That's right, it's Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson!

THIS IS THE CORRECT CLIP, I HOPE (thanks, WaPo!): Gene Robinson spoke yesterday in the Washington Post newsroom after the announcement of his Pulitzer Prize for commentary. You can hear him talk about the moment, at 10:45 on Election Night 2008, when he got to call his parents from the MSNBC set and inform them that they had lived to see the election of a black president. I realize this is technically a "spoiler," what I've just written, but I don't think it will spoil the moment for you.

by Ken

First off, not to worry, nothing has happened to Howie -- he just had an overnight business trip, and should be back in his blogging chair momentarily.

Second, I really don't think we can let the day pass without taking note of Gene Robinson's Pulitzer triumph yesterday. It was a happy moment last night when Rachel Maddow almost exploded with pleasure at being able to introduce as her guest "Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson." It's probably more thanks to his incorporation in the Countdown and Rachel Maddow Show family than to his newspaper writing that Gene has come to seem like family -- like, for that matter, one of the newspaper columnists he beat out, a fellow named Krugman.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT: KRUGMAN HAS NEVER WON A PULITZER

This is, I believe, the fifth time he has been passed over -- and by "passed over" I mean in the sense that he was nominated but didn't win. Since he began writing his NYT column, in 1999, has there been a year in which he didn't deserve the prize?

It's easy to joke that Krugman will just have to console himself with the Nobel Prize he just snagged, even if it is for work he did eons ago. However, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that he occupied a position of such special loathing in the eyes of the Bush regimistas that the politics of the Pulitzers made a prize impossible while the regime was in power.

I'm certainly not going to begrudge Gene Robinson his Pulitzer, which was awarded specifically for his 2008 election coverage. But one of these years Krugman is going to score his first Pulitzer, and I wonder how many people are going to be startled, then shocked, to realize that he's never won one.

It may be worth a moment's reflection to consider how the progressive presence in media has resurged under the pressure of the living catastrophe of the Bush regime. I don't think I've ever been stinting in my gratitude to people like Krugman and Frank Rich and Jon Stewart, and then the the upcomers like Marc Maron on Air America Radio's much-lamented Morning Sedition show, and Rachel Maddow on AAR, and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. And now Keith's and Rachel's MSNBC shows have given us an entire family of more or less trustworthy talking heads.

It's frustrating that such a sizable part of the country still hasn't absorbed the lesson in the horrors of Modern Republican (or Movement Conservative) government dished out in eight years of the Bush regime. But there's some comfort in the newly released AP poll showing, as Ron Fournier (yes, Ron Fournier!) and Trevor Tompson put it:

"For the first time in years, more Americans than not say the country is headed in the right direction, a sign that Barack Obama has used the first 100 days of his presidency to lift the public's mood and inspire hopes for a brighter future."

Let's not kid ourselves about the difficulty of the road ahead. But things look a lot less bleak than they did in, say, the darkest hours of 2003 or 2004. And congratulations again, Gene!

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