As roughly 50% of recent MyDD posts have been dedicated to trashing one candidate or another, we'd like to ask everyone to save bandwidth and your own time by using the following form for your future diaries.  Please circle the appropriate choice in each bracket:

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It's obvious to anyone with a brain that [Clinton/Obama/Edwards/Kucinich/Yogi Bear] is the ONLY candidate who can POSSIBLY win in November and run the country for the next four years.  [Clinton/Obama] has proven, through their stance on [the war/health care/pic-a-nic baskets] that they have utterly betrayed the Democratic party.  [He/she] is supported by [moderates/corporate donors], and has [praised Reagan/fundraised with Rupert Murdoch], so [he/she] is clearly a GOP stooge, who the Republicans secretly want to win the nomination because they think [he/she] won't match up well against McCain in November.

Watching the NH results on TV was pretty funny.  The talking heads had been pushing the Clinton Inevitability Meme for a year, and Iowa destroyed that.  So they immediately shifted to the Obama Will Win Everything Ever Meme, and New Hampshire trashed that one.  So now they're back on the Clinton Inevitability Meme.  It's like they only have two settings: Clinton Will Automatically Win, and Obama Will Automatically Win.  When the truth is, nobody knows what's going to happen.

Every Memorial Day since the war started, Garry Trudeau has run a Sunday Doonesbury (or several) listing the names of the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for their country.  Many papers have refused to run the strips, because reminding Americans of the sacrifices our soldiers have made isn't "supporting the troops," ie. supporting the Bush agenda.  I don't know what your local paper did this past Sunday, but Yahoo.com, where I usually read Doonesbury, refused to run the strip.  Contact Yahoo and tell them that you're disgusted that they'd spend Memorial Day sweeping our troops' sacrifice under the rug.

The next Clinton?  The next JFK?  Lincoln?  Alexander the Great?  We're hearing a lot of wonderful things about Barack Obama lately.  Whether any of this hype turns out to be true remains to be seen, but because the hype is coming so early in election season, we have plenty of time to figure the guy out.  I see two possibilities:

1) It's just hype.  He's an inexperienced freshman Senator who looks good in a suit, but he doesn't have what it takes to survive a grueling campaign season, much less run the country.  If that turns out to be the case, then we have plenty of time to find a stronger, more experienced candidate.  Good for the Democrats.

2) He's the real deal.  If he can keep the hype going for a full year, survive the media scrutiny, the inevitable backlash against the hype, challengers of every stripe, take on Mrs. Clinton, and still be our golden boy come convention time, then I have every confidence that he's our strongest candidate and can beat whoever the Republicans serve up.  Good for the Democrats.

If this hype had sprung up just before Iowa and NH, I could see us being suckered in and then finding out we backed the wrong horse (not that that's ever happened before, #cough# Kerry! #cough#).  But we have a full year to figure out whether Obama's got what it takes.

The folks over at Democratic Underground dug up an interview with George and Laura from '03, talking about what they were doing the night of 9/11/01.  While the rest of us were all tearfully mourning the dead and fearing what the morning would bring, the Bushes were complaining that the beds weren't comfy enough in the bunker under the White House, and preoccupied with not looking too disheveled when they were woken up by a false alarm about another attack.

Even knowing everything I know about Bush, this is still beyond the pale.  While I was up all night wondering if friends of mine who lived downtown were still alive, and whether more attacks would hit us the next morning, Bush was clowning around, without a care in the world.  If there's anyone left on this Earth who doesn't see this man as a self-centered, immoral cretin, show them this interview.

The NY Daily News ran that headline back in the 70s, when Gerald Ford denied federal aid to the then-bankrupt city.  They're using it again today, and this time it's much worse.  Bush's cronies have cut already-inadequate anti-terror funding by 40%, while raising it in such high-profile targets as Louisville, KY and Omaha, NE.

One of the first things Bush did after 9/11, after he finished reading his children's book (the goat does make it to the top of the hill, for those of you who were worried), was cut funding for NYC first responders - our police and firefighters.  So, what's the explanation here?  Bush has done nothing but undermine our response to terrorist attacks.  Does he want the terrorists to win?  Or does he just hate America?

Over on Kos, I just saw the greatest example of grassroots political activism I've ever seen, and I wanted to share it with folks on this site.  A group of Kos readers have gotten together and (with input from thousands of comments), written Energize America, a 20-point plan for making America energy-independent and reduce greenhouse gases in the process.  It's detailed and well-researched enough that you could easily write bona fide legislation based on it.  And yet you can sum up each of the 20 points in a few words, and the whole concept in a few sentences.  Put this on Howard Dean's desk, or Al Gore's or whoever our next presidential candidate is, and you've got a succinct energy policy that will revolutionize our economy, cut our dependence on Saudi Arabia and Iran, and quite possibly save humanity from extinction.  Check it out.

Rep. John Conyers has quietly introduced a resolution calling for the creation of a House select committee to determine whether Bush should be impeached for encouraging the torture of detainees, misusing and misrepresenting intelligence about Iraq, misleading Americans about the reasons for war there and retaliating against critics, like former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who called his actions into question.

In addition, Conyers has introduced resolutions calling for the censure of both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for failing to respond to congressional inquiries about the Downing Street memos and other issues related to the Iraq war.

The GOP will almost certainly quash this, but it makes me hopeful that a Dem-majority House or Senate could spring into action in '07, assuming we have fair elections and can take back either house.