All alone in a committee room of the Senate Office Building in Washington, I was reading the dry typewritten pages in an unpublished report of an almost forgotten congressional committee hearing.

And for well over a hundred years our politicians, statesmen, and people remembered that this was a republic, not a democracy, and knew what they meant when they made that distinction.

In a democracy there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority.

Newspapers write ringing editorials declaring that this is and always was a democracy.

If the elections are a mere fraud, why are terrorists being trained and infiltrated into India at the command of the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency of Pakistan to kill election candidates and to intimidate voters?

The job of the government - and my responsibility - is to help people live healthier lives. The framework is about giving local authorities the ability to focus on the most effective ways to improve the public's health and reduce health inequalities, long-term, from cradle to grave.

When the U.K. or U.S. government issues bonds to fund a deficit, the buyers are not solely in the U.K. or the U.S. - they're in Asia, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. Investment banks provide direct access to these buyers.

We need to give the Iraqis a chance to build their own future. It should be in their hands. It must be in their hands. That is what democracy is all about. We can teach it, we can explain it, but they must want it enough to make it work for them.