I met Muslim immigrants in Brooklyn who were swept up in 9-11 raids, held in abusive conditions, beaten, denied rights. That's how things started in Germany. Guantanamo was modeled after what Stalin developed for the Gulag.

Al Gore was a good guy and he wanted to give flextime to American women who are trying to balance work and family, but he couldn't because the business interests are organized, and they don't want it to happen.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking "beautiful." If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

The stronger that women grow, the more prestige, fame, and money is accorded to the display professions: They are held higher and higher above the heads of rising women, for them to emulate.

To find freedom and happiness in each others' arms, or you know, inside their own bodies and minds. That is a very empowering thing in a society that's trying to control us all the time.

Frankly, liberals are out of the habit of communicating with anyone outside their own in cohort. We have a cultural problem with self-righteousness and elitism.

People who have come of age from the '80s on have experienced a form of activism that's very sterile and annoying. It's not that much fun to be an activist. That's partly by design. They are sterile protests and anonymous e-mail activism - not the kind of thing where people fall in love, form friendships for life, and see the change they make right in front of them. I've seen that, when people start to experience doing these things together and the power that it has.