Edwards' announcement 

Just put on YouTube by Rocketboom.

I'm not so sure about him (a question of sincerity for me, mostly), but I'm happy to help spread the sneak internet pre-announcement. That part is pretty cool.

Right now I'm leaning slightly to the Biden camp. That could change. Should Hillary begin to show the slightest bit of realpeopleness, I'd probably jump. Who knows what will happen, though, in the next 18 months.

Reading and watching all the Ford tributes makes me think even more than usual about WYSIWYG in prospective leaders. Ford did have that real person quality. I remember being hopping mad about the Nixon pardon at the time, but it did take guts to do it, and we did need to shake off the stench of the scandal.

All the eulogic commentary about Ford's decentness and midwestern values is making me almost proud of my corn-fed background, after all these years of trying to cover it up.

Reason to reflect and regroup 

Forty-six presidents over 200+ years makes for nice mini epochs, a way of dividing up history books, a little like the reigns of monarchs.

What were you doing when Gerald Ford was president, if you were alive? I was hired for my first real job on my birthday in 1974, on the day Nixon resigned, so I spent Ford's presidency working in the PR department for a bank in Detroit. It's a couple hours drive from Grand Rapids, the district Ford represented in Congress for 24 years, which is a hour or so southeast of my hometown in Michigan.

The era is quite vivid in my memory, having been a journalism student during the Watergate scandal and investigation.