Uncle Sam wants you. As most people with access to media know, YouTube has asked vox populi to submit questions for the Democratic presidential candidates, to be asked on a televised debate (CNN) July 23. The problem is that while more than 1300 questions have been uploaded so far, according to a good article in the WashPost today, CNN's editors will choose the relatively few questions to ask the candidates.

Something of a bottleneck, there, especially considering the many ways CNN went along with the administration and facilitated its war with Iraq.

A web site named Community Counts has intervened. To quote from fellow interested web site techPresident,

"To fill this void, David Colarusso, a high school [physics] teacher from Lexington, MA currently teaching on a Fulbright scholarship in Scotland, has produced a new feature on his site Community Counts, which let’s YouTube users vote for their favorite Spotlight video every week — that lets the public vote for their favorite video question."

Under the heading Democratic Debate, Monday July 23, 2007, here's the opening:

"

Welcome to Community Counts' mashup of the YouTube/CNN Presidential Debates, a netroots campaign to have the presidential candidates answer the questions you want answered. Post a question. Then vote for the videos you want presented to the candidates. Click  ANSWER  to vote a video up and  IGNORE  to vote it down. You can also comment on a video by clicking. Find out more about us in our own words, or see what other people have to say.

Multiple votes for the same video will be ignored. You may, however, vote for more than one video. Email a friend.

Remember you are voting for the questions you want answered, not the viewpoints you agree with."

According to the Washington Post article, "As of Wednesday night, a video asking for President Bush's impeachment topped the site."

Note: it would have been nice had the article provided a link to the impeachment question itself, rather than a link to other WashPost articles about Bush. However, as any longtime reader of the Post could tell you, that the paper included that item about the impeachment question AT ALL is a flaming rarity. If the past is any guide, the reporter who compiled this piece will presently find himself reporting from one of the world's most dangerous places -- Afghanistan, Colombia, Florida -- unless he sanitizes himself first.

Writers who take a strong voice against bloodshed for greed tend to find themselves lonely at the Post. Former WashPost op-ed writer Colman McCarthy, the strongest voice for peace in the paper's front section, was fired from both the Washington Post and the Washington Post's syndicated writers group on the same day -- some time in late 1997, I believe. And Colnan once told me that the late Mary McGrory, another writer for sanity at the Post, had told him that a top editor/manager there hadn't spoken to her in 2-3 years, toward the end of her career.

In the farther-back history, veteran journalist McGrory had been a writer for the city's other daily, the Washington Star. She was one of the writers taken on by the Washington Post when the Star folded. At that time, the nation's capital became another one-newspaper city. Sadder yet, the Star's place was filled in an ersatz by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's media empire, which erected a pod-person version of big-city newspaper called the Washington Times, dedicated to facilitating every goal of the GOP, the neocons, and the top-down extreme hard-case corporate economic abusers. The imitation was good in a superficial way, with the stodgy title of 'The Washington Times' overlaid on the barking-mad hyena let's-reunite-North-and-South-Korea-by-force-if-necessary editorial "voice" of the paper. Even the New York Times' gothic font was imitated, adopted for the new  paper's title.

Too late to cry over spilled milk now, I suppose. Still -- among deeper regrets -- these people passed up the chance of a lifetime to name an American newspaper The Sun Moon Star.