So Obama “won” the Nobel Peace Prize.

In truth, he got it because he is a Democrat who espouses (follow-through doesn’t matter for these people) policies that this Norwegian group likes. No, it is not just because he is not George W. Bush (although you wouldn’t necessarily know that by viewing his policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, or for renewing the Patriot Act), because I can’t imagine John McCain receiving the Nobel if the election had swayed a few percentage points the other way. So, women’s rights activists, dissidents against the Chinese government, and political prisoners be damned, Obama got moved to the front of the line for what used to be considered a top honor.

The deadline for nominations was 10 days after Obama took office, which means most likely that the prize is awarded on his campaign rhetoric and paying for abortions in Africa (which he decided to do his first day in office).

Of course if Obama has any respect for actual peace activists, or for justice in this world, he’d give it back and say he hopes he can earn it later.

The National Review brings up an interesting hidden motive the Nobelites might have had: whether to bomb Iran (or even use nuclear weapons) to prevent Iran from getting them. Perhaps that could be a silver lining in a very dark cloud: actual deserving past and future Nobelists like Muhammad Yunus will find their prize means less now.

For the record, here is a list of Obama’s accomplishments on behalf of war and strife:

• He has not pulled out of Iraq, as he repeatedly promised during his campaign, or even done anything to decrease troops there.
• He may escalate things in Afghanistan.
• He wants to renew three provisions of the Patriot Act that Republican senators are for, Democratic senators are against.
• “vowed to pursue a world without nuclear weapons” – as everyone does, but of course he has not given up American nukes and hasn’t discounted using them against Iran. And of course, he has agreed to keep Israel’s nuclear stash officially secret.

“One thing is certain — President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.” – Michael Steele, RNC

But this photo tells a different story.

If anyone racially profiled, it was the Harvard professor’s neighbor, who apparently called police and reported two black men breaking into Gates’ house. This is another lesson in why it’s important to get to know your neighbors!

The neighbor may have not called in the cops if Gates and his driver were white, but she/he may very well have still done so. Let’s imagine a different scenario: a robbery had taken place at Gates’ house, and the neighbor comes forward to say she saw it occurring but had figured the person breaking in was the owner locked out; I can imagine how she would have been ridiculed for thinking such a thing.

So it’s no surprise that if the neighbor didn’t know Gates lived there, she might have thought the men breaking down the front door were breaking into the house. This is true whether they were white or black.

So just the neighbor calling the police wasn’t inherently racist. I have relatives who always forget their keys, yet they’ve never had to break the door down to get in; they call someone who has a key or they find a hidden one. I’ve never seen a person breaking their own door down, have you?

Now we have the police. Depending on whose story you believe, the police officer was rude to Gates in his own house OR Gates refused to show identification to prove that he owned the house while accusing the officer (loudly) of being a racist. According to a third party, Barack Obama, the police officer “acted stupidly.” And yes, that was more of a detailed answer than he’s ever given on health reform.

But an aspect of this that hasn’t been reported in the media is that one of the officers that arrested Gates was black. You can see in this picture that as Henry Louis Gates is being led from his home in handcuffs, one of the officers standing in front of him is black (Gates is biracial himself, just as Obama is).

Gates hasn’t mentioned this at all, the media hasn’t mentioned it beyond publishing this picture. Isn’t that an important fact to get the whole picture of this story?

The AP writes:

” The thrifty measures Obama ordered for federal agencies are the equivalent of asking a family that spends $60,000 in a year to save $6.

Obama made his push for frugality the subject of his first Cabinet meeting, ensuring it would command the capital’s attention. It also set off outbursts of mental math and scribbled calculations as political friend and foe tried to figure out its impact.

The bottom line: Not much.

The president gave his Cabinet 90 days to find $100 million in savings to achieve over time.

For all the trumpeting, the effort raised questions about why Obama set the bar so low, considering that $100 million amounts to:

_Less than one-quarter of the budget increase that Congress awarded to itself.

_4 percent of the military aid the United States sends to Israel.

_Less than half the cost of one F-22 fighter plane.

_7 percent of the federal subsidy for the money-losing Amtrak passenger rail system.

_1/10,000th of the government’s operating budgets for Cabinet agencies, excluding the Iraq and Afghan wars and the stimulus bill.”

Of course, there are those who think that Obama’s doing all he can to restrain the budget.

Courtesy of The White Rabbit Cult.

I agree with the We the People Foundation on a few different, very important, points– for instance, the federal government should be directly accountable to the people through the redress of grievance system as mentioned in the Constitution. The group believes in abiding by the text of the Constitution, and they’re certainly right that our current government has gone far astray from that.

However, they undermine these valid points by focusing on tax protests (which have gotten them banned from certain activities through the courts and forced to give up a list of some of their supporters, increasing those supporters’ chances of an audit) and now this.

How does it make any sense at all that Obama was born in Kenya? Imagine you’re a 19-year-old American college student who married a Kenyan and is going to have a baby. Are you going to have the baby in an American hospital or are you going to go to Kenya to give birth in a hut? Imagine you’re that girl’s concerned parents. They were probably already upset enough about the situation already. Would they really have let their daughter fly to Kenya to have their grandchild?

I honestly don’t think so. Occam’s Razor applies here. It just wouldn’t have made sense for Obama’s mother to go to Kenya at that point.

And let’s say that Obama had been born in Kenya. You really don’t think that in that (to put it mildly) seriously cash-strapped country that a single Kenyan hospital employee– or villager– wouldn’t have run to the nearest press outlet willing to pony up and told all about how little Barack Obama was born at their hospital, or down the street? The country is so proud of him that it seems they’d be very willing to brag about how he was born there.

Finally, despite his birth certificate, does it matter if Obama was born in Kenya? His mother is an American, and I see no reason why he shouldn’t be an American citizen even if she was visiting another country. This is a different situation than Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was born in Austria to Austrian parents.