I have a hard time understanding how cutting the program in our country that provides healthcare to working families by $800 billion can be classified as mercy.

There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering.

If you believe that the greatest challenge you've got is credibility, then the way you get that is you earn it, right? That's not something that any set of policy makers can bestow.

Compromise' isn't supposed to be a dirty word. It is, in fact, how representative democracy works.

I still belong to a middle class family; middle class is a mindset than your financial status.

My parents, Mary Agnes Smith and Rowland Smith, both had to work since their early teens, she in the holiday boarding house of her mother and he in his father's market garden in Marton Moss, a village on the south side of Blackpool, just north of Saint Anne's-on-Sea.

I have a lot of breast cancer history on my mother's side of the family.

Now that I have a child of my own, I'm in awe of - and deeply grateful for - the time my parents spent in taking me to bookstores.