Another serious question: Does anyone have a better suggestion? Can anyone name another individual who has been a greater catalyst for international cooperation and the sort of meaningful dialogue that leads to peace than Barack Obama over the past year?

Could he have done more? Sure. Will he do more? I certainly hope so. But the body of work thus far is worthy of acknowledgment. Worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize? I don’t see why not, unless it’s at the expense of a more deserving individual. And I certainly can’t think of one.

Please stop repeating this foolish canard, straight from the right-wing talking points, that Obama’s being nominated by February 1 means anything.

The Nobel Peace Prize nomination process is not some shady mystery. Indeed, information on the process is readily available. Read around a bit, and you will learn something like this:

The statutes of the Nobel Foundation specify categories of individuals who are eligible to make nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. These are;
>Members of national assemblies and governments and members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union,
>Members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice at the Hague,
>Members of Institut de Droit International,
>University professors of history, political science, philosophy, law and theology, university presidents and directors of peace research international affairs institutes,
>Former recipients, including board members of organisations that have previously won the prize,
>Present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and
>Former permanent advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Just here in the US, that’s 535 congresspeople, thousands of University professors and presidents, and perhaps a few dozen Americans who qualify as former recipients (including Americans on the boards of the ICRC, the American Friends Service Committee, UNICEF, Amnesty, and other organizations) or who are now or prevously were on the committee or advisors to it. Worldwide, the number of people eligible to offer nominations must be well into the five figures.

As a logical consequence of this, you may be almost certain that in any given year essentially every global figure or organization you’ve heard of is at least nominally entered into consideration for the Nobel Peace Prize. This includes (perhaps especially) some global monsters: I would be very surprised if Robert Mugabe, Muammar Qaddafi, and Kim Jong Il weren’t nominated by some eligible person every year, either by some deluded soul or by someone making a rather poor joke. The only surprise would be if Obama were not to be nominated.

It is true that the committee pares down the nominations to generate a short list (allegedly in late March, I read someplace). So by that point some people on the committee must at least have been sufficiently intrigued by Obama’s nomination to want him to remain eligible when the final determination was made in October. But even that hardly means that the decision was made at that time.

In any case, please stop acting as if an important decision about Obama’s candidacy was made in February. It’s simply not true, and it makes you look foolish.

Bush’s North Korea accomplishments are: Destroy Clinton’s functioning treaty with N.K., make the point clear that the only places Bush wouldn’t threaten HAD nukes and whine about having to join in when Russia and others made it clear that they would talk to N.K. whether he wanted to or not.

I will simply note that anything Bush did in Africa came with a large price tag attached involving ‘nothing else can be discussed and abstinence- only has to be discussed’.

NPP sticks & carrots? Sure, nothing new here.

@ 192 & 187 -

Wars? Be real, we haven’t been in wars for years. What we have are 2 Occupations. One that is being wound down and one that has been becoming contested in the last couple years.

Which reminds me: the Taliban, shortly after 911, offered to hand Bin Laden over to Bush on a platter. Bush was too busy sticking his fingers into his ears and yelling “I got plans for Iraq, heh heh heh!” to do anything about it. Yes indeed, the Taliban and Al Queda are not the same.

Oh I see how it is! Internet polite guy, eh? Well fine then. We’ll call it a draw. But I don’t have to like it!

(But this is the internets, shouldn’t I call you a name or something?)