Bad Afternoon At Stella D’oro

Crossposted from Fire on the Mountain

It was a rough afternoon.

At 2:00 PM yesterday, I was standing in front of City Hall in lower Manhattan, serving as an extra at a press conference for the Stella D’oro workers. After winning an arduous 11 month strike against concessions, the workers have been fighting plans by new owners Lance, Inc. to move the 78 year old bakery from the Bronx to Ashtabula, Ohio and reopen non-union.

The press conference/mini-rally had been a good one, though major media was thin on the ground, Speakers from the plant, a range of union officials and other supporters gave short sharp statements, demanding that Mayor Bloomberg do something to save Stella D’oro and its union jobs. As we were about to break up, two of the workers got hasty phone calls from the plant. Managers had told the morning shift that when they left at 3:00 PM, the bakery was shutting down!

Maybe a quarter of the 100-plus at City Hall headed up to 237th Street and Broadway, where the arriving shift had been ushered into work to empty their lockers. They were still trickling out at 3:00 when the day shift came out en masse, carrying plastic bags with whatever they had had inside. The three dozen supporters and workers outside the gate clapped as they did and there were chants that had become familiar to all from almost a year of picketing.

So here’s a fun headline: DA prepares to crack down on pot outlets

Front page headline, Los Angeles Times, Friday, October 9th: “DA prepares to crack down on pot outlets.”  Summary, analysis, in context.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

War is Peace



Photobucket

The Nobel committee has done the Orwellian Swing by awarding the world’s chief war monger the Nobel Peace Prize. While perhaps there were reasons for the Prize connected with hope – there is a hope for peace with Obama, the facts on the ground suggest the Norwegians have not been paying attention.

A Means of Atonement: The Nobel Peace Prize

President Obama’s awarding of the Noble Peace Prize may be more about making a strong statement condemning what came before than it is a desire to reward the man who will benefit from the news.  At a time when Obama is facing the sharpest criticism of his still-nascent Presidency, the Noble win temporarily distracts from Afghanistan, Health Care Reform, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, banking regulation, Guantanamo Bay, and a variety of other items on the agenda.  It will dominate the news cycle at least for today and likely into the weekend, with all the usual suspects chiming in to comment.  Obama’s  resume towards world reconciliation and peace activism around the globe, up until now, has been on the thin side, though he has certainly taken much care to begin to undo the damage of the Bush presidency.  I welcome the announcement, though I wonder if perhaps those with a lower profile might have been more deserving.    

One also wonders what impact this award will have on the President’s domestic approval rating or the public support for his substantial agenda.  The Nobel Peace Prize has a long history of courting controversy, and one expects to see no small degree of backlash from conservatives along the same lines as when Al Gore won in 2007.  My initial thought is that this event, notable though it is, really won’t make much difference either way.  It will be a short-term matter that Obama will rightly use to bolster what he wishes to accomplish, particularly in a diplomatic context.  The Republicans will scream bloody murder and the Democrats will release complimentary press releases which politely reveal nothing more than safe, unsubstantial praise.        

Contemplating why the awards themselves were established explains something of their presumptive function.  The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of the explosives dynamite and gelignite, set up a series of separate prize designations in his will. Winners of these prizes would also be rewarded with a substantial cash prize paid out of Nobel’s personal fortune.  Upon his death, a committee was instructed to award the most deserving person who had to advanced human improvement in a each of a variety of areas.  Ever since their establishment, the committee has often broadly interpreted Nobel’s rather vague directives.  


The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way:

The capital shall be invested by my executors in safe securities and shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics; one part to the person who shall have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement; one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine; one part to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency; and one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.  

It was a premature obituary published in a French newspaper that led Nobel to establish these prizes that bear his name.


The obituary stated Le marchand de la mort est mort (“The merchant of death is dead”) and went on to say, “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.” On 27 November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Nobel signed his last will and testament and set aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes, to be awarded annually without distinction of nationality.

Nobel himself was the owner of a large factory which designed war munitions and combined with his brilliant discoveries regarding explosive substances, he is a reminder that human progress and innovation can be used to kill millions of people in open combat.  Not only that, he is a sobering example that we ourselves might prove to be our own undoing when we selfishly advance our own sordid motives at the expense of our brothers and sisters.  Thus, the Nobel Prizes are a lasting testament to one man’s atonement and his desire to seek forgiveness.  This is an unselfish gesture I do not believe was made to whitewash over past sins.  It would be wise to keep that solemn fact in mind when we contemplate the very intent of the awards themselves.  Though we need and must continue to cite instances where the wealthy and powerful destroy human unity on behalf of the pursuit of profit, there are those like Nobel who aim to leave a lasting legacy behind them as more than butchers, or amoral profiteers, or purveyors of anguish.  Political footballs aside and back and forth arguments aside, we shouldn’t let petty grievances detract from the power and grave reverence these awards demand.      

Grayson EXPLODES on GOP: “America doesn’t CARE about your feelings” Man On Fire!

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Alan Grayson (BIG D-FL08) is my new hero. We need this guy in Congress for years to come!

    But first, on to the show, and what a show it is!

    Full transcript of the can of whoop@$$ unleashed by Grayson on Republicans AND weak kneed Dems below the fold.

Illuminati Trifecta News Day!!!!!

Obama Peace Prize!!???  Bombing the Moon for water!!??? And the Satanists are scared their eugenics vaccine program just ain’t gonna go as planned!!!

I feel renewed! Born again! This marks the dawn of a new golden age for mankind!  The sun has risen burning the parasitic vampires who now rule the world.  The “Illuminati” has exposed itself.  It is telling you that you they think you are a retard.  What say you world.  Yes I like that, I like that alot.

The “Illuminati” says you are retarded.  What say you world.  I want the copyright on the T-shirt.

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