i just love molly ivins - she's good at putting into words the sort of things i think about politics - from a recent article:

My, what fun we are having this festive fall campaign season. Ads running coast to coast informing us that if the other guy wins the election, pestilence will fall upon the land, weevils will eat the corn, our children will be sacrificed to Baal, and we'll all be afflicted with piles. It makes me miss the warm, positive, upbeat, people-loving candidates of yesteryear. Like Richard Nixon.

Tough times for those of us who are just little rays of sunshine all the damn time. I was trying to think of a single area where the country appears to be headed in the right direction.

The economy? Flop. Health care? Disaster. Homeland security? The director of the CIA says we're about to be attacked again. Foreign policy? Even our allies are starting to hate us. The environment? Please.

Meanwhile, our only president continues to insist that we need to go bomb Iraq, as he so lucidly explained the other day, "for the sake of peace." We once had a war to end war, but we've never actually tried a war for peace before.