Women are called upon to defend every bit of progress we have made against particularly virulent attack. But we must also hold out a vision put forth a positive agenda of what women need and want and then move forward toward that dream.

The wonderful Mozambican people have endured tremendous misery without losing their dignity and their positive outlook on life. Moreover they have not lost their will to progress and develop. Mozambique is a country where the people never surrendered.

The next thing I am doing is moving back home to Minnesota and getting involved in politics. I'm looking at a run for Senate in 2008 but in the meantime I am focused on knitting together the progressive network in the upper Midwest.

And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn't have all the answers recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.

Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game.

There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy grassroots organizing and electoral politics.

Once the cry and the cause of a generation of progressives to make America safer fairer and cleaner 'regulation' is now a dirty word in our politics. Even Democrats are quick to talk about cutting regulations Republicans hate them with - how to put it? - evangelical fervor.

Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction but often it's really just about the money the perceived prestige.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred and when they meet upon the same road one of them has to give place.