I joined the Labour party because I believed in equality in freedom of speech and in tolerance compassion and understanding for people irrespective of their background and views. In whatever I decide to do in the future I will hold to those principles.

Is there an equality of power between America and Iraq? Definitely not however the Iraqi people are standing fast and are defending their land courageously.

Since the day he came into office President Bush has worked to gut more than 34 years of hard work by weakening many of our Nation's standing environmental laws some of which were signed into law by his father.

More than ever before there is a global understanding that long-term social economic and environmental development would be impossible without healthy families communities and countries.

And I thought that was the best way for me to participate because standing in the crowd and listening is a fantastic education but it's not my nature. I need to be involved. So I did that instead.

We had great faith that with patience understanding and education that my family and I could be helpful in changing their minds and attitudes around.

Education is the silver bullet to improve this Nation's standing worldwide... and our teachers know that.

But instead of standing up for reason our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

Americans are a decade behind Canada when it comes to sex education and understanding their bodies.

If you go and talk to most people they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say 'Oh well that must be true.'