We’ve already seen the Nobel Peace Prize folks render their offering moot in the last few years, but this exemplifies its Cracker Jack box prize significance.

Five Norwegian politicians sent a surprising but unambiguous message Friday, bestowing one of the world’s most coveted honors on President Obama as a signal of the Western world’s repudiation of the presidency of George W. Bush and its embrace of a softer but still untested American foreign policy.

As word of the stunning Nobel Peace Prize selection began to take hold Friday, Americans struggled to digest the news that some first mistook for a prank and others saw as an overreach, given that the president had been in office only 12 days when he was nominated for the award.

“Stunning”, that’s one way to put it.

The award was “a sigh of collective relief that George Bush is no longer here,” said Aaron David Miller, an adviser on Middle East issues to six presidents. More than any concrete contribution Mr. Obama has made to world peace, the prize embodies “the international community’s love affair” with a young, charismatic president who “listens, not lectures,” he added.

What “a sigh of collective relief that George Bush is no longer here,” signifies is that we no longer have a President who does what he believes is the right thing to do, rather than what a bunch of spineless socialist countries in Europe want us to do in order to save their collective skins.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agreed that the Nobel announcement represented a symbolic welcoming of the new American approach.

“President Obama embodies the new spirit of dialogue and engagement on the world’s biggest problems - climate change, nuclear disarmament and a wide range of peace and security challenges,” he said.

Cap ‘n Trade, Government as an ultimately failing super-bureaucracy to replace HMOs, kindness to terrorists and terror sponsoring governments, plundering of the taxpayer to provide “stimulus” for every liberal concern, agenda, project and pipe dream in existence…

The president’s political supporters welcomed such sentiments as a sign that Mr. Obama was delivering on his promise to rekindle relations between the U.S. and its top allies. To others, though, the shock of the announcement came in seeing so esteemed an award handed out before Mr. Obama even had time to build a tangible record of accomplishment that might justify it.

Mark Salter, an author and longtime adviser to Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, called the decision “morally reprehensible,” even if Mr. Obama himself was not at fault.

“No president’s statecraft, whether you agree with its direction or not, can be expected to bear fruit in less than nine months,” Mr. Salter said. “I think the morally correct and politically shrewd response from the White House would have been to refuse the honor.”

Well, Saddam Barack Hussein is politically shrewd, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to be elected dog catcher, let alone president, but morally correct? Nah! You have to possess some sense of morality to be morally anything, exccept, of course, for morally bankrupt, and O, well…

What struck an especially ironic chord with some Republicans was the Nobel committee’s suggestion that Mr. Obama’s call for a nuclear weapons-free world “has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations.” It was Mr. Bush, they said, who persevered with dramatic reductions in the world’s nuclear arms stockpiles begun under President Clinton.

So what? “The One” doesn’t mind borrowing from past POTUSes when it suits his purposes, even from the Bush Administration, witness the surveillance policies he retained, the same ones he deplored during his election campaign.

Of course, the usual suspects could be counted upon to see sense in O’s getting the prize.

After recovering from their initial shock, leaders around the globe applauded Friday’s surprise award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, saying they hoped the prize would spur his efforts on nuclear disarmament and peacemaking in some of the world’s most violent places.

Calling the honor “well-deserved,” NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen hailed Mr. Obama’s “strong commitment to help build peace and defend fundamental human rights, including through the Atlantic alliance.” Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called it “an unexpected but inspired choice.”

Inspired, huh? Yeah, if the Nobel Committee hadn’t already degraded the value of the prize over the last few years (I’m surprised they haven’t issued one to Howdy Doody by now), I suppose one could ask, “What the hell inspired them to give it to Obama!?”

But reaction to the news was mixed both at home and abroad, with some critics calling the award political and others calling it premature. At least one former Peace Prize laureate said that the president - nominated for the prize just days after he entered the White House in January - had not earned the honor.

“Who? Obama? So fast? Too fast - he hasn’t had the time to do anything yet,” said Poland’s Lech Walesa, the 1983 winner who spent a year in jail after he helped found Solidarity, the Soviet bloc’s first independent trade union.

“For the time being, Obama’s just making proposals,” Mr. Walesa said.

Yeah, along with burying our economy, force feeding us socialism, kissing hindquarters in enemy territory…

The last thing the United States or the State of Nevada need is another Carter in Washington. Luckily, it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of that happening.

One member of that household in government was more than enough!

Now here’s a woman with a voracious appetite for modern technology.

Oprah Winfrey’s pissed off at Hermes, because their Paris store wouldn’t let her in to shop 15 minutes after closing(they were apparently having a promotional event, and she wasn’t on the invitation list). They probably wouldn’t have let me in after closing either, but I’d understand. Oprah doesn’t, because like many celebrities, she obviously feels that she’s ”more important” than any mere mortal(remember the big hoopla they made when she had to do jury duty, the media gave it nearly identical coverage to that of the Ronald Reagan memorial service). Yeah, sure, when Oprah’s inconvenienced, it’s big news.

Ms. Winfrey claims it was because she is black.

You go to a store after it closes. They refuse you admittance because they are closed, read the sign, lady! “But I’m Oprah! Surely a mere Closed sign doesn’t apply to me! It must be because I’m black!”

Now, she plans to boycott Hermes and do a show on the affair, despite a profuse official apology from Hermes.

However, on another side of the story,

According to the New York Post, a witness who was with Oprah when she tried to get into the store claims that the talk show host was told that “We’ve been having a problem with North Africans.”

Most North Africans I’ve met have been Arabs, who’ve been swarthy rather than black.

If this remark was actually made, Oprah does have some reason for being a little miffed.

My only reservation here is that I’ve been in several such highbrow stores, most recently Gucci to buy someone a present, and from what I’ve seen, the employees and managers are extremely civilized, polite and well spoken people(you don’t hire abrasive types to deal with customers who might buy single small items from you that are marked up into the thousands of dollars), not the sort to make such remarks.

When I lived in Nevada I worked for a busy casino, and as a casino employee, like employees of stores like Hermes, one thing you learn damn quick is that judging a customer’s spending power by appearance(excluding obvious types like winos, speed freaks, junkies, etc) is extremely foolish. We had regular high rollers who looked like day laborers, one even an old mega-alcoholic who looked the part, who didn’t give a second thought to, let alone worry about dropping $30,000.00 plus on a 21 table in under 2 hours three or four times a week. We had low-income “looking” black regulars who made $5,000.00 sports bets on two or three games a day. In stores like Hermes, employees are usually reaaalllly careful how they talk to people.

My point is, was this racial remark really made, or was this account fabricated? I’m so used to hearing the racial card played that I’ve gone beyond the giving of the doubt that someone levelling such a charge is telling the truth. I’m not from Missouri, but in such a case you have to “show” me.

Of course, this happened in Paris, so it might have happened just as stated. Why? Because the employee alleged to have made the comment was probably French and as we know, the French are “different.”