How about this Mother's Day we all give ourselves a break, pick up Ayelet Waldman's latest book, Bad Mother, put our feet up, eat some chocolate, and pat ourselves on the back that the kids are still alive, we are, too, and that, really, if we think real hard...

Will anyone every forget the pictures of Lynndie England, looking as though she were gleefully enjoying he torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad during the American occupation of Iraq? Or then president George Bush's insistence that England was one of a few "bad apples" in the...

I am not a warmonger. I hate war. I did not support the Viet Nam War, nor the Iraq War. I wish diplomacy would work and I think it can in some instances and should be tried whenever and wherever possible. But on the issue of sending troops to fight...

Having just returned from a lovely week in Paris with my sixteen-year-old daughter I was intrigued to pick up my friend Jamie Cat Callan's new book French Women Don't Sleep Alone and find so much good and spunky wisdom in it. I've traveled to France a dozen times and...

First, there was Senator Charles Grassley's not-so-funny suggestion that the heads of A.I.G. should commit public suicide, and then in yesterday's Senate hearing Edward Liddy, the Chairman of A.I.G. detailed the numerous death threats the employees of the company had been getting, some of them quite horrific. Senator Barney Frank...

Now that we have officially elected an elitist as president, I can finally come out of the closet. Although close friends and family have known for years that I am an elitist, I guess it is time to announce myself publicly. It seems that people are enjoying casting stones at...

A few days ago, at a huge writers conference in Chicago, I met a charming and articulate man -- dressed in lizard cowboy boots and a very interesting sort of felt cowboy hat -- who happens to be a lobbyist for the arts. He was very excited to have just...

Mr. Obama,

No one respects your intelligence or your desire to turn this country around more than I. But I think you are missing a huge opportunity here. Your skills as an orator, as a man who can reach out to the people and gather them to your side...

For more than thirty years, each election day, wherever I lived, I went into the polling place, showed my voter registration card, followed whatever instruction I was given, voted in whichever kind of booth was then available, got my cute little "I voted" sticker and then went on about my...

"I don't believe in coincidences. I believe in the curlicued whimsy of fate," says Sam Tyler, the character actor Jason O'Mara plays on my favorite new television show Life on Mars. He's accepting the philosophy of a ditzy post-hippie who's adopted him when he lands in 1973 after a car...

"I don't believe in coincidences. I believe in the curlicued whimsy of fate," says Sam Tyler, the character actor Jason O'Mara plays on my favorite new television show Life on Mars. He's accepting the philosophy of a ditzy post-hippie who's adopted him when he lands in 1973 after a car...

Lisa Solod Warren is an OffTheBus grassroots correspondent. Each week she contributes a campaign journal documenting her life out on the trail.

It's busy in all the tiny rooms in the rabbit warren of the small headquarters located on a narrow side street in downtown Staunton, busier than I've ever...

Jim Webb, Democratic Senator from Virginia, has made a huge difference in the Senate. As the 51st Democrat in the Senate, he swung the majority two years ago when he won the hotly contested seat during his race against George Allen, when Allen was derailed by allegedly racist remarks captured...

Roanoke, Virginia -- To the music of Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" and against a backdrop of a huge contingent of screaming Virginia Tech students from nearby Blacksburg, Barack Obama spoke to over 8,000 enthusiastic fans in Roanoke, Virginia, Friday, as he made his seventh trip to southwest Virginia in an...

When I first began phone canvassing Staunton city (populations about 26,000) and then more rural Virginia Augusta County undecided and independent voters earlier in the fall most were still uncommitted. They had yet to make up their mind and were still "thinking" about it, as they told me over and...

Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards, who was on Barack Obama's vice presidential shortlist, spoke along with four veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars Tuesday evening at an event at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia.

Edwards, who represents Crawford, Texas, one of that state's most conservative districts,...

I have spent more than two-thirds of my life living in three small towns in America's South. I have also spent part of 30 summers on Cape Cod and other islands off the coast of Massachusetts. I went to college in New England and lived in two very large cities...

Does John McCain actually believe that women might be attracted to Sarah Palin merely because she is woman? That we are so desperate for a woman candidate (never mind that the Dems have offered women veeps before) that we will take anything? Wouldn't that mean that American women as individuals...

Nearly five hundred Democrats gathered at Staunton, Virginia's Frontier Culture Museum, Saturday evening for barbeque and speeches by candidates for office and leaders in the Democratic Party, one of the largest such rallies in Virginia ever and a first for the Shenandoah Valley.

The enthusiastic crowd gathered partially...