I came out publicly as transgender and began hormone replacement therapy while in prison. When I was released, however, there was no quantifiable history of me existing as a transwoman. Credit and background checks automatically assumed I was committing fraud.

As a member of Congress, a coequal branch of government designed by our founders to provide checks and balances on the executive branch, I believe that lawmakers must fulfill our oversight duty as well as keep the American people informed of the current danger.

If we, as individuals, want to keep control of our democracy - rather than have a government paid for by corporate interest checks - then we have to fight back now and make sure our system reflects the belief that people, not corporations, control our democracy.

Buying insurance is no one's idea of fun. And it's especially easy to berate something as funky-sounding as writing checks to defend our neighborhoods against apartment-size rocks from space. But this is one insurance pitch that makes perfect sense. Ask the dinos.

I don't understand why it's not okay to be plus-size. I don't know why people hate that phrase. Many models have built their careers as plus-size women and then suddenly don't want to be called that anymore. But you're still cashing checks from plus-size designers.

I want you to hear from God. God already spoke to me what I'm going to write out. You're going to write your checks to Paula White Ministries. If God tells you to give $12.99, do it. Whatever the Holy Spirit speaks to you. If you need to give by credit card, do so.

It's funny to think that when you get done with an acting job, you're considered unemployed. There are definitely times when those checks don't last forever. I went to college at a private school, and I racked up quite a bit of debt. I was very slow to pay them back.

Scorpions like holes. We had to put our arms in the holes to dig out the smelting residues. We always performed critter checks before an excavation, but one morning, I put an arm in and felt a sharp pierce. When I brought my hand out, it was red and already swelling.

There's a reason that you hear something like 90 percent of our country wants universal background checks, but we can't get it passed legislatively. If we had a true representative democracy, 90 percent of our elected officials would want universal background checks.

The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.

I think there's a need for more oversight by social workers, because there are a lot of foster parents who are just collecting checks. They need to look closely into the backgrounds of the people whose hands you're putting the kids into and then continue to monitor them.

It will at least be a recommendation to the proposed constitution that it is provided with more checks and barriers against the introduction of tyranny, and those of a nature less liable to be surmounted, than any government hitherto instituted among mortals hath possessed.

I'll always understand the Schadenfreude aspect to short-selling. I get that no one will always like it. I'm also convinced to the deepest part of my bones that short-selling plays the role of real-time financial watchdog. It's one of the few checks and balances in the market.

Non-crazy gun advocates - the ones who aren't stockpiling in preparation for a zombie invasion - don't like the idea of expanding background checks because they think it'll be a lot more paperwork. And it probably would make it more difficult to sell guns at, say, a flea market.

Marco Rubio is interesting because he checks so many boxes when you think about what a Republican nominee needs. He brings Florida, he's young, he's Hispanic, the Tea Party likes him. But that said, he's got issues, actually surprisingly, ironically, with Mexican-American voters.

One of the things you learn as a journalist is that when there's no accountability, we humans are capable of tremendous avarice and venality. That's true of union bosses - and of corporate tycoons. Unions, even flawed ones, can provide checks and balances for flawed corporations.

Sure, men like a challenge - but so do women. And nobody likes to be challenged all the time. I know plenty of long-standing happy couples who slept together right away, spent hours yakking on the phone, split checks down the middle, and lived together for years before the wedding.

In my view, a philanthropist is anyone who gives anything - time, money, experience, skills or networks - in any amount, to create a better world. This is not how we once thought about philanthropy. The word used to conjure up something rather passive - sitting down and writing checks.

I offer something very different from the lifelong career politicians who have worked their way up to run for higher office or those who can parachute in with checks for $5 million or $10 million, and that seems to be the definition of credible or legitimate. I'm rejecting that premise.

I get a lot of 'Oh, you've been gone.' I wasn't gone. Just because you didn't see me doesn't mean I wasn't working and collecting checks. I just wasn't singing and doing videos. I do a lot of other things, like I said, like writing scripts and stuff like that. I write for other artists.

We are a republic, very inefficient. If you want a really efficient form of government, you have a king or a dictator. And in the end, you hope it's a benevolent one. But then you could get things done. There's no lurching; there's no bumps. That's the cornerstone of checks and balances.

Even someone as lowly as an assistant U.S. attorney has to undergo a background check, and you're asked a series of very invasive questions, and you're expected to tell the truth and they're under penalty of perjury. And you're asked those questions so you can't be blackmailed or extorted.

Young people often aren't in a position to write checks to charities. But there are two things they can do that are invaluable. One is volunteering, especially mentoring other young people with reading, math or help thinking about college. Through iMentor, one can even mentor people online.

One of the things that happens that's challenging within the democratic process is that people say, 'Look at this failure, so we should totally change this whole thing.' And then you add in tons of bureaucratic process and checks and balances, and all of a sudden, it doesn't work that well.

What we can do where we live is advocate again to bring back to life the 10th Amendment, to bring back to life those boundaries in our constitutional system that were supposed to be the critical checks in the checks and balances system. Without them, we lose - gradually, we lose our liberty.

In Colorado, we passed universal background checks and magazine limits. We need to do that nationally, and we need to raise the purchase age, extend waiting periods for gun purchases, fund gun violence research, pass red flag laws, and more - no matter how hard the gun lobby tries to block it.

I think the government, if you measure it in terms of the dollars out the door, about 83 percent of the government stays open in a government shutdown. Social Security checks go out; military still exists. The FBI still chases bad guys. I think the consequences have been blown out of proportion.

You can harvest any data that you want, on anybody. You can infer any data that you like, and you can use it to manipulate them in any way that you choose. And you can roll out an algorithm that genuinely makes massive differences to people's lives, both good and bad, without any checks and balances.

Religion forbids us from assuming a God-like character. This is especially true in politics and government, where limiting the power of the state, division of powers, and the doctrine of checks and balances are established in order to prevent accumulation of power that might lead to such Godly claims.

In a small lab, if you make a mistake, you can go in the next day and fix it. But here, when you are committed to spending a hundred thousand or a million dollars, you can't fix it later. You need to have a system of checks and balances internally. In particle physics, that's just part of the structure.

The economy is terrible it's been terrible for years now, and the reason it's bad is not because of a debt-ceiling vote. The reason it's bad is because we have people who believe that by making government bigger by keeping people on unemployment checks and on welfare we're going to dig us out of this mess.

Tea Party attendees and health care town-hall protesters share the common belief that the extravagant spending of President Obama and the Democratic Party - absent any checks and balances - will eventually lead more people into government dependency, higher taxes, and, perhaps, our country's financial ruin.

Who needs checks and balances when the left, seemingly, knows and can decide right from wrong? When the left can decide what can be said and what cannot be said? When the left can decide how much money you're allowed to make or whether or not you deserve health care? It is a quest for power. And, it is dangerous.

Yes, we can pay the interest on the debt. We can renew the $500 billion worth of bonds that are coming due. We can mail out our Social Security checks. We can make sure those Medicare claims are honored. We can pay our military. We can protect our veterans. But when you get beyond that, the soup gets a little thin.

Childfree women are actually great assets to the planet. Our carbon footprint is smaller than a mom's! And we have enough money to write checks to organizations that help kids get vaccinations, vitamins, and educations yet have plenty of free time to advise your daughter that one day she will regret piercing her lip.

Now, let me be clear. The path I lay out is not one paved with ever increasing government checks and cradle to grave assurance that government will always be the solution. If this election is a bidding war for who can promise the most goodies and the most benefits, I'm not your president. You have that president today.

I went to the library and learned how checks work. I found out that routing numbers are like zip codes: the checks are sent to the bank that correlates to the routing number. If I manipulate those numbers to a bank far away, it would take longer to get back to the bank, which gave me more time to write more bad checks.

I was on Facebook. I was on MySpace. And somebody said to me, You should check out this thing called Twitter. I knew five people that were on it, so I started following those people and seeing what they were doing, and then I applied my own sensibility to it. The more that I shared, the more people started following me.

Gun owners and non-gun owners alike agree on expanding background checks, making gun trafficking a serious crime with stiff penalties, making it illegal for all stalkers and all domestic abusers to buy guns, and expanding mental health resources so the mentally ill find it easier to receive treatment than to buy firearms.

There's a scene I particularly like in 'Betrayed' where Shane has been shot in the side. Yet he drives to a small airport, checks out the Rockfort plane and flies himself and Elena to safety. Only when he knows they are out of danger does he allow himself to sit down on the couch and admit he's injured - to a horrified Elena.

Trump has been donating big money and influencing politics for years. In fact, while conservative Tea Party groups were working extremely hard to defeat ObamaCare before it passed in 2010, Trump was sending checks to Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders who eventually passed ObamaCare without a single Republican vote.

We are on the precipice of a crisis, a Constitutional crisis. The checks and balances, which have been at the core of this Republic, are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances that say if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing, it's almost a temper tantrum.

Ronald Reagan was long thought to be the most conservative of Republicans. And by any standard today he is the most popular Republican in modern history. Yet he raised taxes 11 times, supported a ban on assault rifles and the Brady Bill, which mandated background checks, and established amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers.

The Treaty of Lisbon gave the European parliament a stronger role as co-legislator and the European Council its own president. Furthermore, the treaty introduced checks on subsidiarity - the concept that decisions should be taken as close as possible to the citizens - in an effort to cut back on unnecessary rules and regulations.

Considered purely as effects-driven filmed drama, 'The Day After Tomorrow' checks in somewhere in the middle of one of Hollywood's most absurd and least lamented dead genres, the disaster pic of the '70s. It's a little better than 'Earthquake' but not as good as 'The Towering Inferno,' because it doesn't star Steve McQueen and Paul Newman.

The first club that reopened in New Orleans was Caesar's, and they called me immediately and said let's do a regular night with you here. So we started FEMA Fridays. It was the only club open in the city, and a lot of people had a lot of money from Katrina, the checks and stuff, so the joy inside that club - I don't think that'll ever come back.

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