“Not even a Rookie of the Year is ready to be elected to the Hall of Fame. I’m afraid this prize will be bad for Obama. For political reasons and on the merits, he should paraphrase Shakespeare to the Nobel committee: ‘As you shall prove me, praise me.’” – George Packer

Remember Jerome Walton? He was the Cubs centerfielder who leveraged a 30-game hit streak into a Rookie of the Year award 20 years ago. Remember how hot his rookie cards were?

If there was a Hall of Fame for potential, he would have been inducted after the ‘89 season. But there wasn’t, thankfully, or else Cooperstown would have a lot of egg on its face right now. Let’s hope the same doesn’t happen for the Nobel organization, which made the surprise decision to award President Obama with a Nobel Peace Prize.

The haters are going wild with this as they do with anything they can use against the president (Olympic FAIL!!!) and those on the left have probably already noted that the Taliban has taken a similar opposition approach as if to say opposing the award being given to a rookie who hasn’t even made it through one season as president makes one an anti-American terrorist.

I tend to agree with Packer on this one and hope, for the sake of our country and the world, Obama’s premature peace prize doesn’t end up being the equivalent of a bronze plaque of Jerome Walton’s face hanging next to Ernie Banks.

Two things said/written from opposing political viewpoints and perspectives over the weekend have triggered my centrist rage in a similarly troubling way.

The first was one of those annoying top five things on Facebook filled out listing five people the world would be better off without. President Obama was listed twice, leading me to believe that this particular ideologue may not be so anti-abortion in the case of unborn future Democrats.

The second was a “joke” told at the White House Press Correspondents Dinner our president so untactfully laughed at wishing kidney failure on Rush Limbaugh.

It’s one thing to disagree with those in power or get annoyed with loud mouths on the radio or cable TV – I do it all the time – but to wish kidney failure or extinction on someone simply because his viewpoints don’t match your own petty, propaganda-fueled left or right-wing ideology is anything but funny.

Haters to the left of me, haters to the right – get a grip.

Like Jeffrey Overstreet, this is probably the first and last time I will post anything about Ann Coulter on this site. I promise.

Obama’s Teleprompter. The right-wing teleprompter meme has been played up so much lately, the electronic note card machine has its own blog. The blog is kind of funny, even if making fun of a president for having prepared remarks seems a bit strange.  If the great communicator Ronald Reagan used a teleprompter, why can’t Obama?

Where The Wild Things Are trailer. Part movie tease. Part Arcade Fire music video. Spike Jonze’s worlds colliding, the video was everywhere this week for good reason.

UConn in hot water. A Yahoo! Sports story Jim Calhoun flippantly dismissed as a blog entry couldn’t have hit at a better time – for maximum exposure’s sake. It’s not something you wouldn’t actually want to read in a RSS feed though – way too long for that.

John 3:16 sign snagged.  The original Bannerman, Rollen Stewart is in jail for doing for holding a maid hostage in a hotel room, but his famed John 3:16 sign antics live on. Not if this security guard has anything to say about it though.

The death of Culture11. Culture11 was a short-lived conservative Web site modeled off of Slate Magazine. It received a thoughtful eulogy in the Washington Monthly recently and sparked some interesting conversation about conservative media in places like Patrol Magazine.