Will the next president be like Ike (Eisenhower), emerging as an attractive and experienced presidential choice to a nation weary of war?

Or will the winner in 2008 redefine their party as Britain's Tony (Blair) did in the mid-1990s, establishing the foundation for a new governing majority in America?

Or will a third party choice arise similar to Ross (Perot's) 1992 populist-driven candidacy, scramble the political matrix, and attract enough support to enable a candidate to win the White House with less than 45% of the popular vote?

These three wildly different scenarios were proposed recently by an influential political scientist as possible precedents for the 2008 presidential contests.

Make the jump to learn the who and the WHAT???!!!

Mayor Bloomberg is mandating that the city's entire taxi fleet be hybrid - massively increasing fuel efficiency and saving the average taxi driver $10,000 in fuel costs. This is the kind of no-brainer that Democratic Mayors (and the federal government) should be mandating as well.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The city's yellow taxi fleet will go entirely hybrid within five years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday.

''There's an awful lot of taxicabs on the streets of New York City,'' Bloomberg said. ''These cars just sit there in traffic sometimes, belching fumes.

''This does a lot less. It's a lot better for all of us,'' he said of the hybrid plan.

According to the NYT,  New York City Boss Michael Bloomberg--a corporatist Republican who has convinced many people he's a Liberal--is sending his army of paid campaign workers to pump up the Lieberman campaign in Connecticut:

In his battle for re-election to the United States Senate without the backing of the Democratic Party, Joseph I. Lieberman is deploying a secret weapon in the race's closing days: a sophisticated operation to identify and turn out voters, courtesy of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

The Bloomberg group includes several top-level operatives who played key roles in the mayor's decisive re-election last year or who are in the administration, and have taken leaves from their jobs to work on Mr. Lieberman's campaign.

Though I'm a long-time reader and sometime commenter here at MyDD, I've never posted a diary before. But nobody's brought this up yet, and given the recriminations recently over whether you can support Michael Bloomberg and still be a Democrat in good standing, I thought that it was pretty pertinent.

In today's Washington Post, Michael Bloomberg and Jeb Bush have a column - together - on their support for the continuation and expansion of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB is a law that, as I've been arguing since its passage (offline, mostly), has a pretty basic set of goals: the destruction of teacher's unions and America's public schools.

Two words: Al Sharpton. Now he wants to have all 3 black candidates unite against David Yassky for NY's 11th Congressional District.  

I explain why and why we should ignore Sharpton on the flipside