I've been around low-income people all of my life. I mean, growing up, low income, the community where I've chosen to live, low-income.

Middle school students are at a critical time in their lives when making good choices matters - the decisions they make in these formative years have an impact on their future success.

Nothing has more impact on my district than unemployment.

Universal coverage is a critical goal, but even if every man and woman, every parent and every child in America woke up with an insurance card in their hands, they would still need a place to go for health care.

You know, you can be really quite subversive in popular fiction, which is capable of taking on big issues of politics, war, the rise and fall of commercial dynasties.

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.

Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done this to our thinking.

For me, true beauty has nothing to do with wrinkles and everything to do with the fact that my maternal grandmother raised five children just after the war and remained a fighter throughout her life. True beauty is the slick of red lipstick my paternal grandmother would put on before going to church on Sunday.