Here's my favorite ex-presidential candidate making me wonder, once again, why anyone ever voted for anyone else:

There's an interesting piece in Firedoglake about who can best carry the upcoming 2008 elections. For Republicans, it appears John McCain is their man, but only because FDL has written off Rudy Giuliani. Despite the polls, I wonder how many skeletons would crawl out of Rudy's closet in a major national race.

And though the entire country seems to have written off John Edwards, he looks to be the best chance for Democrats to take the White House, followed by Obama, with Hillary in dead last.

The upshot of all this: If Hillary's the Democratic nominee, we could very easily lose to any likely GOP nominee. If Obama's the nominee, he does OK so long as he doesn't face McCain. But if Edwards is the nominee, we're sitting pretty. Which, I suspect, is one reason why Big Media hates John Edwards so much and does everything it can to destroy him. (Speaking of which: KingOneEye at DailyKos pointed out this morning how the NYT is ignoring a key result of its own poll on the race -- namely, that as more people get to know him, Edwards' favorability rating keeps going up.)

Even though polls show a statistical dead heat in Nevada, Edwards is routinely ignored by mainstream media. Hopefully sometime between now and February 5th, Democrats will take a look at the big picture and vote with their eyes wide open.

Last night I stayed up and watched a lot of CNN and MSNBC (and even a little Fox). I heard a lot of talk about Huckabee and Obama, of course, and I saw their speeches. I heard an awful lot of talk about Hillary, and what last night may have meant to her. But I didn't hear much, if anything, about John Edwards, who actually outpolled Hillary.

I first saw him in 04, on CSPAN, at some event Tom Harkin hosted. He was very impressive, and it was very disappointing to see him play second banana to John Kerry's bumbling campaign.

I don't know if it was my compulsive channel-changing or not, but I didn't see this last night. Here's a voice that's largely absent from cable news, and through the miracle of the internet, you can hear it right here, right now:

You don't hear a lot of talk like that nowadays, unless you're paying attention to John Edwards. Here are a few more quotes:

"It's a fact that having a good teacher is the single most effective way to improve a classroom."

"We give (teachers) too little control over their classrooms."

"Teachers are heroes for dedicating their lives to our children, but heroes have to pay the bills too. Instead of helping teachers overcome problems, some people talk like teachers are the problem."

And here's the speech it came from. It's well worth a view: