The president of The United States, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize today. He gave an incredible acceptance speech… with highlights like this

And it sure did.

Here are some pix of Mr and Mrs Obama's Oslo trip…

pop below for more pix and reactions to the speech 

some political talking heads/pundits reax to this very honest, historiec and moving the speech that had the audience and the world glued, not to mention there were tears and a very long standing ovation.

Joe Klein wrote:

Precisely the way an American President should address the world. No matter your politics, Barack Obama did our nation proud today.

 James Fallows:

in terms of Obama's own political reputation and momentum, today's address will not supplant the most important speech he has delivered: the one he gave in Philadelphia, about race relations, in March, 2008. But this was a very good and serious speech, which like many of his major addresses – the Inaugural address, the one in Prague about nuclear weapons, the one in Cairo on relations with the Islamic world – will stand re-reading and close inspection, and which shared an obvious intellectual and structural architecture with all his other major addresses. Those trademark elements include:
The embrace of contradictions (in this case, a defense of war as a means to peace); the long view; the emphasis on institution-building; the concern about the distortion of religious and ethnic loyalties; and above all a consciousness that was once called Niebuhrian and at this rate will someday be “Obamian,” which emphasizes the importance of steady steps forward in an inevitably flawed world.

 Ross Douthat, who was and still is a fierce objector to Obama's actual winning of this award, conclude:

He faced the impossible task of having to give multiple addresses at once: A speech his European hosts expected to hear from a Nobel Prize winner; a speech that would work as a statement of foreign policy principle from an American president abroad; and the speech that would play well with a skeptical public back home. It could have easily collapsed into incoherence. Instead, it mostly cohered, and often impressed.
In a sense, this was one of the clearer statements of foreign policy principle that Obama has delivered to date: An extended defense of using realist means in the service of liberal internationalist ends. It’s an approach that fits at least some of the challenges we face, and the turn toward modesty and pragmatism, in particular — toward the pursuit of “a more practical, attainable peace,” to quote Obama quoting John F. Kennedy this morning — makes sense as a corrective to some of the more hubristic elements of Bush’s foreign policy".

Mike Crowley reacts:

Obama is a man trapped amongst the contradictions created by America's awkward place in the post-Bush world. Last week, Obama's address on Afghanistan both escalated and promised an end to the war there. Today, Obama opened his Nobel Peace Price acceptance speech with a long disquisition on the nature of war and its necessity–complete with a brief survey of “just war” theory. (He even threw in a passage about the necessary role of coercion against states like Iran and North Korea that mess around with nuclear weapons.) I suppose it was the honest way to take such a prize at a time when America has about 200,000 soldiers occupying foreign countries. But it was something of a surreal exercise.

Sarah Palin the current defacto leader of the republicans liked the speech too:

“I liked what he said,” Palin told us in a phone interview. “I talked too in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times.”