Below follows the lead from a piece I just wrote for CNN on Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize. An interesting tidbit that I learned from a TWN reader -- though I'm not sure it's accurate -- is that Nobel Prize nominations were due by February 1st -- thus just nine days after Barack Obama's Inauguration.

Even if true, the Nobel Prize committee chose shrewdly in my view.

Here is the intro to my CNN comment:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Cynics will say that Oslo was jealous that Copenhagen, Denmark, scored a visit from President Obama, and giving him a Nobel was the only way to get him to Norway.

But the Nobel Committee's decision to make Obama the only sitting U.S. president since Woodrow Wilson to receive the Nobel Peace Prize shows the committee's clear-headed assessment that Obama's "unclenched fist" approach to dealing with the world's most thuggish leaders has had a constructive, systemic impact on the world's expectations of itself.

Obama has helped citizens all around the world -- including in the United States -- to want a world beyond the mess we have today in the Middle East and South Asia. They want a world where America is benign and positive, and where other leaders help in supporting the struggles of their people for better lives rather than securing themselves through crude power.

Obama has found a way in this interconnected world of cell phones, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking to reach a majority of the world's citizens with his message of hope for a better world. He speaks past the dictators to regular people and has, on the whole, raised global political expectations about everything from climate change to nuclear nonproliferation in ways that no one in history has done before.

Here is the entire piece.

-- Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Awarding the Nobel peace prize to President Obama after only nine months in office is less a tribute to him than a tribute to the United States.

That is because the President's indisputable accomplishment in his short time in office is to restore America's standing in the rest of the world. He came to office at a time when respect for this country - and hence our ability to lead - was at an all-time low.

He went to work to restore our standing immediately. And he has succeeded - not only among the masses abroad but among foreign leaders. Last week's breakthrough in Geneva which the President achieved with our allies could only have occurred because our allies (and even less friendly powers like Russia ) are willing to follow this President's lead.

Essentially this award is a statement from the international community that it welcomes the United States assuming, once again, the role of world leader that it discarded eight years ago.

It is rare for nations to honor another nation for seeking to lead them, but that it what this award means.

It is a tribute to the President but even more to our country.

Not surprisingly countries that reject American leadership are grumbling. They understand that President Obama's sway over them is greatly increased. Previously, he had a powerful mandate from the Ameican people. He now has a powerful mandate from the international community.

He can achieve tremendous breakthroughs in the Middle East and throughout the world. All he needs is the will.

Any American who is not proud today is.....a Republican.

MJ Rosenberg is Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Actions Network

A controversy has erupted recently about whether Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually a Jew. Pundits and professors alike are divided over whether his original last name, which his family changed when he was 4, is exclusively Jewish. I attended Camp Havanagila, a Zionist summer camp in the Catskill Mountains, when I was young—and so, it seems did MA. For decades ago, as a young camper, I happened to come across his diary when I was cleaning up under my bunk bed. I didn't know who MA was then, but kept it because it offered such a novel perspective. Now, I am presenting it to the public—to settle the matter of his background once and for all.

The following excerpts from are Ahmadinejad's childhood years.The first entry was written when Ahmadinejad was 6, two years after the family converted.

March 1,1962 

Dear diary,

I had a playdate with Ali and asked him what he got for Hanukkah and he had no idea what I was talking about. At first I thought it was that his parents were mean and didn't give him any presents. But then I realized he actually didn't even know the holiday existed. He's so stupid. Who doesn't know what Hanukkah is?

March 3, 1962
Dear diary,
I was telling my mom I don't want anymore playdates with Ali because he's too stupid for me to associate with. I thought my mom would agree since she and my dad put such a premium on education and intelligence. But then my mom told me that actually most people don't know about Hanukkah because most people don't celebrate it. She told me to keep it a secret that we do. I asked her why and she said she'd tell me later. I wonder what it could be. I'm very curious, skeptical and analytical by nature, so it's driving me meshuggah.

March 7, 1962 

Dear diary,
My mom told me that a few years ago my parents did this thing called conversion where they stopped being Jewish, kind of and started being Muslim, kind of. But I'm not supposed to tell anyone because I could get the family in trouble. It's a family secret, so that's why I'm only telling you, dear diary. Other family secrets are Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Passover, Purim and the fact that we eat hamantashen which I thought was a national delicacy since the whole Purim thing takes place in Persia, which is, of course, present-day Iran anyway.

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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.

I'd rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm's threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise. Perhaps the Nobel committee can give him half the prize now and withhold the other half until he accomplishes one or more of these crucial missions.

Giving the Peace Prize to the President before any of these goals has been attained only underscores the paradox of Obama at this early stage of his presidency. He has demonstrated mastery in both delivering powerful rhetoric and providing the nation and the world with fresh and important ways of understanding current challenges. But he has not yet delivered. To the contrary, he often seems to hold back from the fight -- temporizing, delaying, or compromising so much that the rhetoric and insight he offers seem strangely disconnected from what he actually does. Yet there's time. He may yet prove to be one of the best presidents this nation has ever had -- worthy not only of the Peace Prize but of every global accolade he could possibly summon. Just not yet.

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?

Thread away.

The surprising announcement of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize received immediate headlines in Israel, with the right wing fearing that he will redouble his efforts to force a two state solution. Let's hope that is true. Arafat didn't deserve his award, we can see that in retrospect. And, it's not clear that Shimon Peres deserved his either. So maybe this prospective notion isn't such a bad idea.

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My first reaction was "how can a guy who's only been in office for nine months win the Nobel Peace Prize?" But once I woke up and thought about it for a few minutes I realized that the honor being bestowed on President Obama is well-deserved for one very good reason: his commitment to work for a world without nuclear weapons. Not only did he commit himself to this goal in April in Prague, but he has already taken many concrete steps in the right direction by commencing new arms reduction talks with Russia; committing himself to seek ratification and entry into force of a global nuclear test ban treaty; serving as the first U.S. president ever to chair a United Nations Security Council meeting on nuclear disarmament; pledging to secure all remaining "loose nukes" and nuclear bomb-making materials within four years, and holding a summit on the subject in Washington next year; and engaging in smart diplomacy by talking to Iran about getting rid of its nuclear weapons program. In short, he hasn't just talked about nuclear disarmament, he and his administration are out there working towards it every day. For this alone, his Nobel Peace Prize is well-deserved.

The Senate Finance Committee is set to vote Tuesday on a healthcare bill that just got a seal of approval from the Congressional Budget Office and is very likely to garner the vote of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe -- a twofer that gives the bill preeminence over four other healthcare bills that have emerged from House and Senate committees over these long months. Unlike those bills, though, the Senate Finance bill won't it have a public insurance option to compete with private insurers. Nor does it allow Medicare to use its bargaining power to negotiate lower drug prices, or adequately subsidize millions of middle-class families who will be required to buy health insurance that will be hard for them to afford. In short, it's a great deal for private insurers and Big Pharma but not such a great deal for middle-class Americans.

Meanwhile, the House Banking Committee is quietly circulating a draft set of reforms of financial markets likely to become the basis for whatever legislation emerges to fix the Street. Barney Frank, who heads the Committee, is a thoughtful progressive. But the draft has gaping loopholes that will let most financial firms escape -- such as one that exempts corporations that deal in financial derivatives from any requirements for capital, business conduct, record-keeping, and reporting if they use derivatives for the purpose of "risk management," which is the very thing they all claim they're doing. Neither the draft bill, nor the Committee, nor anyone on the Hill having anything to do with financial regulation, is raising what I consider to be the two key reforms necessary for avoiding another financial meltdown -- resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated commercial from investment banking, and applying antitrust laws to the remaining five biggest Wall Street banks so none is "too big to fail."

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Iran's ongoing internal "chess match," the intense controversy over Iran's presidential elections and the aftermath, is not only "not over," it's getting profoundly interesting. The charges & counter-charges continue to fly, with both sides dredging up extraordinary heavyweights, figuratively and literally, to their cause. A few mind-boggling examples:

Those notables who boycotted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-inauguration included no less than Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the very Ayatollah who led the 1979 revolution. Khomeini was otherwise occupied visiting one Alireza Beheshti, son of a famous clerical martyr from the early years of the revolution. Beheshti had just been released from imprisonment -- for being a close aide to Mir Hossen Musavi, the still resisting leader of the green wave.

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I have to wonder if Israel's new ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, is just trying to impress his boss, Prime Minister Netanyahu. I mean, it is just not possible that he honestly believes the hysterical nonsense he published today in the New Republic.

Oren writes that the Goldstone Report on Gaza "portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents--as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed."

This is crazy stuff, especially because it comes not from some rightwing crank but from Israel's highest ranking diplomat who serves in its most significant diplomatic post. Oren is also an intellectual, an author who is American born and educated.

Oren's take on the Goldstone report is ridiculous. In fact, nowhere in his piece does he dispute the report's finding that Israel (and Hamas) committed war crimes during the Gaza war.

Reading Oren, one would never know that 1,387 Palestinians (including 320 children) were killed compared to nine Israeli soldiers. Nowhere does he discuss the testimony of the Israeli soldiers who have told Goldstone, as well as Israeli groups investigating the conduct of the war, that the Israeli army repeatedly made no distinction between combatants and innocents.

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I have always thought that Robert Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War, written in 1994 was one of the most prescient books of the last quarter century. Interweaving environmental degradation, ethnic migrations, the rise of warlordism and many other factors, Kaplan painted an anarchic world of the future in which great state versus state conflict fought with large armies would be irrelevant--replaced by the non-state actors with religious and/or criminal motivations. This morning he describes with deep irony our lack of decent outcome in Afghanistan due to our misunderstanding of the nature of modern conflict.

In nuts-and-bolts terms, if we stay in Afghanistan and eventually succeed, other countries will benefit more than we will. China, India and Russia are all Asian powers, geographically proximate to Afghanistan and better able, therefore, to garner practical advantages from any stability our armed forces would make possible.

Everyone keeps saying that America is not an empire, but our military finds itself in the sort of situation that was mighty familiar to empires like that of ancient Rome and 19th-century Britain: struggling in a far-off corner of the world to exact revenge, to put down the fires of rebellion, and to restore civilized order. Meanwhile, other rising and resurgent powers wait patiently in the wings, free-riding on the public good we offer. This is exactly how an empire declines, by allowing others to take advantage of its own exertions.

The neoconservative scholar, Robert Kagan--a favorite of Pentagon hawks--once wrote, "Over the last six decades, it is an objective fact that Americans have been expanding their power and influence in ever widening arcs." This widening arc of empire has now brought us into the box canyon of Afghanistan, with no safe exit. I have argued for a while that the cost of empire has meant that we have sacrificed the basics of advanced societies--reasonably priced, good healthcare and education--for the burdens of being the world's unpaid cop. It was not a fair trade and Kaplan's "free riders"--China, Russia, India, France, Brazil, et al--watch from a certain remove as we spend our blood and treasure to their advantage.

This is the real conversation President Obama needs to have with the American people over the next month. I am highly doubtful that such an honest account can be had in such a highly charged partisan atmosphere. But eventually some President will have to tell the truth about the American empire project.

Mahmoud Abbas clearly knows the truth of the adage "with friends like these, who needs enemies?" The friend in this case is the United States.

Last month a United Nations team headed by the distinguished South African jurist Richard Goldstone issued a report - based on months of interviews and on-the-ground investigations - concluding that Israel and Hamas both committed war crimes in Gaza. The report's primary focus was on Israel, largely because the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army was 1,387 (including 320 children) compared to nine Israeli soldiers who were killed by Hamas.

The Israeli government - and the lobby here - went into full "shoot the messenger" mode, attacking Goldstone rather than addressing the incidents described in his report.

Nonetheless, the next step was for the United Nations Humans Rights Council - which had commissioned the Goldstone report - to consider its findings and then refer it to the UN Security Council.

But that is not going to happen. According to media reports in Israel and here, Israel persuaded the United States to get the UNHRC to defer consideration of the report. But then came the crazy part: the United States pressured the Palestinian Authority to itself request deferral.

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If this article from the U.K. Independent is true, the world financial center of gravity just moved.

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning - along with China, Russia, Japan and France - to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

Robert Fisk, who wrote the story is a good reporter with a lot of experience. One could argue that a good bit of the American competitive advantage over the last 30 years has been the dollars role as the world reserve currency. It has kept our interest rates abnormally low as foreign debt-holders buy U.S. treasuries. If that changes, everything changes.

Akiva Eldar, the distinguished journalist for Ha'aretz, wonders what the US would do if Iran offers to give up its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for Israel ending the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. (Israeli troops left Gaza but still control all its borders, air space and sea lanes).

Eldar writes: "Let us assume that tomorrow Iran informs its American interlocutors that it will cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency, abide by all United Nations resolutions relating to nuclear weapons, and recognize Israel - but on two conditions: first, that Iran will receive assurances from the international community that it will immediately act to implement UN resolutions calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in territories conquered in 1967, and a commitment to expedite the end of Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights; secondly, that Israel be forced to open its reactor in Dimona to IAEA inspectors, to ensure that the country has developed nuclear energy solely for peaceful purposes rather than for producing dozens of atomic bombs, which foreign press reports say do, in fact, exist."

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Last Friday's job report showed that most of the US is experiencing enormous economic pain, even if America's economy is now in a recovery. Overall unemployment rose to 9.8%, with the unemployment rate for men hitting a new post-depression high. The economy shed another 260,000 jobs in September and the previous figure for jobs lost in the recession was revised up by more than 800,000. The average workweek continues to shorten. With real wages falling, this ensures that most workers will be taking home shrinking wages.

For the vast majority of people in the country, who derive the vast majority of their income from working, the economy looks really awful. But the economy is not looking bad for everyone.

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Whether the Spanish banks are hiding their losses is a major debate going on in the blogosphere and has been detailed at length in  the Financial Times.  The stakes are very high – this is a debate about the stability of the Eurozone and possibly of Europe itself.

Background

I have a lot of American readers whose interest in finance stops at the American border.  I need to outline what is going on. 

Spain had a monstrous building boom – a building boom on (at least) Californian standards based very much on coastal development.  The building boom has slowed considerably.    The building boom attracted relatively unskilled labour – as building booms are apt to do – and about 40 percent of all migrants to EU settled in Spain.  Wikipedia (I wish I could read the original Spanish source) state that the foreign population in Spain has gone from about half a percent of the population in 1981 to over 11 percent recently.  This change in racial mix has resulted in only minor tensions (with the possible exception of the large terrorist attack in Madrid).  

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In his Saturday radio address, President Obama acknowledged the White House is exploring "additional options to promote job creation.” It's about time. This is the worst job market in seventy years -- including the longest duration of steep job losses.

If anyone had any doubt that something far more dramatic must be done, listen to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He warned Sunday against further stimulus because “we are in a recovery, and I think it would be a mistake to say the September numbers alter that significantly.” Greenspan has turned into an inverse soothsayer. After his cataclysmic error about where the economy was headed before the meltdown, his views about the future should be carefully noted as being the exact opposite of what's likely to be in store.

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If the average American worker had any economic literacy, they would look at this chart and scream, "I've been getting royally screwed since 2001!" Capitalism was not supposed to work this way--as the workers become more productive their wages fall. But of course as wages fall and layoffs grow, the working class is well aware that they can no longer borrow from their home equity or their ten credit cards and so they cut back on discretionary spending. This means that our ten years of overcapacity in what's left of our industrial plant will get worse

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Michael Moss has this shattering piece on E. coli hamburger poisoning in today's NYT. I gave up counting the number of companies he cites who seized upon every legal loophole to circumvent regulations that would keep feces out of ground beef.

And who was it, conservatives, you expected to keep you safe? Do you really want the government's hands out of your hamburger? Or is the paralyzed 22-year-old Stephanie Smith, a victim of E. coli passed down the food chain by Cargill in the guise of ""American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties," which included slaughterhouse trimmings, a case of collateral damage in the War Against Regulation?

It's worthwhile remembering, by the way, what a serious newspaper can do.