McCain got caught in two traps by this perfectly reasonable question.

The first is that he, and now all politicians running for high office, feared saying something that would contradict something he had said in the past. The minute he says "my favorite movie is Casablanca" when he was once on record saying "my favorite movie is Godfather," he gets branded as a flip-flopper. On the question of condoms for Africa, he obviously realized that it was an issue that he'd had to finesse in the past, and couldn't recall quite how he handled it. Rather than saying something that would lead to a gotcha moment, he punted. Given the current climate, that seems reasonable. Given the question, it is bogus - he could have said, "you know, my feelings on this have been influenced by strong arguments on both sides, but in a perfect world I would say X."

The second trap is one of his own party's making. He knows as well as anyone that you cannot win the Republican nomination if you piss off the evangelicals. He hears the word "condom" and he also factors in conservative Catholics, and he says, "boy oh boy, this is poison, run, John, run!" Unfortunately, we've seen symptoms of this disease even in the Democratic race - witness Hilary and Obama declining to say that homosexuality is not immoral. Given McCain's history with the religious righteous, his understandable reaction is to shut his mouth and let the spin doctors do the damage control later.

Understandable, but detestable nonetheless. On behalf of the millions of women and men who risk dying horrible miserable deaths because you don't have the balls to stand up and say "Yes, let's distribute condoms as part of a massive effort to wipe out HIV," you and your ilk will never, ever get my vote, Mr. McCain.

I wasn´t particularly taken with Obama´s overrated speech to the Democratic Convention in 2004, and I haven´t been much impressed so far with his presidential campaign, because it always seems to me that he plays it a little too safe. But this speech is one of the most moving I´ve read or heard in years. I´m sitting in a bad-smelling internet cafe in a foreign port, quickly trying to get the news from home, and suddenly stopped cold by reading Obama´s words in Selma. Honest to God, the speech brought tears to my eyes.

Until now I was a firm "Draft Gore" man. Now, put me down as "leans Obama."

George W. Bush went into Iraq for one reason: to get Saddam. Unfortunately for the planet, he was captured alive, and we had to stage a farce of a trial in order to send him to the hangman. Bush will not consider leaving until Saddam's neck is swinging from a rope. This is the governor of Texas, after all, who got his jollies watching inmates fry, even those like Karla Faye Tucker who found Jesus while praying for Bush to find mercy in his heart.

I am 99.9999% against the death penalty. That .0001% is for true villains like Saddam, if and only if their deaths will save the lives of others. This is one such case - Baby Bush will have defended his daddy's honor, and will finally start to allow American troops to come home and, perhaps, some sort of peaceful resolution to emerge in Iraq.

I find the idea of Saddam's execution repugnant (justice would be to let the man rot in jail watching videos of the atrocities he committed replayed 24/7/365), but I find the idea of losing more lives by extending this war even worse. We are trapped in Bush's little Freudian drama, which will only end when he can do a little jig on Saddam's grave. Saddam's is one execution that can't come soon enough.