Walking back to my car after a rally calling for peace at the Ohio State House on Saturday, I walked past a spot where only a few days earlier a distraught man sat in his van with a gun to his head surrounded by police. From what I understood of that situation, it sounded like the guy was at the end of his rope, in need of help and aiming a gun at his head on election day was the only way he felt anyone might listen to him. The only way he felt he had left to amplify his voice and be heard. It was his own private anarchy against a system he felt had wronged him.

Many people spoke on Saturday from a variety of backgrounds, experiences and emotions, all trying to make the same point- the Bush Administration must be stopped. With such diversity taking the stage, everyone there could find a speaker who touched their conscience, their soul, their heart, their mind. Another voice that echoed their individual thoughts and feelings on our country's disastrous situation and reenforced "I am not alone," "I am not crazy," "I am not unpatriotic or un-American to be here."

I believe it's safe to say that as individuals, each person has his or her

AUSTIN -- Never say this is not a great nation. A campaign in which Jesse Ventura took offense at someone else's behavior: Mr. Etiquette, the sensitive male. Poor Charlton Heston, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, no shame to him, shipped about the country, urging us all to buy more guns while being held up by supporters on each arm. Both candidates for governor in California capable of inducing brain damage in anyone luckless enough to listen to them speak. Another great year!

As a veteran of many an electoral defeat at the polls, may I remind you of the proper Texan attitude toward slaughter at the polls. A few years before Billie Carr died this September at age 74, a friend called to ask how she was doing. "Well," she said, "They just impeached my boy up in Washington, there's not a Democrat left in statewide office in Texas, the Republicans have taken every judgeship in Harris County, and yesterday, I found out I have cancer." Pause. "I think I'll go out and get a pregnancy test because with my luck, it'll come back positive."

AUSTIN, Texas -- So the new guy in charge of reforming the accounting industry himself sat on the board of a company now being investigated for fraud, and when that company's outside auditors complained about accounting irregularities, he voted to fire them. This is just peachy.

Why don't we add Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers to the new accounting oversight board, as well?

It's not as though it weren't already painfully clear the Bush administration is both opposing and undermining all efforts to clean up corporate corruption, but do they really have to make a mockery of them, as well?

The headline in The Wall Street Journal read, "Criticism Mounts as Pitt Launches Probe of Himself." SEC chairman Harvey Pitt has just made himself immortal: Pitt, inventor of the self-probe. It sounds painfully rectal.

This is obscene. Where are the big fish on this one? We used to say of Bush in Texas, "He doesn't care about the topwaters." The topwaters are the bitty fish that swim on the top of the pond; Bush always worked for the big fish that swim underneath.

We live in the "blowback" years. By blowback we mean, what goes around comes around. Unforeseen consequences, or foreseen but ignored. Unleash the mujahiddeen on the Soviets in Afghanistan, and you end up with Osama bin Laden. Blowback always comes as a shock, because the art of politics is to separate actions from consequences.

A nation always on the war path mans a nation always under arms and a country to which the war is always coming home -- a potent minority in the form of psychically maimed people, violence-prone drunks, domestic abusers, drug addicts and basket cases. This summer, before John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo embarked on their terrible jihad, the whole issue of Wars Coming Home had turned red hot with the murders and suicides in Fort Bragg, N.C.

On June 11 Sgt. 1st Class Rigoberto Nieves, 32, of the 3rd Special Forces Group, shot his 28-year-old wife Teresa, and then himself, in their bedroom, as Teresa’s sister and other relatives sat downstairs. He had returned from Afghanistan only two days before, having requested leave to resolve "personal issues"