The 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) award was split three ways between Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, women's rights activist Leymah Gbowee from the same African country and democracy activist Tawakkul Karman of Yemen -- the first Arab woman to win the prize.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee told The Associated Press that Karman's award should be seen as a signal that both women and Islam have important roles to play in the uprisings known as the Arab Spring, the wave of anti-authoritarian revolts that have challenged rulers across the Arab world.

"The Arab Spring cannot be successful without including the women in it," Jagland said.

He said Karman, 32, belongs to a Muslim movement with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group "which in the West is perceived as a threat to democracy." He added that "I don't believe that. There are many signals that that kind of movement can be an important part of the solution."

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Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina, secret-spilling organization WikiLeaks and Cuban dissidents are among the candidates who have been publicly announced by those who nominated them.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee does not reveal the names of nominees and doesn't discuss any candidates until the winner is announced in October.

Geir Lundestad, the permanent secretary of the committee, told The Associated Press that 188 individuals and 53 organizations have been nominated for the prestigious award.

"We have a record number of nominations this year, but there has been a steady increase over time," he said. Last year the committee received 237 nominations.

The deadline for outside nominations was Feb. 1, but the five-member committee added its own suggestions at a meeting Monday, said Lundestad, who doesn't have voting rights.

"We have an active committee, which has added several proposals the last years," he said.

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The man they honored wasn't there Friday -- he is serving an 11-year sentence at Jinzhou Prison in northeastern China for urging sweeping changes to Beijing's one-party communist political system.

And there was no news coverage of it in China, where foreign TV news channels went black as the ceremony began and authorities denounced the award as a "political farce."

It was the first time in 74 years the prestigious $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize was not handed over.

Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland drew the first of several standing ovations from the international gathering of 1,000 guests at Oslo City Hall when he noted that neither Liu nor his closest relatives were able to attend.

"This fact alone shows that the award was necessary and appropriate," he said.

He brought the crowd to its feet again when he declared: "He has not done anything wrong. He must be released."

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The prestigious 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) award can only be collected by the laureate or close family members.

Liu, a Chinese dissident, is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion after co-authoring an appeal calling for reforms to China's one-party political system. His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest and subject to police escort since the award was announced last month.

Norwegian Nobel Committee secretary Geir Lundestad told The Associated Press that no other relatives have announced plans to come to Oslo for the Dec. 10 ceremony.

"The way it looks now, it is not likely that someone from his close family will attend," Lundestad said. "Then we will not give out the medal and the diploma during the ceremony."

If that happens it will be the first time since 1936, when there was no one present to accept the medal and diploma for German journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who was seriously ill and refused permission to leave Nazi Germany. However, a representative of Ossietzky received the prize money, Lundestad said.

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While scores of people who gathered near her home were disappointed that she was not given an early release Friday night, colleagues said an order to set her free had already been signed by Myanmar's ruling generals. Some 200 people has come earlier when rumors of her impending release were at their height.

Adding to the expectant atmosphere was a sharply stepped-up security presence in Yangon: truckloads of riot police, cruising and parked -- a familiar sight to city residents during times of political tension.

The country's first in 20 years was held Nov. 7, and critics allege it was manipulated to give a pro-military party a sweeping victory. Results have been released piecemeal and already have given the junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party a majority in both houses of Parliament.

The 1990 election was won in a landslide by Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party, but the military refused to hand over power and instead clamped down on opponents.

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Here are two excerpts, one addressed to his jailers, and one to his wife -- one of the most incredible expressions of love I've ever read.

But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed twenty years ago in my "June Second hunger strike declaration" -- I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I'm unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities. This includes Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing who act for the prosecution at present: I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December.

For hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

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Chinese state media immediately blacked out the news and Chinese government censors blocked Nobel Prize reports from Internet websites. China declared the decision would harm its relations with Norway -- and the Nordic country responded that was a petty thing for a world power to do.

This year's peace prize followed a long tradition of honoring dissidents around the world and was the first Nobel for China's dissident community since it resurfaced after the Communists launched economic but not political reforms three decades ago.

Liu, 54, was sentenced last year to 11 years in prison for subversion. The Nobel committee said he was the first to be honored while still in prison, although other Nobel winners have been under house arrest or imprisoned before the prize.

Other dissidents to win the peace prize include German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky in 1935, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1975, Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa in 1983 and Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991.

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The irony was not lost on the president, and he tried to address it in his Nobel acceptance speech. "I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land," he said. "Some will kill. Some will be killed. And so I come here with an acute sense of the cost of armed conflict -- filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."

Granted, there's a gap here between the rhetoric and the reality. But there's always been something askew about Nobel Peace Prize, in no small part because it's given in the name of the man who invented dynamite, one of the most powerful and destructive weapons in the human arsenal.

It was rumored that after Alfred Nobel brought his version of Frankenstein's creature into the world, he was torn by guilt, his shame said to have intensified when a French newspaper prematurely ran his obituary with the headline "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." The article vilified him as a man "who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before."

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There were some interesting responses, though, especially two that came from people who normally find reason to criticize most things that Obama does or says: Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.

"I liked what he said," Palin said in an interview with USA Today. "I talked too in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times."

As for Gingrich, he said, in an interview with NPR show The Takeaway, "I thought the speech was actually very good. He clearly understood that he had been given the prize prematurely, but he used it as an occasion to remind people, first of all, as he said: that there is evil in the world."

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Still, Obama was clearly given the prize to encourage him in the direction of peace. It is the tragedy of the sole superpower that it is unconstrained by peers and so can launch wars of choice and shatter international law at will. It can be counseled but not blocked. He was awarded this honor as a counsel.

So here are the things Obama can do to redeem his prize.

1. Get out of Iraq on schedule. We can't stop their low-intensity conflicts, and they are more likely to compromise with each other if we are not there.

2. Resist calls for Iran to be bombed. Such a raid would guarantee that Iran would start a crash program to develop a nuclear weapon, and there would be no way to stop it short of full-scale war.

3. Stop allowing the CIA to operate drones with which to assassinate people. It is illegal and shameful. The U.S. military must be in charge of defending the country by force or we are a police state.

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A lesser speaker, or someone without the quality speechwriting team Obama has assembled, could never have pulled all of this at once. And the president will certainly get criticism from both left and right for having even tried it.

Still, somehow Obama accomplished what he set out to do.

"Compared to some of the giants of history who have received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight," Obama said at the beginning of his address.

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Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, a member of the Nobel committee that chose him, told the Associated Press this week, "I looked at his face when he was on TV, and confirmed that he would receive the prize and would come to Norway, and he didn't look particularly happy."

After all, Obama has been president for barely nine months and, yes, he has made some fine speeches in support of peace and bettering international relations. But was that enough to merit the award? Was he winning it more for who he's not -- George W. Bush -- than for who he is?

Sadly, much of the initial reaction in the United States was churlish and scornful, ill-informed and frankly, as un-American as that of the knee-jerk right who cheered when Obama's quick trip to Copenhagen failed to win the Olympics for his Chicago hometown. We are less serious as a nation than we should be. The empty-headedness and inanity of much of the media and the political response to the announcement bears testament to that unhappy truth. We would do better to see ourselves as others see us than to scream in protest and sarcasm when another part of the world wishes to honor our president and us.

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The right in the U.S. objected to Obama getting the Peace Prize on the alleged grounds that he had not yet done anything to deserve it. But the right in the United States is to peace as velociraptors were to vegetarianism. They don't believe in the ideal for which the award stands in the first place. And they find President Obama laughable, so they can't imagine him getting any awards. They have underestimated him badly and will probably pay a price for that. They misunderstand the Nobel Peace Prize and its history, and the Rupert Murdoch right (he pays for a lot of this pollution of our airwaves) would not have agreed with any of the past awards.



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I'd rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arms threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise. Perhaps the Nobel committee can give him half the prize now and withhold the other half until he accomplishes one or more of these crucial missions.

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A few hours of reflection, and reading what the committee said about the award, and I could see its point and purpose. In recent years the Nobel Peace Prize has more often honored promise and encouraged progress than it marked concrete, permanent achievements in the realm of world peace. So the prize went to President Carter's ultimately unsuccessful 1978 Middle East peace drive; and to the same still uncompleted effort by Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. In 1991, Aung San Suu Kyi won the prize in her jail cell, but the point was to support democracy in Burma (and 18 years later, she is still under house arrest).Thinking about the Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant "Peace Mothers" who won the award in 1976,  years before real peace accords, I suddenly saw Obama's win as strangely humble, and personal: One man trying to reverse the bloody tide of recent American history.

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Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum — when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.

Hat-tip to CNN's Political Ticker blog.

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"This fully exposes, folks, the illusion that is Obama,'' Limbaugh said. "This a greater embarrassment than losing the Olympics bid was.'' He wasn't done there, either.

"You are destroying your country as a superpower -- keep it up, bud," he said to Obama."These are the accomplishments they're looking for. He's basically emasculating this country and they love it ... It really is insidious. The intent of the committee is to neuter the United States of America. They've done it by rewarding a pacifist." At one point, Limbaugh even quipped, "I think Obama's the second Kenyan to win."

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Both Media Matters and Daily Kos have produced videos compiling reactions to the award and suggesting that the right has aligned itself with terrorists. You can see the Media Matters video below. After a series of clips put together by the liberal press watchdog, the video ends with a black screen, on top of which is white text asking, "So if it's not America, who are the conservatives rooting for?"

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