For any trade deal to move forward, there has to be agreement.
I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.
My parents were very supportive.
I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.
We have a lot of employers who are looking for skilled workers and not being able to find them. And we have workers who lack the requisite skills to access these good-paying jobs in high growth industries.
The majority of the new jobs being created require higher skills, more education.
I love working in the garden.
In normal times, laid-off workers are unemployed an average of eight weeks.
Washington policymakers have to understand the adverse implications of their actions on job creation, and they must reorder some of their priorities.
In the best of years, millions of jobs are lost.
Deep in the heart of Kentucky's rugged Eastern Mountain region, there lives a woman who has fascinated and inspired me for two decades. She is known locally these days as 'Mayor Nan' - the octogenarian chief executive of Hazard and advocate for its 5,467 residents.
Nan Gorman was born in Memphis, Tenn., on St. Patrick's Day. She moved to Hazard in 1929 when her father, James Hagan, a recent medical school graduate and aspiring surgeon, went to work there.
The work of these women doesn't end when they return home from overseas, as one goal of the Peace Corps' mission is to help promote a better understanding of other cultures here in the United States.
Perhaps the original layaway angel knew from experience, or simply deduced, that people resorting to the old-fashioned installment method of layaway may be struggling financially.
Because of these layaway angels, many children did not have to wonder why Santa skipped them in 2011.
We Americans typically are more positive about our individual futures, which we have some control over, than we are the nation's or the world's, which we see largely through the media prism.
News-free existence is not a serious proposal, but it is worth noting that while today's 24/7 media environment is wonderful in many ways, it can also be like drinking out of a fire hose and intensify a downward reinforcing cycle of despair.
While there have been news reports of recent college graduates living with their parents because they have been unable to find a job paying a salary sufficient to move out, their near and long-term career prospects remain far brighter than for those without a college degree.
The greatest job creation is driven by entrepreneurs and young businesses, so they merit special attention.
America needs a new approach to boost the economy - one that does not doom future generations to being saddled with paying off today's federal deficits.
