True that "the Dalai Lama and Aung Sun Suu Kyi [led] nonviolent protest move[me]nts against brutal regimes." Also true that Obama is currently leading the movements to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons; to establish a lasting peace in Palestine/Israel; to end the Iraq War; to create understanding instead of a "clash of civilizations" between the US/Europe and Muslim countries; and to reduce the damage to world civilization from climate change. You may not like the list, but it was enough to impress Oslo.

It is furthermore true, as Robert Reich points out, that Obama has not yet "delivered" on the promise of any of these movements. But neither have the Dalai Lama or Aung Sun Suu Kyi yet delivered on the promise of democracy, human rights, and liberation in Burma and Tibet. My point is that the prize awards aspirational and inspirational leadership, not "delivering."

(Footnote: I am not arguing for or against the prize, which is in the hands of the Nobel prize committee to decide. Personally, I have major problems with Obama's continuation of the vile Bush-era human rights policies, as detailed in Salon by Greenwald. But I am simply pointing out the curious double standard that seems to have gripped the pundit world. To continue the analogies, I am sure none of them complained six years ago when Shirin Ebadi of Iran won because she hadn't yet "delivered" human rights in her country, and I am sure that few of Obama's left/liberal critics complained two years ago when Gore won because he hadn't "delivered" on climate change. My question is why this particular standard of "delivering" on promises is placed on Obama and not on previous awardees.)

for the first good laugh all day! and the second, third, fourth... Super-Fun-Pak forever!

(With apologies to AL for an otherwise excellent post.)

[L]egislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases is imminent has also driven the special interests whose oxen will soon be gored into a last-gasp fever-driven explosion of propaganda that is day by day ever further divorced from reality. This boiling over of paid-for-and-delivered climate-skeptic insanity is hard to ignore....

You can't lose what you never had.

For those who read right past the opening line ("Fiction, Satire, Humor"), the fact that Palin is quoted as speaking in complete grammatical sentences is a dead giveaway.

Sarah Palin and the English language: like oil and water.

People have been wringing hands over the decline and imminent fall of civilization and all that is holy since at least the days of Hesiod (and it was probably old news back then, too). The problem is structural: language is living, human, and social, which means (axiomatically) that it is always changing. So (again, axiomatically) as young students transform inexorably into old farts, they (we) can't help but notice how the unkempt young students of today speak and write in ways we never would have done in our time.

We also tend to conflate mistakes with new usages. In Miller's excellent formulation, "The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate." Let the new usages slide, even if you refuse to use them yourself (I shudder whenever I let "impact" slip through my lips), but feel free to correct errors that ... ahem ... impact meaning.

Here I would include the useful bugbears: its/it's and they're/there/their (and also one that I see a lot here in Michigan -- must be the local pronunciation -- then/than). These mistakes and other spelling errors rarely rise to the level of "failure to communicate," since 99% of the time you can figure out quite easily what the writer meant, but for the sake of that other 1% of the time it is worth maintaining the distinction among correct spellings. I can correct with a clean conscience the students who make such mistakes in graded papers, while at the same time caring zip about the alleged misuse of English in twitters, texting, email, and other new electronic media that have there own internal logic.

And then there is the case of Sarah Palin's train-wreck grammar. My objection to her speaking style is not that it is "incorrect," much less that it is "working-class," but that, in a sentence that begins with one subject and then sprouts additional verbs that transmogrify object into subject, it is impossible to get a clear idea of what she means to say. This is not a matter of class prejudice but of clarity of meaning. In political speech, language that obfuscates is a danger.

"[H]eavyweights like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former House Majority Leader Dick Armey..."

(snicker)

H.G. Wells, in The Time Machine (1895), foresaw a future 800,000 years from now with two distinct humans species. The overclass, grown rich, lazy, idle, and incapable of producing anything but pleasantries, had evolved into a sweet species (the Eloi) that lived a blessed life above ground. The underclass, meanwhile, having been forced underground millenia earlier to work the machines that made civilization possible, had evolved into a kind of combination of Neandertal and naked mole-rat (the Morlocks) -- very unpleasant sorts, but at least the machines ran on time, production continued unabated, and the Eloi got whatever they needed to live. The only catch for the Eloi: they were also the cattle that the Morlocks ate. Oh, well!