In a sense, all the votes that have recently been taken in the Senate on the Iraq war have been test votes about impeachment of Bush.  The most important fact to remember is that while the House can impeach, it is the Senate that convicts, and it takes a 2/3 majority vote to do so.  The votes on cloture of debate on Iraq funding, requiriing 60 votes to pass, were not even close.  IMHO, the main reason the Republicans are still supporting Bush despite his obvious destructive impact on their election prospects, is to not send a signal to the Dems that impeachment might succeed.

So what is to be done?  We have to elect a hell of a lot more Dems to the Senate in 2008, not to impeach Bush-Cheney, because that will be too late, but to allow for impeachment of some of those nut-case judges that he has appointed.  The long shadow of the Bush regime will linger in the federal judiciary, and  they need to be cleaned out if the country is to be saved from the kind of fate that the decisions of idealogical judges played in the Weimar Republic.

I'm sure most of the people here also frequent Daily Kos and MyDD and are aware of the whole Bill O'Riely / JetBlue fiasco.  If you're not, here's the general gist:  Billo equated DKos with the KKK and Nazis, taking some troll rated comments and portraying them as the standard for Kos (I won't degrade GMD by posting yet another Billo video here, but if you want you can see his BS in the original on YouTube) and singled JetBlue out for sponsoring Yearly Kos.  Subsequently JetBlue at first resisted and then caved and withdrew their name from the website, though they're still donating the vouchers.  The real kicker was their letter explaining the withdrawal (signed by Dave Barger, their CEO), which essentially goes along with O'Lielly's conclusion that Kos is a hate site (emphasis complements of Scott Shields of MyDD):

I was personally completely unaware of the existence of DailyKos prior to news connecting the YearlyKos convention and thus our airline ticket donation to DailyKos. I personally have never condoned and abhor anything hateful towards anyone and am fully confident that JetBlue's crewmembers share this view.

So here's the letter I sent to JetBlue:

To Whom it May Concern,

I want to say first of all, JetBlue is far and away my favorite airline.  I have flown with you on several occasions and had, until very recently, been looking forward to my next opportunity to do so.  I also want to say that I appreciate your donation of travel vouchers to Yearly Kos.  However, due to your company's decision to withdraw your name from association with the convention due to the disgusting, politically motivated and staggeringly inaccurate attack on the part of Bill O'Riely I feel I can no longer use your airline.

Please, look into what Daily Kos is really about, and do the same for Bill O'Riely.  Decide for yourselves who the real “haters” are, and act accordingly.  I would like to refer you to two recent diaries on Daily Kos, here and here.  Daily Kos is not a hate site.  The comments picked by O'Riely were “troll rated,” meaning the Daily Kos community recognized them for what they were and made their displeasure at the rancor of the comments known.  O'Riely knew this when he picked them but did so nonetheless.  He has no interest in stamping out hate, and I hope you come to realize that.  Until then, I am sorry to say you have lost my business.

Sincerely,
Me*

*not my real name. Also, not in the original letter.

So why did I feel this was important enough to both write a letter to JetBlue and to write a diary (my first, come to think of it) on?  As progressives we need to push back when we're pushed, and especially when we're pushed this hard.  By equating the people that frequent and contribute to Kos (and by implication the rest of the liberal blogosphere) to Nazis and the KKK is to not only slander us, it is to trivialize the horrific crimes those groups perpetrated and trivialize the suffering of their victims.  It's also a point of pride for me to not let blowhards like Billo win the day.  More importantly though, by letting a company implicitly agree that liberals/progressives are hate-filled, bigoted extremists we would be playing right into the narrative that conservatives have spent so much time and energy building.  Only by pushing back and saying “No, this is what we really stand for,” can we win back the meme that's playing out in our society, and this is one small piece of that battle.

Obviously, as maxomai pointed out on Kos there are far, far more important things happening in the world than this, but being successful in the political arena means doing a whole lot of little things right and IMHO at least, this is one of those things.

PS – You can reach JetBlue at corporatecommunications@jetblue.com.

I'm not kidding:

President Bush will undergo a routine colonoscopy Saturday, and will transfer power to Vice President Dick Cheney during the procedure, expected to take about two and a half hours, the chief White House spokesman said.

Let's hope nothing too serious happens.