You bet being funny helps accomplish things. I've always maintained that people don't realize how many brain cells it takes to be funny. And politics ought to be fun -- after baseball it's our next favorite national pastime.

We saw farms go on the auction block while we bought food from foreign countries. Well, that's wrong.

You can put lipstick and earrings on a hog and call it Monique, but it's still a pig.

The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

I think you have to deal with grief in the sense that you have to recognize that you have it, and say that it's OK to have all the sadness.

We're living in a whole new social and economic order with a whole new set of problems and challenges. Old assumptions and old programs don't work in this new society and the more we try to stretch them to make them fit, the more we will be seen as running away from what is reality.

I believe in recovery, and I believe that as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.