Every Friday, The Next Prez ranks the top five presidential contenders for 2008 in the Democratic, Republican, and third-party camps. Here are this week's rankings:

Democrats

1. Hillary Clinton (steady): Clinton will likely remain in the top spot at least until the 2008 presidential race begins in earnest after the 2006 elections.

2. Mark Warner (rising): Warner is gaining a lot of name recognition, and receiving a lot of credit, for helping Tim Kaine to a convincing victory in the race to replace him as Virginia's governor.

3. Wesley Clark (steady): Clark has held off challenges from Feingold and Kerry in contending for the support of progressive activists, despite not joining them in calling for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.

4. John Edwards (falling): Edwards continues to travel the country raising awareness about poverty, but Democrats have started looking to Warner for a candidate who might be able to deliver Electoral votes in the South.

5. Bill Richardson (steady): The New Mexico governor brings a unique resume to the world's longest job interview, the race to determine who will be The Next President.

Read the story and Vote

Angry words and personal insults erupted in Congress this week when a representative from Ohio with barley two-months tenure in the august body suggested Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Marine decorated for combat duty in Vietnam, was a coward when he proposed that the war in Iraq was a failure. More of this acrimony should swirl around Dick Cheney, who took five deferments to dodge the draft during the Vietnam period. What else is here – the daily Kos, among the most influential of the blogs – has Wesley Clark desired by more that 34% of his readership, far more than any other contender for Democratic leadership. Clark’s stock will rise now in the party and in the country. Here is an essay I wrote about Wesley Clark in late August, 2005 for The Free Liberal. Murtha is wrong on the issue of withdrawal and General Clark is right. But what will bring Clark through is character he is a warrior through and through.

Read the entire November 19, 2005 post

Have a great night!

Today's Open Thread will include posts by Erick Mullen. Erick is General Clark's Communications and Political Advisor. He was with General Clark on Capitol Hill last week and traveled with General Clark to Wisconsin and Iowa.

From the SecuringAmerica.com Event Calendar.

For more information please contact the Oklahoma Democratic Party at 405-427-3366.

Check Out the newspaper article from the Oklahoma State University Daily O'Collegian.

General Clark will be on Fox news today at 12:50 CDT to discuss Rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.

If you have digital images from events that General Clark are spoken at or attended and would like to have them included in the WesPAC image library, send them to JOhn Oeffinger. We cannot include any images that have a Copyright or other ownership rights attached to them...so if you or a friend took pictures and you'll let us add them to the gallery...send them one. We may not be able to display all of the images, but we would love to have a great sample to post.

This is not a conversation thread. Please post only the URL and a short description of the web site or blog.

We are compiling a list of web sites or blogs helping to re-connect displaced family members due to Hurricane Katrina. Please insert the link and a very short description of the site or blog so people can use this as a resource to re-connect family members. In addition to adding your link hear, please cross-post the url's? Thanks for keeping the discussion off this blog.

Kudos to Sharon K (20 links), WesDem (11 links), Barry_NJ, Blue Moon, PA fo

Clark's Consistency - By Ed Kilgore

In and beyond General Wesley Clark's Table for One posts, he's showing a really admirable consistency in his national security views, and his particular take on Iraq.

It's well known that Clark opposed the invasion of Iraq on national security grounds, but it's sometimes forgotten that he, like many other war opponents (including Howard Dean) took the position that the U.S. could not afford to lose the post-invasion struggle to make a post-Saddam Iraq stable and semi-democratic.