The search continues for the next American fill-in-the-blank

Surprise, surprise. Hillary Clinton is still in the game, and still keeping things precarious for the Democratic party. I’m not placing all the blame on her, but the closer we’ve come to November, the more apparent it’s become that the Democrats need Barack Obama on their ticket if they want to beat John McCain.

Props to Mike Huckabee for finally coming to his senses. What a waste of time and money.

The playing field on American Idol evened out a little bit last night, as favorite David Archuleta gave an inevitable but potentially strategized average performance of Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise” and formerly average performers David Cook and Michael Johns rose to the challenge.

Last night was the first time I did not think Simon Cowell’s criticisms were dead on. I thought Chikezie did a fine job of Luther Vandross’ “All the Woman I Need” and that pretty boy Jason Castro’s rendition of Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” was really nothing special.

Luke Menard has been in this competition three weeks too long and needs to be booted on Thursday and Danny Noriega continues to try to shock audiences while doing a poor job of it, though he definitely has star quality. In fact, I’m beginning to see his oft-noted resemblance to Miley Cyrus.

And I’m waiting for David Hernandez to be booted off, if for no reason other than the supposedly-scandalous photos (I haven’t seen; don’t care enough) and his skeevy past as a male exotic dancer. He’s a good enough singer to stay in for now, but the use of his face to seduce the audience (namely with his eyebrows) is a huge turnoff. Somebody tell him to stop.

There’s probably a good reason I’ve never been able to make it through an entire season of American Idol: when everyone can sang, it’ll come down to differentiating talents by their increasingly annoying quirks. David Hernandez and his eyebrows, DArchuleta and his flappy lips … as for Danny Noriega, he is himself a quirk, so he can only run the risk of being madly loved or wildly hated.

[Photo courtesy of AmericanIdol.com]