RJ Matson, The St. Louis Post Dispatch This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

Despite a thumbs down from much new and old media punditry, a new Gallup poll suggests that President Barack Obama’s surprising Nobel Peace Prize win may have boosted his approval rating: Barack Obama appears to have gotten a slight bounce in support after he was announced as the Nobel Peace Prize winner on Friday. His 56% job approval rating for the last two Gallup Daily tracking updates is up from a...

As freethinking Americans, we all have our own thoughts and opinions about homosexuals and homosexuality; about same-sex marriages and same-sex unions; about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and about so many other related issues. As Americans, we are fortunate that we can express our opinions freely on these issues in healthy, sometimes argumentative and emotional debates, as we often see on TMV. Sometimes...

Obama to shift focus away from Taliban by Jon Wells Pick your preferred source on this one, whether it’s the AP or the Times of London. The Obama administration appears to be headed down a course that would see the focus of military operations in Afghanistan shift away from fighting the Taliban toward simply hunting al-Qaeda. During the shift the administration is apparently willing to accept the Taliban...

WASHINGTON — It is a sign of our weird political moment that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama will probably hurt him among some of his fellow citizens. His opponents are describing the award as premature. The deeper problem is that the Nobel will underscore the extent to which Obama is a cosmopolitan figure, much loved in European capitals because he is the change they have...

The President’s reaction to winning the Nobel Prize was to say he will “not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments.” Presidents rarely refuse to take credit for any sort of achievement, so I won’t give Obama a hard time. What’s more interesting is how the Prize committee framed its decision: Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician and member of the committee, said in a phone...

Van Gujjars are India’s legendary & colorful nomads, mostly Muslims, tending to their buffaloes in the green pasture land in the Himalayas or its foothills. Their entry into forests, their abode for centuries, is now being increasingly blocked in the name of environmental protection. The New York Times brings this poignant story alive in a beautiful photo-essay Showcase: Traveling With the Van Gujjar...

Earlier today, TMV’s Jack Grant chose Dr. Steven Taylor’s commentary on the value to Americans of being admired by the rest of the world rather than disliked.

Although I have written a couple of commentaries on the Afghanistan war, mainly illustrating the complexity of that conflict, I will be the first one to admit that I am by no means an expert on that issue and that I have no relevant suggestions on how to proceed. The real experts are hard at work, hopefully to come up with a successful strategy, corresponding troop levels, etc. However, when I say “real...

So what do the Swedes – the custodians of every other Nobel Prize – think of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to President Barack Obama? This editorial from Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter says in part: “That the Norwegians got carried away with euphoria over Obama’s election is understandable, but that doesn’t make their decision any more justifiable....

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This cartoon is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.

UPDATE BELOW: So, in the 36 hours or so since the world found out that Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, we have been reading, hearing, talking, and writing about the seemingly near-universal feeling of disbelief, leading to various degrees of displeasure for many, that he was nominated for the award only two weeks after he was inaugurated, and won it after only nine months in office.

Americans aren’t alone in thinking that President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize was nothing more than a West-European rejection of the polices of President Bush. For Italy’s Corriere della Sera, columnist Franco Venturini gives vent to his fear that this Nobel may have ben erroneously awarded: “If not an indictment of his predecessor, what is this Nobel for Barack Obama, which has no relation...

Yesterday’s White House presser was consumed with questions about the Nobel Committee’s decision to award the Peace Prize to Pres. Obama. Absolutely nothing unexpected or untoward about that, of course. But one reporter’s line of questioning was, shall we say, a bit over the top? Bizarre might be a better word. If you’ve watched these briefings before, you will not be surprised that the...

Those too mesmerized by baseball playoffs to watch Letterman, Conan et al last night did not miss much. All day long politicians had been doing stand-ups about Obama’s Nobel Prize. The President himself led off his Rose Garden turn with “Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning. After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, ‘Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and...

Nobel Peace Prize now officially a joke after Obama selection by Jon Wells The Nobel Peace Prize was already flirting with irrelevance after recent selections like Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, and Jimmy Carter, but after the award was yesterday announced as going to President Barack Obama, in office for only nine months and for only 12 days when the nomination period expired, the award can officially be said to...

Our Quote (zinger) of the Day comes from the State Department’s spokesman, responding to a question about President Barack Obama winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — an award that sparked a shower of criticism from Republicans: “Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.” That’s the...

We have seen reactions from just about everywhere in the world on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to president Obama. How about from Norway where its Parliament appoints the Nobel Committee that selects the Laureate for the Peace Prize? Yesterday, the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen presented a Norwegian view. In “A Bold Peace Prize,” translated at Watching America (watchingamewrica.com), the...

US president Barack Obama’s predicament (on hearing about Nobel Peace Prize) seems similar to that of a dashing man who comes face-to-face with a fawning socialite in public who gushes: “Darling I love you from the bottom of my heart.” The media is having a field day revelling in this hot/sexy topic that has landed in their lap. This element of surprise (after the award’s announcement)...

I must say, I am well and truly appalled at the comments made by the Democratic National Committee’s communications director:

Shock and surprise – but not necessarily dismay – have spread across the world after the announcement that Barack Obama is to be awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The first French translation we’ve posted on the subject is from France’s Rue 89. For the Rue 89, Pierre Haski writes in part: “We salute the intention, the bold words and perhaps mostly the man himself and his journey...

President Barack Obama being awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is akin to me winning a Pulitizer Prize in journalism. Neither one of us accomplished enough to earn it. The world’s most prestigious award is diminished to the level of an Academy Award nominee finishing fifth. Hey, Obama talks the talk but has failed so far to walk the walk. The Saturday Night Live spoof that he has accomplished nothing...

While I strongly disagree with most of Charles Krauthammer’s ideology and politics, I must admit that the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist is a brilliant journalist and probably the most influential commentator in our country. That’s perhaps why I am disappointed at his latest column that appeared this morning in the Washington Post. As I have pointed out in a previous post, president Obama is faced...

Here’s a video of President Barack Obama’s statement on winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. He says he will accept the award as a “call for action:”

The surprise news that President Barack Obama has been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize didn’t put a damper on the ongoing, nonstop 7/24 political partisan warfare in the United States — in fact, it was akin to throwing a lit match into a big, fat puddle of gasoline. The Huffington Post has an eye-opening post HERE: conservatives reacted with outrage, anger and some demonization (one writer even...