In undergraduate school, I chose a career path that always leads to certain unemployment: I majored in politics and public affairs with a double-minor in philosophy and history.

I've been a loud voice as a Democratic leader for years, but that's not my job now. My job is to represent fishermen and farmers - everyone.

Looking for a job, I was working with the Salvadoran American Foundation, a humanitarian aid group, and from there, I got an offer from the Cuban-American National Foundation.

If you give everybody a good government job, there's no crime.

I am not Left or Right. I believe in nationalism, patriotism, the federal structure, democracy, and the poor.

The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy.

I never thought I'd see the day when the U.S. government could listen in on phone conversations or read private mail without first obtaining a warrant from a court. That sounds more like something that happened in the Soviet Union.

Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House.