from San Jose Mercury News on mercurynews.com

When voters grow sickened by the morass that is modern politics, they need a candidate who's a bit kinky. So, running as an independent, country singer-songwriter/novelist Kinky Friedman garnered 600,000 votes, 13 percent, in the six-contender 2006 Texas gubernatorial race.

In a 2010 run for Texas agricultural commissioner, Friedman received 48 percent of the vote. Close, but no cigar, for a man who markets his own brand of top-notch cigars (www.kinkycigars.com).

Though his passion for politics still burns and he yearns to right government bureaucracy's woeful wrongs, Friedman is, at the moment, once again concentrating on music.

He has just launched the "Go West Young Kinky Tour of 2010," his first left-coast dates in 20 years.

"Music has a lot more truth in it than politics does," Friedman told The Daily News. "To be a musician is a better thing than to be a politician, a far better thing.

"I've always believed that if musicians ran the world, instead of politicians, that we wouldn't get a hell of a lot done in the mornings, but we'd work hard and we'd work late and we'd be honest."

His wit and honesty have won him fans in the worlds of music, politics and literature. In the 1970s, Friedman and his band, The Texas Jewboys, rode onto the scene and delivered such memorable numbers as "They Don't Make Jews Like Jesus Anymore," "Sold American" and the merrily misogynistic "Get Your Biscuits in The Oven and Your Buns in the Bed."

(read full story on mercurynews.com)