In the UK, Boxing Day (the day after Christmas) is the day that you give gifts to employees, coworkers, or people who have served you throughout the year. According to Wikipedia:

Boxing Day is a traditional celebration, dating back to the Middle Ages, and consisted of the practice of giving out gifts to employees, the poor, or to people in a lower social class.

Somehow, it seems like an appropriate day to celebrate John Edwards, the candidate who has taken the gloves off to fight for all of us.

There's more...

I'm not the most prolific diarist or commenter, but anyone familiar with my contributions knows something about my temperament.  I've cheered our field of candidates since before any of them announced.   I've contributed long essays where I've tried to be constructive in both praising and criticizing my favorite candidate, John Edwards.

I've tried to be very respectful toward other members of this community.  On those occasions when I think someone's made a particularly inane remark, the harshest you might expect from me is satire, not bile.

In other words, to use an old-fashioned idiom, I've kept a civil tongue in my head.

But not in this post. Because some members of this community have gone beyond the pale, and I don't feel like being at all polite toward them. I'm talking about this comment and response - the latter by someone who is accorded frontpage posting privileges on this blog.  I'm not going to blockquote their comments, because they don't deserve to be quoted.  They are shitty comments.  And the original commenter continues to smear this fecal matter in a new thread today.

There's more...

It seems that the attacks that John Edwards has thrown at candidates like Hillary Clinton for doing, among other things, taking money from Rupert Murdoch have boomeranged and come right back at him.

John Edwards received a $500,000 advance to write a coffee table style book, along with $300,000 in expenses, from the Murdock owned Harper Collins.  Edwards defends the $500,000 advance saying it went to charity.  However, it is not clear how he explains the portions of the expense money that flowed to his daughter Cate, as well as a political aide that works for him.  Furthermore, it is unknown why such a book drew such a large advance in the first place.

There's more...