Madea is a cross between my mother and my aunt. She's the type of grandmother that was on every corner when I was growing up.

The most important thing that I learned in growing up is that forgiveness is something that, when you do it, you free yourself to move on.

What I've learned is you treat women right.

Everyone can relate to love, hurt, pain, learning how to forgive, needing to get over, needing the power of God in their life.

We know what happens when a woman earns money. She is far more likely than a man to spend her earnings on the health and education of her children and to invest in improving her family's standard of living.

In the universities, we teach you what we decide you need to know. And the employers find out when they hire people that students didn't learn what we needed them to learn. Online learning offerings, like the University of Phoenix, have relationships with employers and teach what you need to know.

Investing in better-quality education outcomes - especially in maths and science - more than pays for itself.

My first real awareness of Chechnya came when I was a college student studying in Russia. I arrived in St. Petersburg about two months after Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated for her reports on Chechnya. I lived with an elderly woman and her grown children in an apartment that was not too far from the neighborhood military cadet school.