Obama Nobel?????

[Dawnseeker]

When I look around for better candidates in the world for a peace prize, there are very few, unfortunately. Perhaps it isn't appropriate at this point in time but who else would you have given it to?

Really? Where to start?

Ingrid Betancourt is a fearless Columbian activist. She was taken captive by an insurgent group when she took her democratic advocacy into dangerous regions of the country and was held for 6 years (just released last year).

Jalal Talabani has been fighting for the rights of Kurds, a historically oppressed ethnic group in northern Iraq, for over 40 years. Has been serving as president of Iraq and has helped bring a measure of peace to the country and brought opposing factions into the government.

Hu Jia is a Chinese dissident who has been campaigning for humanitarian causes (most notably to draw attention and funding to combating HIV/AIDS in China) and for democracy. He was thrown in prison for "subversion" last year and will probably die there.

Morgan Tsvangirai is the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. He has been a key force for human rights and democratic change and challenged the brutal tyrant Robert Mugabe for the presidency recently, but withdrew from the runoff (despite being ahead in the first election) because of acts of violence and threats of civil war by Mugabe and his supporters.

Thich Quang Do is the patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, which has been banned from the country. He has been an advocate of democracy in Vietnam since the fall of Saigon in 1975. He has been jailed several times and has been under house arrest for several years, although he courageously violated that arrest to be at the bedside of the former patriarch of the church who died while also under house arrest.

Barack Obama has been the President of the United States for 9 months and has given various speeches about various things.