Cosmetic surgery and the ideology of self-improvement may have made women's hope for legal recourse to justice obsolete.

Demographically, I'm a hippie from San Francisco and I'm not culturally inclined to be sympathetic to states' rights. My cultural heritage is FDR and Medicare and federal government solutions. But if you think through the analysis, strengthening state rights is a good corrective of the aggregation of an over-reaching federal power.

We need people to be alert and thinking for themselves and connected to each other and connected to that sense of hope and empowerment and radical chutzpah that the founding generation had and intended us to have.

The First Amendment was designed to allow for disruption of business as usual. It is not a quiet and subdued amendment or right.

The press doesn't stop publishing, by the way, in a fascist escalation; it simply watches what it says. That too can be an incremental process, and the pace at which the free press polices itself depends on how journalists are targeted.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

When people get this consciousness of the way things are supposed to be in America - that the locus of agency is in them, that they are supposed to be the ones setting the agenda - if people believe this, they get very energized. Yeah, it's annoying to have this extra burden of saving the country.