By Steve Clemons

(photo credit: Brian Greer) “That’s Obama!” No words can say more than this picture of excitement and hope in pure form.

Maureen Dowd threw a “Star Spangled Banner” party — so I wore a star spangled tie. My modest attempt at festive attire wasn’t matched by anyone else there. Maureen loved the tie and told me her sister had originally wanted everyone to come patriotically dressed.

Last night, through a massive crowd of people that David Brock and Media Matters for America assembled for an excellent Inaugural celebration at the Hirshhorn Museum, I thought I saw Norman Lear. And a tear came to my eye.

Well, I have made it through every corner of my schedule so far. And last night, we actually added an event — a drop by at the “Late Night Finance Committee Party” of the Presidential Inauguration Committee at the DC Convention Center.

I’ve been asked by quite a few readers what I’m going to do and attend this weekend. So, I’ll lay that all out here. But first let me say that there are a lot of great gatherings in DC — some really cool ones — that I was invited to that I just can’t attend….

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Richard Lugar (R-IN) submitted quite a number of written questions (pdf here) to Hillary Clinton to answer as part of the process of the Senate considering her nomination as Secretary of State.

Later today, I will post video here at TWN from a presentation author and filmmaker Eugene Jarecki made at a meeting I hosted under the auspices of the New America Foundation/American Strategy Program.

I will be regularly posting clips called “What the Right is Saying” and “What the Left is Saying” from time to time — particularly when there is a point either side is making that reasonable people could scratch their head and say, ‘hey, that makes some sense. . .’ From RedState.

Barack Obama is about to become the 44th President of the United States and like most Presidents, he will begin (if he hasn’t already) to read as many profiles and biographies of great leaders as he can pile on his night table. Or Lincoln’s.

I just learned that John Shattuck, President and CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, will be shifting from his current duties to assume the helm as president and rector of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.