It came a week late, but President Obama did win the gold. Last Friday, the International Olympic Committee stiffed him. Today, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He should probably leave his schedule open next Friday, because apparently anything can happen.

It was the second time in three years that the peace prize went to someone trying to create a new international climate. In 2007, Al Gore shared the prize for his efforts to combat global warming. Explaining this year's selection, the committee credited Obama not for concrete accomplishments but for atmospheric ones. "Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," the committee said. "His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population."

This clip has 5,994 comments on Huffington Post.

US President Barack Obama, right, proposes a toast with United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon Photo: EPA Only three years ago, the bristling, moustached figure of John Bolton prowled the corridors of the United Nations as America's Ambassador to an organisation he wholeheartedly despised.

"There is no such thing as the United Nations," he bluntly declared. "There is only the international community – which can only be led by the only remaining superpower." If the UN's Manhattan tower block were to lose 10 storeys, said Mr Bolton, this "wouldn't make a bit of difference".

UNITED NATIONS — For President Obama, the handshakes and hugs during his first visit to the United Nations last week masked a cold reality: nine months into his presidency, he is being forced to retool his most important foreign policy initiatives, from the war in Afghanistan to peace in the Middle East and his diplomatic overture to Iran.

Mr. Obama’s efforts to reach out to adversaries and break political deadlocks are running up against old enmities, insoluble differences and foreign leaders who simply do not see eye to eye with the president.

Anyone wanting to write about Obama’s second one hundred days in office might call the account “From Leno to Letterman: A Presidential Odyssey.” Obama’s performance on Leno’s old Tonight Show six months ago couldn’t have been more different from his appearance on Letterman last night.

On Leno, Obama was self-deprecating and almost boyish, telling stories as if looking at himself from outside the “bubble,” as he charmingly called it—anecdotes about being followed by a doctor with a defibrillator, about Secret Service men who wouldn’t let him walk alone for “750 yards,” and so forth. Without sacrificing the dignity of his new office, he bent it toward ordinary life. He bantered with Leno, even seeming to have a turn at playing comedian himself.

But last night on Letterman, for all his smiles and seeming bonhomie and that bit of business about the heart-shaped potato—if only the heartland would embrace him like that! you felt he was thinking—the president wasn’t about to play along with the comedy. In reply to Letterman’s (uncharacteristically) earnest question about the bitter opposition to his proposals for health-care reform, Obama said, almost as an admonition to his host: “That’s why I end up having to be on the David Letterman Show.”

That is to say, Obama’s goal last night was to cast the recent town-hall and tea-party turbulence as tired summer reruns of historical American opposition to change.  . . . more

Photo illustration by Gluekit {Photo: Mannie Garcia, AP)All around were satanic representations of President Barack Obama in whiteface, as a Nazi, an African witch doctor, a Marxist, a Muslim, and Che Guevara’s best friend—but Kathy Golya had never felt so good about the new administration as she did right now. It was a day after Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst in Congress, and the South Carolina congressman had given voice to Golya’s inner heart. He hadn’t just said it on the Internet, he had said it to the president himself.

No, it was not the appropriate place, Golya said, but still she glowed with the memory. “It was the first time in my life I felt good, since he got into office. Someone had called him a liar.”

Following his nationally televised address to Congress, opinion of President Barack Obama has taken a more favorable turn. Obama's job approval ratings, which had declined in the summer, have remained essentially unchanged over the past month. And the balance of opinion regarding the health care reform proposals before Congress has become a bit more positive than it was in late August, though the public is about evenly divided over those proposals.

Obama's job approval rating, currently 55%, has changed little since late July. Nonetheless, it remains well below his rating at the 100-day mark of his presidency (63%). The president's personal image also has slipped since the early weeks of his administration, but continues to be very strong.

FOR ME, the real Obama moment of this back-to-work season wasn’t the speech before Congress or Wall Street. It was in the Virginia schoolhouse when a ninth-grader asked him a question that had nothing and everything to do with his presidency: “And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?’’

The president was not about to choose Lindsay Lohan. Nor did he pick Abe Lincoln. His answer was Gandhi.

We gave him a FOR SHAME award over at Anne of Carversville, as he joined last week's FOR SHAME trio of Serena Williams and Joe Wilson.

We are not the only people in the world to make a---- of ourselves, but question is: where does incivility and unadulterated individual narcisssism end and some degree of respect for others begin?

Some of us have had enough. Anne

Quoted via Politico:

President Obama's TMZ Kanye West Video

Interviewer John Harwood asked Obama before the interview began if his girls were upset that West gave Taylor Swift “the Joe Wilson treatment” as Taylor was accepting an MTV video award Sunday.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty ImagesWhen an outraged Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at President George W. Bush during a visit to Baghdad, the incident was fodder for jokes and snickers. Mostly we laughed at the president’s lightning-quick reaction and the failure of the Secret Service to stop the guy from throwing not one, but two shoes. But even those of us who believe that President Bush is among the nation’s worst presidents reacted with a mixture of shock and genuine concern that the president of the United States had been so powerfully humiliated and potentially endangered. (Thank goodness it was only a shoe.)