The President and First Lady host trick-or-treating at a Halloween party for local schoolchildren, military families and White House staff. October 31, 2009.

Check out this article I found on weirdasiannews.com! This sushi chef made sushi that looks like Obama! Truly amazing. Check out this link. Yum…

http://www.weirdasianews.com/2009/10/17/japanese-chef-rolls-obama-sushi-platter/

The surprise decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize elicited swift reaction Friday, with some hailing the choice and others expressing astonishment and skepticism.

Praise came from Afghanistan’s president, the Israeli defense minister and even a senior official from Hamas — the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza. Yet an Egyptian human rights activist said he was “shocked” that Obama won. And the Internet hummed with a range of views.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai — whose U.S.-backed government is locked in warfare with Islamic militants — praised the choice.

“We congratulate, wholeheartedly, President Obama on the award of this prestigious award,” said Karzai. “We recognize and commend President Obama’s vision and leadership with a hope that peace and normalcy will return to Afghanistan and our region.”

Yet Hisham Qasim, Egyptian democracy and human rights activist, said he was “shocked” Obama won.

“He has achieved nothing. He’s stumbling. He hasn’t achieved any of his promises and nothing is working. He promised to close Guantanamo and now that’s not going to happen, and the Arab-Israeli conflict looks like it’s going to get very nasty.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it gave the prize to Obama for his “efforts to strengthen international diplomacy,” his “vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons” and for inspiring hope and creating “a new climate in international politics.”

Many questioned what Obama had accomplished to deserve the award.

Gideon Rachman, a foreign affairs columnist for The Financial Times, wrote an online blog under the headline “What did Obama do to win the Nobel Peace Prize?”

“I am a genuine admirer of Obama. And I am very pleased that George W. Bush is no longer president. But I doubt that I am alone in wondering whether this award is slightly premature. It is hard to point to a single place where Obama’s efforts have actually brought about peace – Gaza, Iran, Sri Lanka?

“While it is OK to give school children prizes for ‘effort’ — my kids get them all the time — I think international statesmen should probably be held to a higher standard,” he wrote.

Obama has sought to make peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and officials from the Israeli government and Hamas sent congratulations and hope that the choice will help pave diplomatic ground.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said he believes the prize “will strengthen President Barack Obama’s capability to contribute to regional peace in the Middle East, and to an agreement between us and the Palestinians that will bring security, growth and prosperity to all the nations in the region.”

Hamas official Ahmed Yousef also congratulated Obama, “though it is early for him to be awarded this prize.”

“He reached out to the Muslim world in his Cairo speech and said many of the right things” and said, “this is a man who thinks of achieving world peace.”

He said he believes Obama represents a “new era in American politics,” but thinks “the president has done nothing to push forward peace between Israeli and Palestinians” even though the “intention is there…it is an uphill battle with the Jewish lobby and Congress.”

“We know he is somebody different from past leaders who supported Israel economically and militarily,” Yousef said.

The Internet was alive with commentary from journalists, political leaders and ordinary people.

The winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, anti-communist Polish leader Lech Walesa, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as expressing surprise.

“Who, Obama? So fast? Too fast — he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet,” the paper’s Web site quoted Walesa as saying.

One person expressed “sheer disbelief” that Obama had won, in a Twitter posting, saying the prize should have gone to a person such as Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai because “he stood up to a murderous dictator.” Another person said she “seriously cannot believe they gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. Ridiculous.”

Others had praise. One person wrote: “My president Just won the Nobel peace prize!!!! Go prez Obama.”

Former Nobel peace laureates weighed in.

Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary general who won the peace prize in 2001, called the choice “unexpected but inspired.”

“In an increasingly challenging and volatile world, President Obama has given a sense of hope and optimism to millions around the world” and “has shown that the only way forward is through genuine cooperation with other nations.”

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, last year’s Peace Prize laureate, said it was clear the Nobel committee wanted to encourage Obama on the issues he has been discussing on the world stage.

Wangari Muta Maathai, the Kenyan who won the 2004 Peace Prize, said Obama’s win will help Africa move forward.

“I think it is extraordinary,” she said. “It will be even greater inspiration for the world. He has shown how we can probably come together, work together in a cooperative way.”

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel jokingly made reference to last week’s awarding of Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics — which some viewed as a snub to the United States after Obama went to Copenhagen, Denmark to make a pitch for Chicago.

“It’s clear Oslo beats Copenhagen any day of the week,” he told CNN.

As a strong advocate of universal healthcare, Ted Kennedy passes just before seeing his dreams turn to reality.

Sen. Ted Kennedy died shortly before midnight Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77.

The man known as the “liberal lion of the Senate” had fought a more than year-long battle with brain cancer, and according to his son had lived longer with the disease than his doctors expected him to.

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the Kennedy family said in a statement. “He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it.”

Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy brother who was left to head the family’s political dynasty after his brothers President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated.

Kennedy championed health care reform, working wages and equal rights in his storied career. In August, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — by President Obama. His daughter, Kara Kennedy, accepted the award on his behalf.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, known as Ted or Teddy, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in May 2008 and underwent a successful brain surgery soon after that. But his health continued to deteriorate, and Kennedy suffered a seizure while attending the luncheon following President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

For Kennedy, the ascension of Obama was an important step toward realizing his goal of health care reform.

At the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, the Massachusetts Democrat promised, “I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great test.”

Sen. Kennedy made good on that pledge, but ultimately lost his battle with cancer.

Kennedy was first elected to the Senate in 1962, at the age of 30, and his tenure there would span four decades.

A hardworking, well-liked politician who became the standard-bearer of his brothers’ liberal causes, his career was clouded by allegations of personal immorality and accusations that his family’s clout helped him avoid the consequences of an accident that left a young woman dead.

But for the younger members of the Kennedy clan, from his own three children to those of his brothers JFK and RFK, Ted Kennedy — once seen as the youngest and least talented in a family of glamorous overachievers — was both a surrogate father and the center of the family.

And certainly it was Ted Kennedy who bore many of the tragedies of the family — the violent deaths of four of his siblings, his son’s battle with cancer, and the death of his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. in a plane crash.

Edward Moore Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on Feb. 22, 1932, the ninth and youngest child of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.

His father, a third-generation Irish-American who became a multimillionaire businessman and served for a time as a U.S. ambassador to Britain, had risen high and was determined that his sons would rise higher still.

Overshadowed by his elder siblings, Teddy, as he was known to family and friends, grew up mostly in the New York City suburb of Bronxville, N.Y., and attended private boarding schools. He was expelled from Harvard during his freshman year after he asked a friend to take an exam for him.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Kennedy returned to earn degrees at Harvard and then the University of Virginia law school. He married Virginia Joan Bennett, known by her middle name, in 1958. The couple would have three children, Kara, Teddy Jr. and Patrick.

By the time he reached adulthood, tragedy had already claimed some of his siblings: eldest brother Joe Jr. was killed in World War II, sister Kathleen died in a plane crash, and another sister, Rosemary, who was mildly retarded, had to be institutionalized following a botched lobotomy.

But then the family hit its pinnacle in 1960, when John F. Kennedy became president.

His brother’s ascension created a political opportunity, and Joe Kennedy decided he should take over JFK’s Senate seat. Ted Kennedy was only 28 at the time — two years short of the required age — so a family friend was found to hold the temporary appointment.

In 1962, Ted Kennedy — backed by his family money and the enthusiasm his name generated among Massachusetts’ Catholics, was elected to the Senate.

The Only One Left

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His brother Robert became the focus of the family’s — and much of the country’s — dreams.

Following the tragedy in Dallas, Robert and Ted Kennedy became closer than they had ever been as children.

“When I was working for Robert Kennedy, there was hardly a day in which the two of them didn’t physically get together, I would say at least three or four times,” said Frank Mankiewicz, who served as an aide to Robert Kennedy. “I mean, if, if Sen. Robert Kennedy wasn’t in his office, and nobody knew where he was, chances are he was seeing Ted about something.”

Five years later, while pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 against Lyndon Johnson, Sen. Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. That left Ted as the only surviving Kennedy son.

“He seriously contemplated getting out of politics after Robert’s death,” said Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer. “He thought, you know, it might just be too much. He might be too obviously the next target and all of that. But he decided to stick it out and as he said on more than one occasion, pick up a fallen standard.”

Kennedy was seen by many as his brothers’ heir, and perhaps he could have won the White House had he stepped into the presidential race then. But he didn’t. And the very next year there occurred a tragedy that would forever block Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions.

In July 1969, following a party on Martha’s Vineyard, Kennedy drove off a bridge on the tiny Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick. The car plunged into the water. Kennedy escaped, but his passenger did not.

Kennedy later said he dived into the water repeatedly in a vain attempt to save Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the “boiler room girls” who had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. But Kopechne, 28, drowned, still trapped in the car.

Questions arose about how Kennedy had known Kopechne — he denied any “private relationship,” and Kopechne’s parents also insisted there was no relationship — and why he failed to report the accident for about nine hours.

Kennedy pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence and lost his driver’s license for a year, but the political price was higher.

Kennedy was re-elected to the Senate in 1970, but the accident at Chappaquiddick effectively squashed his presidential hopes.

He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination in 1979 against incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

Once when his daughter Kara, then 19, was passing out campaign leaflets, a man took one and said to her, “You know your father killed a young woman about your age, don’t you?”

Sen. Ted Kennedy was not done confronting personal tragedy.

In 1973, 12-year-old Teddy Jr. was diagnosed with bone cancer, and he had to have a leg amputated. Kennedy’s marriage to Joan deteriorated. Some blamed her drinking, others cited his alleged womanizing. The couple divorced in 1981.

In contrast, Kennedy’s career in the Senate continued to flourish.

He supported teachers’ unions, women’s and abortion rights, and health care reform. He sponsored the Family and Medical Leave Act. And he was seen as a stalwart of the Democratic Party, delivering several rousing speeches at conventions.

Former Boston Glober reporter Tom Oliphant, who covered Kennedy’s career in Washington, observed, “It’s not all back slapping and, and personal relationships. I think one of the things that sets Kennedy’s politics apart is his, what I call his dirty little secret. He works like a dog.”

Political analyst Mark Shields said Kennedy’s “concerns were national concerns, but his forum for achieving his ends and changing policy, became the Senate. And he mastered it like nobody else I’ve ever seen.”

But another family incident exposed Kennedy’s vulnerabilities and held him up to public censure.

A nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was accused of raping a woman at the family’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla. The case generated lurid headlines around the world. Kennedy was at the estate at the time of the alleged attack and had been at the bar where Smith met his accuser.

Eyebrows were raised even further when a young woman who had been with Kennedy’s son Patrick that night revealed that she had seen the senator roaming around the house at night, wearing an oxford shirt but no trousers.

Smith was acquitted following a highly sensational trial, but the incident definitely left a dent in Kennedy’s armor. His alleged heavy drinking and womanizing were widely lampooned, and in October 1991 he thought it prudent to be low-key in his opposition to Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who had been accused of sexually harassing a former subordinate.

Kennedy’s life, both professional and personal, took a turn for the better in 1992.

He married Victoria Reggie, a divorced attorney with two children from a previous marriage, Curran and Caroline. That year Kennedy also supported Bill Clinton, an open admirer of the Kennedy clan.

“Well, sometime during our courtship, I realized that I didn’t want to live the rest of my life without Vicky,” Kennedy said about his wife of nearly 30 years. “And since we have been together, it’s made my life a lot more fulfilling. I think more serene, kind of emotional stability.”

Elected in 1992, President Bill Clinton appointed Kennedy’s sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, ambassador to Ireland. And in 1994, Kennedy had the satisfaction of seeing his son Patrick elected to the House of Representatives from Rhode Island.

But tragedy returned that year.

In May 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died of cancer. Kennedy had remained close to his sister-in-law, who once quit her job at a publisher’s after it came out with an unflattering biography of Ted.

Kennedy had served as a surrogate father for many of his nephews and nieces, but he may have been closest to Jackie’s children, Caroline and John F. Kennedy Jr.

He was horrified when in July 1999, five years after Jackie’s death, John Jr. and his bride of two years, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, along with her sister Lauren Bessette, were killed when the small plane John was piloting crashed off the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard.

Sen. Kennedy led the family during the harrowing wait for information as Coast Guard crews searched for the missing plane.

When the bodies were retrieved from the ocean, Kennedy and his two sons went to identify the remains. The senator’s eulogy for his nephew who “had every gift but length of years” and “the wife who became his perfect soul mate” touched grief-stricken Americans.

It was an all-too-familiar sight for those who remember Ted Kennedy mourning the deaths of his brothers John and Robert, and helping the family bear up after the deaths of Robert’s sons David and Michael.

For decades, it was Ted Kennedy who carried the burden and led the way as the patriarch of a family seen as America’s answer to royalty.

Report: CIA threatened detainee families

Meanwhile, attorney general announces appointment of special prosecutor

WASHINGTON – A newly declassified CIA report says interrogators threatened to kill the children of a Sept. 11 suspect.

The document, released Monday by the Justice Department, says one interrogator said a colleague had told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that if any other attacks happened in the United States, “We’re going to kill your children.”

Another interrogator allegedly tried to convince a different terror suspect detainee that his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him — though the interrogator in question denied making such a threat.

The report, written in 2004, examined CIA treatment of terror detainees following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It has been declassified as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder has directed a federal prosecutor to look into possible violations of U.S. law in the CIA’s treatment of terrorism detainees overseas, NBC News reported.

Administration officials say he’ll give the assignment to a career federal prosecutor in Connecticut, John Durham.

For more than a year, since January 2008, Durham has been investigating whether any laws were broken when CIA officials destroyed audio and video tapes of the interrogations of several terrorism detainees. His work on the tapes issue is not yet completed, though there are indications that Durham is nearly done with that part of his work.

This could mean the coming to an end of the worst recession since World War II! This is the first time umemployment rates have dropped since April 2008.

What: An estimate of 247,000 jobs were lost last month, the least in a year! The unemployment rate is now at 9.4% where as in June it was at 9.5% when 443,000 people lost their jobs. Everyone’s hours and paychecks are starting to go up too.

Who: Ken Mayland, president of  ClearView Economics says there’s clearly been a turn for the better and that the worst is behind us when it comes to people getting laid off and losing their jobs. Analysts were expecting that job losses would round off to about 320,000 and that the unemployment rate would boost up to 9.6%. All in all, about 14 million Americans were jobless in July.

When: Economists say it might take until 2013 for our unemployment rate to come back down to a normal 5%. (I’m so thankful for my job.) The most job cuts of the recession came in January, when 741,000 jobs disappeared, the most in any month since 1949. Since the recession began in December ‘07, our economy has lost an estimated total of 6.7 MILLION jobs. Wow.

Why: The unemployment rate is slowing down bit by bit because companies aren’t cutting investment and spending as much as they were during the middle of the recession. Another one of the reasons the unemployment rate is going down is because hundreds of thousands of people left the labor force. The labor force includes only those who are either employed or looking for work. Fewer people though reported being unemployed.

time for a little balloon-poppin’!

WHO SAID YOU HAVE PAY AS YOU GO!

BEEP BEEP

As critics of last night’s Obama speech try to draw connections between the current president and former president Ronald Reagan, the rest of the nation awakes with a newly invigorated sense of hope, and a drive to do better. Something Reagan wished he could have done for sure, but missed the mark by a long shot.

President Obama challenged an entire generation to stay in school last night, saying that dropping out “was no longer an option”, and receiving a long ovation from members of both major parties for doing so.

“You’re not only letting yourself down, but your letting you’re letting your country down.”

Obama then went on to set a 2020 deadline on lawmakers, parents, and educators for making the US the world leader in college graduates once more, the largest challenge since Kennedy promising a man on the moon, and equally as daunting.

The president used this speech to expand on the ideas he campaigned on. Sighting changes before the end of the year in health care, freeing up the credit market, expanding renewable energy programs, and ending the war in Iraq swiftly. They were goals requiring a high approval rating and a majority congress, both of which this president has.

Thee speech was also a “no nonsense” affair. The president spelled it out in real terms, and then handed it off to lawmakers, and the American people to see the hard work done.

Critics say that the goals are too lofty and the promises were empty. “How can he plan to do all of this and cut the budget?” Pat Buchanan asked after the speech on The Rachel Maddow show. “It’s just too much,” he added.

Well, there is room for cutting spending, as the president stated last night. “We have begun going though he budget line by line, a daunting task that will take some time as you can imagine. But we have already made cuts that will save $5 trillion over the next 5 years.”

This is where Obama differs from Reagan. Obama inspires and drives us to do better. We want to sacrifice for the greater good. Reagan, he promised much, but expected it just to come to the American people even though they had to do nothing to get it. Hard work yields results, and the president’s critics seem to have forgotten this.

 - Miller