You heard it first last from the on the ball folks at PBH, Barack Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize! Some of the highlights of his administration include:

* The continuation of occupation of Iraq

* The targeting of civilians in Afghanistan

* The unconditional support of systematic ethnic cleansing in Palestine

This is peace that would make from Nobel Peace Prize winner Harry Kissinger proud!

See Also: Even mainstream media stunned, skeptical over Nobel Peace prize, Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize. No, really., The Nobel, The GOP Will Whine About the Obama Nobel Peace Prize, Verbatim, Obama Nobel: But what will the wingnuts think?, and Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize.

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The Long Strange Posthumous Life of Leon Trotsky, worth reading in it’s entirety, not just for the insights on Trotsky’s legacy on the Left, but for a really disturbing look at the fractures that consumed the American left for most of the 21st century. The money shot below:

“But always and always, those who took Trotsky’s side cannot help but look back and think what the Soviet Union might have been if only Stalin had lost that fight. I’m very much among those who feel that American socialists need to look to American history — not Russian or Chinese or Cuban history — to chart our course. But no one who has looked back at the early part of the 20th century can fail to be thrilled by that moment when it seemed as if the workers were actually in control of history. It was this painful memory Trotsky carried with him as he began the first of his exiles in Turkey.

Every year when I pay my taxes, I always hope that government money will be used by predatory banks to enrich their executives at my expense! And it looks like my hopes finally came true:

Citigroup Inc., one of the biggest recipients of government bailout money, gave employees $5.33 billion in bonuses for 2008, New York’s attorney general said Thursday in a report detailing the payouts by nine big banks.

The report from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office focused on 2008 bonuses paid to the initial nine banks that received loans under the government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program last fall. Cuomo has joined other government officials in criticizing the banks for paying out big bonuses while accepting taxpayer money.

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Last fall, the American taxpayer handed over $700 billion dollars to Wall Street because the American economic system would supposedly collapse if the big banks failed. Now, just 9 months later, the largest recipients of TARP bailout money are now posting record profits and handing out exorbitant bonuses.

This past week, Bank of America announced a quarterly profit of over $2.4 billion [source], Citigroup announced record profits of over $3 billion [source], and Goldman Sachs reported profits of over $3.4 billion [source]. Even worse, Goldman Sachs is going to distribute over $11.3 billion in bonuses to it’s employees this year, or over $1 million per employee.

So, let’s just get this straight: the American taxpayer gave nearly a trillion dollars…. so banks could make record profits and so Goldman Sachs could distribute over $11.3 billion dollars to it’s employees.