From Vatican City:

Oct 11, 2009 / 10:45 am

Today, Pope Benedict XVI canonized five new saints in St. Peter’s Basilica, including Fr. Damian of Molokai. During his homily, the Holy Father noted that all of the saints followed the invitation of Christ: “Come, follow me!”

Speaking to the faithful packed in St. Peter’s Basilica this morning, the Pope described the invitation of Christ saying that he “invites his disciples to the total gift of their lives, without calculation and human self-interest, with a wholehearted faith in God.”

This call, the Holy Father continued, is welcome by the saints who “place themselves in humble obedience” to follow the Lord.

They no longer focus on themselves, the Pope explained, but by their “logic of faith.” They choose “to go against the trends of the time living according to the Gospel.”

Benedict XVI then gave a brief description of each of the five newly-canonized saints: a bishop, a Trappist brother, two priests and a nun.

Archbishop Zygmunt Szczesny Feliński of Warsaw, founder of the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Family of Mary, was committed to evangelization and support for the poor, defending the oppressed during the Russian occupation of Poland, and was sentenced to 20 years in exile in Jaroslaw on the Volga. “His gift of himself to God and man,” the Holy Father said in Polish, was “full of confidence and love,” and “becomes a shining example for the entire Church.”

To those younger generations today who “are not satisfied with what they have,” the Pontiff gave the example of Rafael Arnaiz Baron, who came from a wealthy family and was a bit “of a dreamer.” He died when he was 27 years old, a Cistercian oblate, considered one of the greatest mystics of the twentieth century.

The Pontiff next spoke of Dominican Father Francisco Coll y Guitard, founder of the Congregation of Dominican Sisters of the Annunciation Blessed Virgin Mary. Through his preaching, the saint spread his love of the Word of God and the Sacrament of Reconciliation among all people especially the young.

Father Damian, the famous apostle to the lepers, left Flanders, Belgium at the age of 23 to go on a mission to modern day Hawaii. “Not without fear and loathing,” Pope Benedict underlined, “Father Damian made the choice to go on the island of Molokai in the service of lepers who were there, abandoned by all. So he exposed himself to the disease of which they suffered. With them he felt at home. The servant of the Word became a suffering servant, leper with the lepers, during the last four years of his life.”

He continued, “To follow Christ, Father Damian not only left his homeland, but has also staked his health so he, as the word of Jesus announced in today’s Gospel tells us, received eternal life.”

The figure of Father Damian, Benedict XVI added, “teaches us to choose the good fight not those that lead to division, but those that gather us together in unity.”

And finally, the Pope spoke of St. Mary of the Cross, of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and her “wonderful work to help the most vulnerable elderly.” He noted that her initiatives and goals are “still valid today, given that many elderly people suffer from multiple poverty and loneliness, sometimes even being abandoned by their families.” ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

America’s potentially ominous sovereignty sellout.
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Note: This item went up at Pajamas Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Friday. I’m going to keep it at the top most of Sunday because it addresses an under-reported development.

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You may have missed it, because there wasn’t much news coverage.

Yes, there have been a lot of competing stories, some of them indeed quite important. There’s the frightening erosion of our military position in Afghanistan (which withers, while our commander-in-chief dithers), the health care tug of war, and of course, the ongoing job-killing, deficit-exploding POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy, which the nation has endured since the summer of 2008.

But a few relatively and quite obviously unimportant stories have consumed way too much of the available oxygen. Yes, Chicago’s Olympic bid smackdown did expose Barack Obama and his handlers as over-proud, naive, or both. And yes, it was quite unusual for Saturday Night Live to openly mock a hard-left president after only eight months in office. Establishment media’s obsession with playing presidential defense in these two matters has exposed their hypocrisy to many casual news consumers who may finally understand that they can’t automatically trust what they see out of the Big Three networks, CNN, and others.

But meanwhile, you may not have noticed that our government gave away control of the Internet. Here’s how the UK Guardian reported it:

US relinquishes control of the internet
• Icann ends agreement with the US government
• Move will give other countries a prominent internet role
(more…)

Thanks to Drudge, the Internet will likely be abuzz with the news and video about Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer’s challenge to former Vice President Al Gore over correcting the nine errors found by a British judge in Gore’s Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth” documentary.

McAleer is co-producer of Not Evil, Just Wrong, a film challenging the content of Gore’s film, that according to Wiki will be premiering on October 18.

When organizers of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference tired of McAleer’s refusal to back down and acquiesce to Gore’s conveniently incomplete answer, they cut off his microphone. The video also shows a meeting official scolding McAleer afterwards for attempting to “monopolize” the floor, telling him that “you got as much as you’re going to get.”

Gore’s answers to McAleer’s challenges are so disingenuous that they deserve their own Oscar for dissembling.

Here is a transcript of the exchange, which begins at about the 0:40 mark of the video:

McAleer: The judge in the British High Court after a lengthy hearing found that there were nine significant errors (in the movie). This has been shown to children. Do you accept those findings, and have you done anything to correct those errors?

Gore: Well I’m not going to go through, uh, uh, a-all of those. Eh-th-th-the ruling was in favor of the movie, by the way, and the ruling was in favor of showing the movie in schools. And th-th-that’s really th-th-the uh-uh-uh bottom line on that. There’s been such a long discussion of each one of those, uh, specific things, um, one of them for example was the polar bears. If I remember correctly, it’s been a long time ago, that polar bears really aren’t endangered. Well, polar bears didn’t get that word, heh, so uh (Audience chuckles.) ….

McAleer: Well the number of polar bears have increased, actually, and are now increasing ….

Gore: You don’t think they’re endangered, do you?

McAleer: Well the number of polar bears have increased.

Gore: Do you think they’re endangered?

McAleer: The number of polar bears have increased. (Audience laughs). If the number of polar bears increased, surely they’re not endangered.

At this point, organizers began to move to stop the McAleer’s questioning, eventually cutting him off.

McAleer may or may not be right in his final assertion (bald eagle populations had to increase for a while before they become both officially and in reality not endangered). But Gore’s in-essence claim of vindication by the British high court is a risible misrepresentation of the actual October 2007 result, as described at the time in coverage at ABC News. The network even indicated in the report’s sub-headline that the ruling “resurrects the global warming debate.” You’ll also note that Gore’s peeps began spinning the ruling a some kind of victory from the moment the ruling came down:

An Inconvenient Verdict for Al Gore

British Court Ruling on Errors in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ Resurrects Global Warming Debate

The verdict couldn’t have come at a less convenient time for Al Gore.

One day before Friday’s announcement that he was a co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a British High Court judge ruled that Gore’s global warming film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” while “broadly accurate,” contained nine significant errors.

The ruling came on a challenge from a UK school official who did not want to show the film to students. High Court Judge Michael Burton said that the film is “substantially founded upon scientific research and fact” but that the errors were made in “the context of alarmism and exaggeration.”

Burton found that screening the film in British secondary schools violated laws barring the promotion of partisan political views in the classroom. But he allowed the film to be shown on the condition that it is accompanied by guidance notes to balance Gore’s “one-sided” views, saying that the film’s “apocalyptic vision” was not an impartial analysis of climate change.

The claim was originally filed by truck driver Stewart Dimmock, whose two children have not yet seen the film.

“I got finished watching the documentary and felt I had watched a science fiction film,” he told ABC News’ Joseph J. Simonetti. “The court ruled nine inaccuracies. How many more exist?”

Dimmock criticized the British government’s use of the film in schools, saying, “It was about time someone got off their backside and say, ‘Oh, you’re wrong.’” Yet he admitted, “I’m not an expert on global warming, then or now. I’m just a lorry driver.”

The ruling resurrected the heated debate over the film’s arguments between Gore’s supporters and climate change skeptics.

His spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said that Gore was “deeply gratified that the court upheld the fundamental thesis of the film” and “affirmed it as a valid educational tool.”

The bolded sentence in the excerpt makes mincemeat of Gorebot Kreider’s claim in the excerpt’s final sentence.

At the end of the video, which was produced by the MacIver Institute for Public Policy, which describes itself as “a Wisconsin based think tank that believes in free markets, individual freedom and responsible government,” McAleer makes a crucial point about journalists’ dereliction of duty throughout their coverage of environmental issues over the years (link within added by me):

McAleer: At the Society for Environmental Journalists, the reaction of the journalists, the reaction of Andrew Revkin of the New York Times, the reaction of the journalists, was to shut down the journalists and protect the politicians.

….What I would like of environmental journalists like myself is that you treat Big Environment the same way as you treat Big Politics, and Big Government, and Big Business. Y’know, treat Big Environment the way you treat Big Business. Where does the money come? Who’s channeling it? …. Where is the independent verification of those claims? But they don’t. If an environmentalist organizer says something, it’s accepted as gospel.

Well said, sir. And well done.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

From Irondale, Alabama:

Oct 5, 2009 / 05:12 pm

Pope Benedict XVI has awarded the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice Medal to Mother Angelica, founder of the Eternal Word Television Network and also EWTN executive Deacon Bill Steltemeier. The medal is the highest honor the Pope can bestow upon laity and religious.

Bishop of Birmingham Robert J. Baker conferred the awards in a brief ceremony following Sunday benediction at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama.

Noting that yesterday was the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, Bishop Baker recalled the lasting impact that the Italian saint made on the renewal of the Church. He then remarked that “We also have the privilege of acknowledging the contributions to our Church of another person in the great Franciscan tradition, whose link to St. Francis is through St. Clare … Mother Angelica.”

Mother Mary Angelica, 86, is a Poor Clare Nun of Perpetual Adoration who founded Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama in 1961. She began EWTN in a garage on the monastery property in 1981. In 1999 she relocated the monastery to the grounds of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville.

Deacon R. William Steltemeier, 80, is a former Nashville, Tenn. attorney who left his law practice to join Mother Angelica’s fledgling television network. He served as EWTN’s president and now serves as chairman of the network’s Board of Governors.

Commenting in his homily at Our Lady of the Angels Monastery on Sunday, Bishop Baker said that the medal is “a significant acknowledgement by our Holy Father, of Mother’s labors of love in support of our Church.”

“By giving awards the Church is not saying people or institutions are perfect, but we are saying that Mother Angelica, through this network, has made a significant contribution to the new evangelization heralded and promoted by recent Popes,” the Bishop of Birmingham said. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

How well I remember it. In April 2006, when Bob Carter, in a UK Telegraph op-ed, observed that there had been no warming of the earth since 1998, global warming advocates screamed that Carter didn’t know what he was talking about; that he was only “a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, engaged in paleoclimate research,” not a real climatologist; and that anyway, the science was settled, so he (and we) should shut up already.

3-1/2 years later, Paul Hudson, the climate correspondent (at least for now) at no less than the previously climate koolaid-poisoned BBC, without naming him, is acknowledging the correctness (HT Instapundit) of Carter’s observations. The Beeb reporter also concludes …. brace for it …. that “it seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over.” Imagine that.

As I’ve been writing for years, “Consensus, conschmensus.”

Here are selected paragraphs from Hudson’s report:

What happened to global warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998. (The contention about 1998 may be incorrect; it IS incorrect in regards to the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. — see Update below)

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Recent research has ruled out solar influences on temperature increases.

…. But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.

He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.

He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.

If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.

It doesn’t really seem to be much of a “revolution” to admit that Mr. Sun influences global temps, but there it is.

This spreadsheet shows that worldwide carbon dioxide emissions grew from 23.16 billion metric tons in 1998 to 29.20 billion in 2006 — a 26% increase. If manmade gases were causing warming, one would expect that we should have almost literally gone to Hades in a handbasket during that period, and to have burnt to a more serious crisp since then. Obviously, that has hasn’t happened. It hasn’t because the preponderance of the evidence, or at least of the evidence that hasn’t been conveniently lost, seems to support the notion that the idea of man-made global warming may be one of the biggest hoaxes associated with power-grabbing efforts by statists in human history.

Given the evidence, it’s truly frustrating to see this country’s president continue to act as if man-made global warming is an established, irrefutable fact, and, along with his party, continue to insist that draconian cuts in this country’s emissions must be made — even as the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) chug merrily along.

When the globalarmists are starting to lose the BBC, you know that their foundations are beginning to crumble. Quick — better pass another bill that no one will have time to read or properly evaluate, and that the U.S. establishment media, still firmly in globaloney’s grip, will cheer.

UPDATE: Thanks to BizzyBlog commenter zf for reminding me that 1934 is the hottest year on record, not 1998, at least in regards to the 48 contiguous states of the U.S. I have revised my opening sentence accordingly. BBC’s opening-paragraph contention regarding temperatures in the entire world in 1998 may be incorrect.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

As if the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (Fan and Fred) crackups weren’t bad enough, IBDeditorials.com noted on Thursday evening that another bad-mortgage shoe is about to drop. This time it’s at the Federal Housing Authority (FHA).

First, let’s revisit Fan and Fred to remind readers just how complete the disaster has been at these decades in the making Democratic crony-controlled entities.

A little-noticed CNNMoney.com item by Chris Isidore in late July told us what the original announced loss estimate had been a year earlier (bolds are mine throughout this post):

When Congress was debating the bailout of Fannie and Freddie last July (of 2008), the official estimate from the Congressional Budget Office was that a bailout would most likely cost taxpayers $25 billion, with only a 5% chance of the price tag reaching $100 billion between them.

Isidiore then noted that just one year later the loss estimate had doubled:

…. Neither firm has given an estimate as to how high losses will reach. But the original limit of $100 billion in losses set in place when the government put Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship, essentially a form of bankruptcy, last September was quickly raised early this year to $200 billion each because of concerns about looming losses.

In return for pumping taxpayer dollars into the two firms, Treasury received preferred stock, which is designed to give the government a healthy 10% to 12% dividend. But few expect that Fannie or Freddie will be able to pay that dividend, let alone return the money handed to the firms to cover their losses.

Barely 45 days after Isidore’s item, John Ydstie at NPR noted that the supposed worst-case scenario had doubled yet again:

in its August update the CBO predicts the Treasury’s TARP program — which rescued banks, auto companies and homeowners — will lose more than $200 billion. It estimates the takeover of Fannie and Freddie could cost almost $400 billion.

That gets us back to IBD’s editorial on the FHA, a SO-SAD (Same Old Song And Dance) situation involving — you guessed it — even more lending to unqualified borrowers. What’s particularly galling is that FHA seems to have proactively and irresponsibly decided to be the conduit for bad loans once Fan and Fred stopped serving that purpose:

A huge, government-run housing agency shows massive losses and needs a bailout. Fannie Mae? Freddie Mac? No. It’s the Federal Housing Administration, in a bad case of financial-meltdown deja vu.

The FHA, which insures mortgages made by first-time buyers with low down payments, says it may need a bailout because it will have losses of — get this — $54 billion. And how did it lose all that? By backing home loans made to people who couldn’t pay them off.

Where have we heard this before?

At a time when we talk routinely of trillion dollar deficits, $54 billion may not seem like much. But it’s huge. Worse, it signals that the government, contrary to its repeated assertions of fiscal competence, is incapable of learning from its worst mistakes.

In the case of the FHA, as the Los Angeles Times notes, it doubled down on its bad bet. “This year alone,” the Times found, “the agency has backed nearly 2 million mortgages worth at least $328 billion.

Those who think that there are people inside our government who are bound and determined to take the economy down will consider adding FHA’s obviously deliberate move to take on new amounts of virtually guaranteed losses to their dossier.

Despite the LA Times work IBD refers to, the establishment media has been very slow to notice the deteriorating FHA situation. That has changed in the past 24-36 hours, which would appear to indicate that once again, an editorial in a conservative publication has shown the media where the story is. It should be the other way around.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

…. “US forces leave isolated Afghan base after attack“:

Taliban fighters claimed Friday their flag was flying victoriously over an eastern Afghan village U.S. forces abandoned after suffering casualties in one of the war’s deadliest battles for American troops.

The withdrawal this week from mountainous Kamdesh, an isolated hamlet near the Pakistan border, was planned well before the intense Oct. 3 attack left a pair of outposts in ruins and eight American troops dead.

The NATO-led coalition said the move was part of a new strategy outlined months ago by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to shut down remote difficult-to-defend outposts and redirect forces toward larger population areas to protect more civilians.

The strategy has an inadvertent consequence, however: Every inch of ground the U.S. cedes, emboldened Taliban militants are likely to take and trumpet as a victory over another superpower.

The fourth paragraph is exactly what Lara Logan (and anyone else who understands human nature) predicted would happen — which is why what’s in the second and third paragraphs is nothing more than an poor effort at CYA.

When are all the lefties who said for years that “Afghanistan is the good war” going to get passionate about winning it? Oh, I forgot: “Victory” isn’t necessarily the goal. If victory isn’t the goal, losing is usually the result.

From Appia, Samoa:

Oct 7, 2009 / 06:10 am (CNA).- An Australian sister and her colleagues at a Samoan primary school saved the lives of 320 school children when she quickly moved them to higher ground after an earthquake triggered a tsunami warning.

The Queensland-born Sister Doris Barbero, a Salesian, was teaching at St. Joseph’s Primary School on the edge of the sea in a village in southwest Western Samoa. The school is sponsored by Catholic Mission in Australia.

On Sept. 29 Sr. Doris, two other sisters and 11 lay staff felt the violent rumbling of the earthquake. According to the Archdiocese of Sydney, she said her first reaction was relief that all the children and the school had come through unhurt.

Then came strong aftershocks and the tsunami warning.

“We realized we had a very short time to get the children away from the school and the sea and up to higher ground to the hills behind us,” Sister Doris said in a phone conversation with the Archdiocese of Sydney.

Sr. Doris and the staff scrambled up the hills with the children, who ranged in age from four to fifteen years old.

The older children helped the younger ones, who were very frightened.

The group remained huddled in the hills until the following day, the Archdiocese of Sydney reports. ….

Go here for the rest of the story.

That there has been little love lost between yours truly and CBS correspondent Lara Logan over the years is not exactly a secret (see here, and a previously linked Fox News story here).

I don’t know what has happened in past couple of years to knock some sense into Logan (“good war” Afghanistan v. “bad war” Iraq? Motherhood and/or marriage?). But her clear-headed, passionate, alarming interview with CBS News’s Bob Orr about the situation in Afghanistan is a must-see (HT Hot Air). In the process, she leaves a number of leftist myths and fantasies, including the crap about how pursuing war aggressively only helps the enemy in their recruiting, in shreds on the floor.

Following an interesting back story about our Secretary of Defense’s apparent intent to water down what Obama ultimately got to see, the Logan interview goes from about 1:35-8:30 of the video (don’t waste your time with what follows, which is about a Ralph Nader book):

If I were only reading and not seeing the words that follow and didn’t know who was saying them, I would almost believe they came from Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney instead of Lara Logan.

Here’s a transcript of most of the interview:

LOGAN: General McChrystal has been very clear that there is a very short window here, probably 12 months, to turn this thing around.

…. They really can’t afford to deliberate for very long about this ….

Right now, everyone agrees that the momentum is on the side of the insurgents and the terrorists. What does that mean? It doesn’t mean they’re winning. It doesn’t mean every time there’s a battle that they win. What it means is that the public perception, the flow, the increase in insecurity, everything is on their side right now. It’s going the way they want it to.  And that is what McChrystal has to stop.

…. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are very effectively using civilian casualties in their propaganda against the U.S.

…. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are clearly at war with the U.S. They’re not concerned with counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, call it whatever you like. They are at war, and McChrystal has to fight that war. And to do that, he has to have troops to secure the people, and also not to give up ground to the enemy, which is what they’re going to do if they withdraw from these small combat outposts in the remote areas. They’re going to say, “Here, have the mountains, have the valleys, have all these places that are hard to get to.” Oh where by the way, there aren’t huge numbers of Afghans, but there are many Afghans scattered across these remote areas. And oh yes, as well, that’s where Al Qaeda had their training camps before. So let’s let them come back in and plot more attacks and do whatever they want in those remote areas, while we concentrate on building schools and roads that are just going to get blown up? It doesn’t work. You have to fight the war as well. You can’t just do counterinsurgency.

…. It’s very clear to the soldiers on the ground that they need more help.

…. (characterizing Joe Biden’s so-called “counterterrorism” strategy) Absolute disaster. …. No way it would work. Because you can’t do any of those things if you don’t have security in most of the country. And let’s not forget, the violence now spread, from the south and the east of Afghanistan. It’s in the north, it’s in the west, it’s everywhere. It’s in the provinces surrounding Kabul. I mean, it’s like, what kind of a wake-up call do you need to say that you’re still at war?

And so this idea that you can separate the things is just ludicrous. That’s why I think, General McChrystal has gone and made everybody angry by his speech in London saying, “This is what I need, and nothing else is going to work.”

Because you know what? You can be asked to give 10 options. But if you know that only one of them is going to work, only one’s going to work. And even then, he’s not guaranteeing that’s going to work. So I don’t understand why no one would listen to the man you put your faith in, and said “He’s the guy who’s going to do this for us. You’ve got to give him what he wants.

ORR: … (If) they cede Afghanistan back to the Taliban, does Al Qaeda then have safe haven again in Afghanistan?

LOGAN: Of course. Without hesitation. You know, one very important point to make. There are a lot of Pashtoon apologists out there, Taliban apologists who are advisers to this White House, and to this administration. And they’re saying, “Oh you know the Taliban’s fight is not with the U.S. You give them power, bring back the moderate Taliban, and everything will be okay. It’s nonsense. It’s the worst advice we could ever get from anyone.

First of all, the Taliban have no intention of sharing power, and they have every intention of bringing Al Qaeda along with them, and giving Al Qaeda safe haven again. They absolutely do have a problem with the U.S. They want to see the U.S. fail. It’s very important to note that talks with “moderate Taliban” (makes “quote marks” gesture) have been going on since 2003. It’s 2009, six years later. What have those negotiations and talks brought? Absolutely nothing. So that is one of the biggest lies ever on this whole situation right now. There are no moderate Taliban that matter in this fight.

And for the U.S. to give Al Qaeda the victory, I mean the philosophical victory, the physical victory, the tactical victory, on every single level would be catastrophic in the War on Terror. It would be the greatest recruiting advertisement ever for Al Qaeda. And on top of that, you’re leaving their top leadership intact? You’re leaving Osama Bin Laden there to come back and do what he wants? …. The Afghan intelligence minister put it best when he said to me, “There’s no glory in defeat.”

I think I detected an “I almost can’t believe I’m saying this” expression on Logan’s face before she went into that final paragraph.

I wish I was as apparently confident as Logan appears to be that we have “a commander in chief who wants to do the right thing.”

Posted in revised form at NewsBusters.org.

I can’t top what Michael Binyon at the UK Times Online wrote, so I’ll let him take over for a moment:

The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to President Obama will be met with widespread incredulity, consternation in many capitals and probably deep embarrassment by the President himself.

Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. It was clearly seen by the Norwegian Nobel committee as a way of expressing European gratitude for an end to the Bush Administration, approval for the election of America’s first black president and hope that Washington will honour its promise to re-engage with the world.

Instead, the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace.

…. they can no longer separate hopes from achievement. The achievements of all previous winners have been diminished.

Geez, and he isn’t really even black (“Mr. Obama is only 6.25% African Negro”), except by twisted, pathetic self-definition.

Kaus is right that Obama should turn the award down. It would actually be an impressive move. The odds of it happening appear to be zip, zero, and nada. The tragedy is that Obama, if he doesn’t already, will more than likely convince himself that he really does deserve it.

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UPDATE: Mary Katharine Ham at the Weekly Standard tells us who the Nobel Committee passed over.

UPDATE 2: Real Clear Politics has 7-plus minutes of priceless Rush audio with Dittocam video. Rush is right that this is an attempt to emasculate our foreign policy beyond what has happened already in just 8-1/2 months.

It’s here.

It will go up here at BizzyBlog on Sunday morning (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires.

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Snarky Comment: Perhaps ceding control over the Internet to “the rest of the world” is the real reason why Obama has been handed (I would say “won,” but even his most fevered fans can’t seriously argue that this man has yet done anything to advance the cause of peace) the Nobel Peace Prize.

It will be interesting to see what Saturday Night Live does with the Nobel news.

Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, who has been on quite a roll as of late, had the Media Bias Catch of the Day, Polling Division, this morning. Rush mentioned Hoft’s post on his show this afternoon.

Jim compared the results of a Quinnipiac poll on ObamaCare to how Bloomberg reported the results. He first noted what Quinnipiac found:

Jim then asked, “So, how does the state-run media report this news?” Here’s the answer:

Bloomberg’s false fig leaf is this paragraph from Quinnipiac:

But Republicans get their lowest grades since Obama was elected on several measures:

• Voters disapprove 64 – 25 percent of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job, with 42 percent of Republican voters disapproving;
• Only 29 percent think Republicans on Capitol Hill are acting in good faith;
• Voters trust Obama more than Republicans 47 – 31 percent to handle health care;
• Voters 53 – 25 percent have an unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party.

Only one of the items even relates to health care, and the question is in no way comparable to the one asked about a specific (well, as specific as he ever gets) Obama plan. About Obama, it says that “American voters oppose 47 – 40 percent President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan.” By any reasonable reading of this result in combination with the third bullet just noted, the most you could possibly conclude is that voters specifically don’t like ObamaCare, but don’t trust Republicans to do any better with the issue in general. That simply doesn’t translate into “Voters Back Obama Over Republicans on Health Care” by any sane interpretation. The truth is that “Voters Back Republicans in Their Opposition to ObamaCare.”

Jim wrapped his post by asking, “Could the media be any more in the tank for these guys?” Only if they were on the government dole, Jim — and that may be coming.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.