Interestingly one journalist today wrote, “Obama’s name was rarely mentioned as a potential candidate for the award.”

Here is what the Nobel Committee had to say

The Norweigan Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama’s initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.

Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.

For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama’s appeal that “Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.

“What are your feelings towards the victory of Barack Obama, a representative of the African American minority, in the US presidential elections?”

Here were the options and results (by%):
Admiration 5
Content 15
Surprise 16
Envy 0,4
Irritation 2
Indignation 1
No special feelings 57
Not sure 3
(N=1600)

The categories make for a fun list. Especially since we don’t often get to see the the options of “envy” or “indignation” on political surveys.

In Russian:
Восхищение 5
Удовлетворение 15
Удивление 16
Зависть 0,4
Раздражение 2
Возмущение 1
Никаких особых чувств 57
Затруднились ответить 3

Note to reporter: don’t read from the script it makes you seem like a girltard. Someone once said that “broads don’t belong in broadcasting” — but I saw Anchorman so I know what female reporters are capable of…you can do better.

Obama tells the world that we should ‘look forward, not backwards.’ The slogan is bizarre. How should the victim feel when we tell him that we are going to look only forward? We won’t admit what we did to him, and we won’t even say we’re sorry?

Something about the quote grates against me. On one hand it reads like just another liberal gagging to flaunt their left-wing credentials, but on the other hand it feels like an intentional mis-reading of Obama and American politics.

Often the liberal knee-jerk reaction is to immediately fly into the victim defence stance (”how should the victim feel”) on all things political. But this simply misses the fact that Obama, like most people, does look to the past to guide his decisions. Take Healthcare reform for example: he consciously sought to avoid a repeat of Clinton’s folly and arguably took into account that the “victim” in that case (the congressional sense of pride) needed to be dealt with softly next time around.

Likewise, it is difficult to say Obama is oblivious to victims when he authorizes billions of dollars in economic supports, tries to pull out of Iraq, looks to shut-down Gitmo, toys with criminal charges for military interrogators and so forth.

Obama occasionally says sorry when he missteps (as when he cracked a few jokes about the special Olympics), but why should he apologize for the actions of the previous administration? Despite attacks during the presidential campaign that Obama would be all talk and no action, we have seen him quickly correct many of the faults of the last administration.

Even as he vowed to shut-down Gitmo on his second day in office he has sought to change the ethos of prison in the remaining months of its operations. In fact a recent article about Gitmo by a journalist who toured the facility declares it “a model” detention centre, and comments that one of the biggest problems there is not torture but rather that the inmates are becoming obese.

To this end “looking forward” means that Obama can distance himself from the traumas of Bush and correct those past problems. But to begin apologizing for past transgressions is stupid. How does one pick and choose what is worth an apologetic oration and what is not? The oval office as an alter of repentance? If the West wing suddenly had all of America’s dirty laundry flapping in the wind, how could one expect to win the political allies necessary to make change?

Condensed graphical chronology of Iran’s Nuclear developments 2002-2007

I didn’t realise the extent of US (and European) involvement in Iran’s pre-revolutionary nuclear program (see the first timeline). Between 1957 and the Iranian revolution in 1979 we all but forced nuclear technology down their throats — supplying the uranium, the plutonium, building the enrichment facilities, and even attempting to sell 8 reactors to Iran (a transaction that was only halted because the revolution got in the way). Thankfully, after the revolution, the Iran-Iraq war happened and Iraq managed to bomb many of Iran’s nascent nuclear projects. Of course, during the course of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US sold Iraq several anthrax cultures (and other pathogens) via the American Type Culture Collection. Then we spent the 1990s onward playing inspection games with both Iran (nuclear) and Iraq (bio-chemical) — which in neither case seem to have effectively curtailed the criminal ambitions of these nations.

Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

This video was created by Eric Spiegelman, who wrote:

Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.

On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr (link below). And, of course, compressed into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure.

The Times (of London) is thinking Obama could possibly be a robot