President Obama wins the Nobel Peace Prize
 --Some good news, excellent news, hope-affirming news to end a week or kick off a weekend in need of excellence: The United States has a president who has won the Nobel Peace Prize and who deserves to win it. The extent of a change like that can hardly be overestimated.

The web site of the Nobel Foundation linked here is far too slow uploading--indirectly a good sign if it indicates that quick access is being impeded by an overload of visits to the site from people around the globe. Hope is alive, globally as well as in America.

According to the AP article linked above, the choice of Obama went unforeseen by bettors and short-listers who keep an eye out for predictions. The AP does not put it that way, of course, but did have the decency and transparency to post its previous article speculating on possible winners.

Obama's election has already brought large changes and has expanded the reach of the possible in the public discourse, which is much less arid than a few years ago. It will be interesting to see how the city of Chicago reacts to the Nobel award--after losing its Olympics bid. Competitions of some sorts--athletics--may be highly valued, but there is even more value in the kind of award that cannot be competed for.

It will also be interesting to see how the Washington Post reports it. After all, the Nobel Peace Prize is something of an envy-stymier.

Update: Here is the YouTube video link to the Nobel oral statement.

Further update: Perhaps my comment above about stymies to envy was a bit premature. Joe Scarborough--he of Lori Klausutis fame--has already gone on record, or rather on cable, as calling the Nobel a disaster rather than an honor and claiming that Obama will find some way to turn it down. This mystifying delirium, oddly, is joined in by MSNBC's Chuck Todd, going along with the notion that the Nobel Peace Prize, you see, is reeelly a European thang, not an American kind of thing. Sinclair Lewis himself would have trouble satirizing this.

For all the talk about "thinking outside the box" in relation to both counterterrorism and business economics in recent years, corporate media outlets have been loath to relinquish their narrow Dems-versus-Repubs mindset. To an astounding degree--and to a sometimes frantic degree--they tend to be maintaining some polite fiction that the two major parties have a fifty-fifty (jib-jab) hold on everything of importance that happens in America, and--worse--that the two parties are either just alike or have equal credibility. This split-the-difference substitute for genuine political analysis has not stood them in good stead.

Further update: Speaking of envy and corporate media outlets, CNN and the New York Times seem to be running some awfully quick articles pooh-poohing or disparaging the award, awfully quickly, including by analysts never heard of before. This is actually part of a pattern in the big media outlets; the WashPost has run several 'reports,' recently, decrying the fact that Obama has not been able in eight or nine months to reverse the damage of the past thirty years.

Too bad there is no quick remedy for economic/civic illiteracy in the news business.