Here’s a video of President Barack Obama’s statement on winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. He says he will accept the award as a “call for action:”

The surprise news that President Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize didn’t put a damper on the ongoing, nonstop 7/24 political partisan warfare in the United States — in fact, it was akin to throwing a lit match into a big, fat puddle of gasoline. The Huffington Post has an eye-opening post HERE: conservatives reacted with outrage, anger and some demonization (one writer even...

Pavel Constantin, Romania This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Christo Komarnitski, Bulgaria This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. UPDATE: Here’s a VIDEO of Obama’s actual statement about winning the prize.

Reporters gasped when it was announced. Coverage: New York Times Washington Post Wall Street Journal Bloomberg Reuters BBC Matt Lauer, “So in some ways he wins this for not being George W. Bush…” Twitter’s going crazy. The Nobel website is dying under the sudden traffic surge. UPDATE: My favorite #ReasonsBHOwonNPP: “Because the Nobel committee was pissed about last week’s...

I was pleasanly surprised to see that Rabbi Eric Yoffie will be one of the keynote speakers at the J Street convention later this month. Rabbi Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism, describes himself as a dove who welcomed the founding of J Street as an alternative to AIPAC. Yet when J Street equated the actions of Israel and Hamas in Gaza, Yoffie lashed out, writing, [J Street's] words are...

Gaza City’s zoo lost its only two zebras to hunger during the Gaza war. The animals were extremely popular with area children, but were too expensive to replace. So the zookeepers got novel: they hired a painter to paint black and white stripes on two donkeys, making them approximate the real thing. The article reports that many Gaza children, having never seen a real zebra, enjoy their local “variant”....

Like when you might possibly be deciding whether to drop one or more 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities:

Gore Vidal, 83, described as America’s greatest essayist and one of its best-selling novelists, says he has in his life “crashed many barriers.” Vidal’s brutal manner of criticism hasn’t waned. The United States of America, he says, is a “madhouse” and its President is “overwhelmed” and “incompetent”. Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary...

Is it possible that the People’s Republic of China is in fact not aggressive at all, and wants to create ‘harmonious international relations?’ According to Fyodor Lukyanov of Russia’s Gazeta newspaper, Western countries – including Russia, may be superimposing their own ways of thinking on the Chinese, and hence, drawing the wrong conclusions. For Gazeta, Fyodor Lukyanov writes...

Guest Post By Leonidas Leonidas is a frequent, right of center commenter on The Moderate Voice and has been invited as a Guest Voice. ********** The Washington Post reports: Faced with the smothering inefficiencies of a state-run economy and unable to feed his people without massive imports of food, Cuban leader Raúl Castro has put his faith in compatriots like Esther Fuentes and his little farm out in the...

Everyone wants to know what he’s thinking. If Gates says no more troops for Afghanistan, Obama can say “Why send more troops if George Bush’s secretary of defense says they’re not necessary?” If Gates says send the troops, it will be extremely hard for Obama to reject the advice of a secretary so highly-regarded that he was the only Bush cabinet member reappointed by Obama. So...

Mike O’Hanlon says no. Eugene Robinson says, The men with the stars on their shoulders — and I say this with enormous respect for their patriotism and service — need to shut up and salute. Robinson adds that he applies the same standard to military officers whose opinions he agrees with. Clearly, Robinson shares the suspicion of many, including myself, that opinions about civil-military relations...

Steve Benen has been right on top of  the revelries on the right over Pres. Obama’s failed bid to get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago (which, for those who aren’t aware, is in the United States). Benen writes about the conservative meme of the moment regarding Obama’s Copenhagen trip, as showcased in George Will’s column today:

Dollar May Be Dropped In Oil Trade by John Wells A troubling article in the UK Independent reports that Gulf Arabs are planning with China, Russia and France to begin dropping the dollar as the trading currency for oil and moving to a hodgepodge of currencies including the Chinese yuan, the Japanese yen and the euro. Meetings have already been held discreetly by the involved finance ministers, and though it...

Is it time for the U.S. military to leave Afghanistan and that nation’s security to an international peacekeeping force? In this surprisingly forthright op-ed credited to the deputy general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies, the Beijing leadership definitively wades into the question of what should be done to fix Afghanistan. For the China Daily, Deputy General Li Qinggong...

THIS JUST IN! A news flash: An expert says Iran’s anti-Semitic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t have Jewish roots after all. The news comes on the heels of this raging story that Iran’s President, who believes the holocaust is some silly story cooked up to justify what he seems to feel is Israel’s unjustifiable existence, could have had Jewish roots. Given Ahmadinejad’s statements,...

Paresh Nath, The Khaleej Times, UAE This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to appear on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. All rights reserved.

Chris van Hollen (D-MD) on Republicans pressuring Pres. Obama to make a decision about whether to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan:

There seems to be an emerging trend in the Muslim world, in which all leaders regarded as despots are called ‘worse than Saddam’, ‘as bad as Saddam’, or the ‘new Saddam.’ Yesterday we posted ‘Muammar Qaddafi is No Better than Saddam,’ from the newspaper Sotal Iraq. Today, from Kuwait’s Arab Times, we have this article that warns about Iranian President...

WASHINGTON — At a White House dinner with a group of historians at the beginning of the summer, Robert Dallek, a shrewd student of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, offered a chilling comment to President Obama. “In my judgment,” he recalls saying, “war kills off great reform movements.” The American record is pretty clear: World War I brought the Progressive...

Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Libyan Despot Muammar Qaddafi succeeded in amusing and ticking off quite a few people last week with his rambling speech at the United Nations, which he made, according to him, not due to his role as dictator of Libya or president of the U.N. Security Council [yes - Qaddafi presently holds the rotating presidency of that body], but in his capacity as African Union chairman. According to Noor al-Harby, a...

Last month, I gave the President a hard time for denouncing GOP scare tactics, while relying on his scary stories to build support for his healthcare plan. On Monday, ABC’s Jake Tapper pointed out that the President’s scary stories were “not quite accurate” or, in plain English, completely misleading. First up, there’s the man who died when his insurance company cut off his chemotherapy...

On its broadcasts…