Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize; Breaks the Democratic/Republican tie

From the New York Times:

"Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize" The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 on Friday totie former US Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations' climate panel, citing the importance of battling global warming.”




That makes Democrats 3, Republicans 2.

We're now winning, breaking the Nobel Prize tie.

On the Democratic side:

Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace prize in 2002, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson won, for being founder of the League of Nations.

And now, Al Gore and bringing the issue of global warming to the international scene. And he won an Academy award for the film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. Not bad.

On the Republican side: Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating the 1905 peace treaty between Russia and Japan after the Russo-Japanese War.

Oh, yeah, and Henry Kissinger won the Prize in 1973, sharing it with Le Duc Tho of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam for jointly negotiating the Vietnam peace accord.

And how many Republican presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize in the last 100 years?

Hmm, let see…None. Zilch. Zip. Nada. We have two wins.

Not even one Academy Award, either. And they elected a b-movie actor as president, too.

Go, Al. Thanks for being the tie breaker. Any thoughts on the 2008 Presidential race?

The King of Schnorrers?

At times I take great inspiration from quotes that pop up serendipitously during web research. This week the quote ---

“The Past: our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamor. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.”

---popped up for me in a Google search on an entirely different topic.

The quote is from Israel Zangwill, a humorist, journalist, writer, and political activist. He counted amongst his friends and colleagues, H.G. Wells. He coined the phrase “The Melting Pot”, in a play of the same name. He also wrote social satire such as "The King of Schnorrers" (1894). He was a political activist and humorist --- a combination I greatly admire. Oh, for those of you who don't know and might be afraid to inquire: A schnorrer is a person "who asks for little things like cigarettes or little sums of money, without offering a return" or someone who "will get money out of you any way he can, often through an air of entitlement...[but] chide you for not giving enough. A schnorrer is distinguished from an ordinary beggar by dint of his boundless chutzpah." But I digress.


The quote moved me to think about the upcoming 2008 election, and which direction we need to take the nation.

I believe we need to embrace the empowerment that the past ---the 1960s---has made us know we are capable of. I believe we need to create a progressive vision for America that is inclusive, democratic and self-sustaining. Check out, if you have not already done so, OpenLeft.com.

We need to shed ‘political spin’ for ‘intelligent discourse’. We need to be skeptical, but not cynical. To that effect, I recommend Al Gore's new book, ----“The Assault on Reason."

From the Amazon.com description of Gore’s new book ---

“It's the political environment he's concerned about in The Assault on Reason: the way we debate and decide on the critical issues of the day. In an account that balances theoretical discussion of the foundations of democracy with a lacerating critique of the Bush administration, Gore argues that the marketplace of reasoned debate our country was founded on is being endangered by a variety of allied forces: the use of fear and the misuse of faith, the distractions of our entertainment culture, and the concentrations of power in the national media and the executive branch."

Yup, the past is prologue. We have lots of work to do for 2008.