By Steve Clemons

Below follows the lead from a piece I just wrote for CNN on Barack Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize.

Forget the Chicago Olympics foul up. Barack Obama has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — the first sitting US President to win the Prize since Woodrow Wilson.

Former Reagan Administration Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State George Shultz thinks that the US embargo against Cuba should “simply be lifted.

(photo: Matthew Waxman, Walter Pincus, Dana Priest, and Christian Brose; photo credit: Steve Clemons) My good friend and occasional intellectual jousting mate, Christian Brose, is leaving Foreign Policy magazine and becoming Senator John McCain‘s senior foreign policy adviser.

Today, Barack Obama is spending nearly all of his day in briefings related to Afghanistan and Pakistan. While many Members of Congress are invited to the briefings, you and I are not.

(Riz Khan anchors the Riz Khan Show on Al Jazeera English. This “Note” is part of a series of posts that personalities from Al Jazeera have been sharing with readers of The Washington Note.) New York is going into rehab – to use an increasingly popular term.

Cherie Blair, Founder of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, was kind enough to give me a few minutes at the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative to talk about her partnership with Hani Masri and the Tomorrow’s Youth Organization in Nablus, Palestine.

This in from a friend: Theresa Poulson, one of the NJ.com reporters was covering a conservative event here in D.C. today in which Michael Steele, GOP chairman, was the featured speaker. She was the only reporter there. Steele interrupted his speech to announce that Chicago had lost and Rio had won the 2016 Olympics.

I had an excellent discussion with former German Green Party Chairman and new European Parliament Member Reinhard Bütikofer and his European Parliament colleague Claude Turmes this past week on what Europe was expecting from the US and President Obama at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. A short exchange is posted ab

Congressman Aaron Schock is a highly reasonable, intelligent, balanced Republican Member of Congress — and though I have only met him twice, I was impressed with how he conducted his conversations and views in DC cocktail policy chatter — particularly at an MSNBC party where Rachel Maddow was tending the bar.