By Steve Clemons

I’ve had a number of emails from folks suggesting I am disrespecting the hardworking campaign canvassers and volunteers working hard on the Obama campaign for having reported that at least two paying guests at the Obama fundraiser last night in Philadelphia thought that there was a bit of “inevitability” woven into the evening.

I have heard from two attendees who along with 198 other business and social leaders had dinner with Barack Obama last night in Philadelphia. One said that the whole evening “looked like a victory lap to me.” The other attendee agreed with that assessment. Overconfidence and the posture of inevitability KILLS campaigns.

The U.S. will now remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list. Vice President Cheney and John Bolton must have migraines today. Congratulations to Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary of State for Christopher Hill.

Watch out for her bite.

Free Webcam Chat at Ustream Four years ago, Osama bin Laden chronicler and CNN and New America Foundation terrorism expert PETER BERGEN, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib author and NYU Center on Law and Security Director KAREN GREENBERG, and I organized a day long mega-meeting of the world’s best and brightest al…

Here would be an interesting line of defense in Senator Norm Coleman’s brewing scandal. Perhaps Coleman just BORROWED the suits — and wore temporarily — a few times — and then returned them to friend and campaign supporter Nasser Kazeminy. Note to the press: Ask the spokesman if Coleman just took a few loaners. ….

Thanks to Politico‘s Ben Smith for sending this our way. This is the most painful press engagement between a campaign spokesman and a “polite, but persistent” group of media I have ever seen. Let’s just hope that Al Franken buys all of his own suits.

This is important and is more evidence of the dismantling of George W. Bush’s imperial presidency. Federal District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina has ordered the release by the end of this week of 17 Guantanamo detainees who happen to be Uighers.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel My colleague Michael Lind — who is Senior Fellow and Director of the New America Foundation’s American Infrastructure Initiative — offered some thoughts on what the future might look like over at The New Republic‘s “The Plank“.

I never learned to play a musical instrument. I have huge, widespread hands and should have been a pianist.