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Why Obama Should Not Have Received the Peace Prize — Yet

President Obama's only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That's important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama's predecessor. Had the world not suffered eight years of George W. Bush, Obama would not be receiving the Prize. He's prizeworthy and praiseworthy only by comparison.

-Robert Reich

This is an odd award. You'd expect it to come later in Obama's presidency and tied to some particular event or accomplishment. But the unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the 'hyper-power' as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it's a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was 'normal history' rather than dark aberration.

-Josh Marshall

This is soooo awkward. This is like when someone gives you a $400 vacuum cleaner that you can't return. Actually? Worse. This is a horrible, misguided, not-bright idea by THOSE MEDDLING SWEDES that has just entirely disrupted our political conversations and plans for most of the next month.

-Choire Sicha

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 (this guy should make Republicans wish Bush & Rove were still around - what an idiot!)

The Nobel Prize fallout will be the tipping point for Obama to start plowing through cigs again. Lock it down.

-Bill Simmons

Well, in that case, let's just give Matt Wieters the 2009 MVP award!

-Keith Law

So, the internet is exploding this morning with the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The President says he's "humbled," some pundits say he should turn it down, everyone's got an opinion. What's yours?

How arrogant of anyone to see this from a U.S. perspective, it is just proof of how desperate the Bush/Cheney junta made the rest of the world.

It's not Obama's prize. This prize is for the people of the United States for showing the world how a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic democracy can work.

I'm a big supporter of the President, but along the prestige continuum, the Nobel just moved away from the Congressional-Medal-of-Honor type award and a lot closer to the Mira-Sorvino-Winning-an-Oscar end of things.

I think the popular media meme is missing the point. Is Obama being awarded for his accomplishments as President? Or is he being awarded for changing the international climate? Obama did not start gathering the world's attention on January 20, 2009. As the first serious African American presidential candidate, the first presidential nominee of a major American political party, and during his campaign, he was a voice of reason, a supporter of peace. Let's not buy into the ridiculous idea that his eligibility for this award started on Jan. 20.

-Andrew Golis first, then Open Thread Contributors. Also follow TPM's live reaction wire.

I’m really excited that the Birfers, Becks, Oxycontin abusers, and pseudo-plumbers in Wingnuttia will now give me enough material to post on Cyn-C for the next few months. Put your ponchos on Cynics, the spittle is about to fly.

-Cynical C

President Obama is gambling that America is now mature enough to understand that machismo is not foreign policy, and that grandstanding on the global stage just won't succeed. In a new world, with other countries more powerful and confident, America's success — its security, its prosperity — depends on working with others. It's a big, bold gambit. The Nobel committee wanted to encourage this sentiment. I hope Americans will see that and encourage the path President Obama is taking

-Fareed Zakaria (This "article" is simply a transcript of Zakaria's talking head appearance - pathetic.)

What's with all these Kanye-Taylor Swift-President Obama jokes?

-Paolo Lim (amen)

The French have got all kinds of wild descriptions for eggs cooked to various degrees of doneness, but in American culinary terms, in the ideal soft-boiled egg, the white should be completely opaque, but not to the point of rubberiness (somewhere in the range of 155 to 180 degrees), and the yolk should be completely liquid (no hotter than 158 degrees). In this way, with each spoonful, you get tender bites of soft, velvety-smooth white, bathed in a sauce of glorious, bright golden, rich, flavorful yolk. These are the type of soft boiled eggs that'll get you laid.

-Serious Eats: How to cook the perfect egg (this is important!)

Bouchon Bakery's Fluffernutter Sandwich

via newyork.seriouseats.com

"If the good folks at Bouchon Bakery would add some crispy bacon to the filling, Elvis might come back from his grave to partake."

Blogging is the New Closure

I used the iPhone's "Kindle" app to purchase and enjoy My Revolutions, the first fiction I've read in a long time. I read a lot of scripting manuals (but do very little real development) and I read about 3000 pages of baseball predictions and notes a year (sadly, this is not an exaggeration). The book was excellent!

Once I settled on a font size (that sounds ridiculous) the text was very easy to read, at home, on the subway, or before going to sleep. I did have some pretty severe Kindle envy on the B train tonight, but I regained my focus quickly.

I have one major complaint: I found the act of finishing the book unsatisfying; after paging through 4393 "locations" (the Kindle doesn't entertain the conceit of page numbers) I missed the satisfaction of closing the volume one final time. The application resisted my impotent flicks, always returning to the final page.

Blogging the Moment

Happy iPod Day

If you're bored of the usual apple rumors, may I humbly suggest iPhone @ home, the "superset of all Apple rumors, ever."

Major Threat Redux

The working-class London borough of Hackney is furious that Nike is selling t-shirts with the Hackney logo without asking for permission to use (much less license) the decades-old icon. In keeping with their act first, act later practice, Nike has agreed to discuss the issue with Hackney.

Stay Free! brings us another Nike kerfuffle, "Just Coopt it."

I'm sure this story will follow a similar arc as the Minor Threat "controversy" (see kottke, torrez, me, mike, mike again, and anil) - debate among bloggers, coverage in alternative weeklies, GIF apology.

Chimpanzee Media Monitoring (really!) were the first to blog the story, and you can read the statement from the Mayor of Hackney. The Hackney city council is asking for financial reparations to fund sports activity, and assurances that the clothes were not produced in sweatshops.

I wonder if it's too late for the District of Columbia to argue that Minor Threat (and by extension, Dischord Records) is a local treasure. Reparations should be paid to local musicians and educational programs.

Cell Phone Comments

Ours is a Nokia house. Adriana has been loving the N90 and it's sweet camera, which for my money is two or three times nicer than the next best camera on a phone, which belongs to my beloved n70. And of course both phones sync wonderfully with our Apple computers. This is the perfect amount of PDA in my phone - I need to be able to check mail & appointments but rarely do I need to write mail or create appointments. When I do need to do that, the features are available, albeit inconvenient.

I've also been playing with the Spring A920 as part of their Ambassador Program. As far as I can tell, this program is a raging success. The blog chatter is off the charts, and if I'm at dinner with six or seven folks there's a good chance four of us may whip out the phones and start playing songs. This phone is great as a walkman or mini-boom box. However, there's no way will I pay $2.50 for a single or $4.99 for a ringtone.

I have played with the idea of using my Sprint phone as a primary phone, but the lack of syncing with OS X is a deal breaker. And although Nokia's "smart phone" utopia has never quite materialized and probably never will, it's still pretty good and I don't want to give it up. I love the music capabilities of my Sprint phone, but I simply don't need them. iPods are good for music, and in my estimation things will stay that way for the forseeable future.

Finally, the Sprint Ambassador program may be a victim of it's own success. I searched for some fun Sprint A920 ideas or tricks that I wouldn't have known about on my own, but all I could find was a bunch of blog entries. Relevant blog entries, but almost all of them talking about how good the Sprint A920 is at downloading music when that music is free. Yes, that is true. No, that is not what I need in a phone, especially when the music stops being free.

Looking Southwest

Looking Southwest
Originally uploaded by david.

Adriana and I took a walk through midtown last night and ended up at the new Apple store.

Lists make for lazy English, but here I go anyway:

• Apple is clearly channeling the Louvre. It's placed in the most Parisian-feeling corner of the city, just a half of a block away from Manhattan's Grand Army Plaza.


• Steve Jobs is clearly channeling Willy Wonka, all the way down to the Glass Elevator.


• FAO Schwarz looked like a deserted film set. Kind of sad for me, since it used to be my favorite store. My favorite was the basement in the old Forbidden Planet (on 11th st., not 13th). They had tens of thousands of back issues of comics in hardly sorted white cardboard boxes and Go-Bots. Every Go-Bot. Come to think of it, that is the exact opposite retail experience of the new Apple Store.


• One of the City's great architectural treasures, The Plaza, looked like the crummy construction site it is after her very public battle with the Hotel Workers Union. Just down 59th St. the Time Warner Center looked lonely and dark.


• No, we didn't go in.

So, to sum up. Glossy screens: bad. People: idiots. Steve Jobs: insane. This post: too long. Blah.

John Siracusa on the technology industry glossy screens.

Remnick, The New Yorker and the War

Jason linked to an NPR interview with David Remnick, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker. It's notable because it's the first time I've ever heard or read anyone take Remnick to task for his pro-war stance in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Remnick hems and haws and says "No one got the story quite right." This is one of the most enraging cop-outs that I hear reported over and over as an excuse for the press' total lack of spine and vision last year. I wish Remnick would simply apologize, which is clearly the right thing to do. There's more shame in not owning up to your mistakes than in admitting them. It seems like a minor point, but I naively hold the magazine to a higher standard.

I know Art Spiegelman left The New Yorker largely because of this issue, and now I see he's doing covers for Harper's, which seems silly and derivative. All in all it's just a minor footnote to this whole sad episode.