I play Captain Lance Van Der Berg, who's a Union captain who ends up staying with the Confederate family who's been taken over by the army when they come into the city in Virginia. He strikes up a romance with the youngest daughter in the house, which obviously causes some issues for the family.

Prosecutors frequently overcharge, load up charges on individual defendants, knowing that three strikes laws and harsh mandatory minimum sentences will force people to plea bargain and essentially convict themselves because they're terrified of doing a life sentence for a relatively minor crime.

The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

I studied about the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and about how the Constitution was written by men, many of whom were slave owners. So I suppose the travel ban strikes me as coming from an era I thought we'd left behind, but I guess we haven't entirely left it behind.

In full accordance with the law - and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives - the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qa'ida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones.

When you've got an extra gear in your head where that's all you do, you've constantly got a little radar up. ... And when something hits that strikes that beeper, hits that radar, it's like my song skills kick right in and go, 'Oh, OK, there's a song in that.' And then I start trying to figure it out.

When tragedy strikes, or even when it looms, our families will have the opportunity to look into our hearts to see whether we know what we said we knew. Our children will watch, feel the Spirit confirm that we lived as we preached, remember that confirmation, and pass the story across the generations.

Happiness doesn't just happen. It must be pursued. And if the pursuit of the 'ultimate currency' of happiness helps us choose occupations that confer present and future benefit, and these choices, in turn, motivate us to succeed, this strikes me as perhaps the most powerful non-cognitive skill of all.

The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.'

It strikes me as a sound, honest statement for a prospective voter to say: 'Look, I haven't given this election a minute's thought, and it's just not fair for me to cancel out the vote of someone who actually gives a damn.' Indeed, it's not just sound and honest - it's the ethically responsible thing to do.

The Kennedy assassination is one of the ghostliest parts of our history. The Kennedy family - that's our royalty. It's fascinating and tragic and just strikes to the heart of our country. Here's the youngest president ever, full of hope and promise, and he made government service seem like it was dignified.

If there is something that strikes me as interesting or beautiful or something I could learn from, and I don't write it down, then I could be at lunch with you, and it's like there's a pile of laundry in my brain that I haven't put away, and I struggle to really listen, so that's always been important to me.

It strikes me every time I do an interview that I don't really sit around thinking about my goals and my life and my career. I do what I love doing and I get a lot of feedback. I'm free as a bird, you know? If I do something good, it's, 'Wow, that was brilliant,' and if I do something bad, it just goes away.

Legislative proposals that would enable an employer to determine whether or not a woman's insurance would cover the cost of birth control strikes women as particularly bizarre. Is the boss going to take care of the children that are conceived accidentally? Stop treating us like children. Women are grown ups.

Hollywood always represents this big dream and fairy tale in people's minds, but to me, it's just hard work. Of course, we play fairy tale on the red carpet. It's all Cinderella. But when the clock strikes midnight, I turn into a gray mouse and I go home, and I take my dress off and it's over. That's Hollywood.

It strikes me as hubris that Universal will buy EMI. What it will do is create a super-major that will have far too much power... I think when Universal goes up over 40 percent market share, I don't see how reasonable regulators can countenance. It will impact not just labels, but artists and cultural diversity.

We've gotten a long way on missile defense. We know how to do it. We know how to take down incoming warheads, but we need to do a lot more work in order to be - to deploy a system that'll defend the United States against those kinds of limited strikes that might be possible by a nuclear armed North Korea or Iran.

What Americans desperately need is a way to transition from the current system - which is fragmented and focuses on high-cost, high-tech interventions after illness strikes - to a modern system that delivers coordinated, high-touch, lower-cost, patient-centered care with an emphasis on primary care and prevention.

The very purpose of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution is to protect minority rights against majority voters. Every court decision that strikes down discriminatory legislation, including past Supreme Court decisions, affirming the fundamental rights to marry the person you love, overrules a majority decision.

I like Kelela. I like Twigs. I love the more old school; I hate to say old school, but I love Peaches; I love Peaches, I love Cat Power. And there's constantly new things coming up. But there's something so beautifully powerful - for me being a woman, when there's a woman doing something, it really strikes a chord.

'Mad Men' is nothing more than the fulfillment of every possible stereotype of the early 1960s bundled up nicely to convince consumers that the sort of morally repugnant behavior exhibited by its characters - with one-night-stands and excessive consumption of Cutty Sark and Lucky Strikes - is glamorous and 'vintage.'

While I was living in New York a friend and I flew to Miami and travelled through a storm. I could see lightning strikes through the window. I grabbed my friend's hand tightly and kept repeating: 'We're going to die! We're going to die!' Thank goodness he was there as I don't know what I'd have done if I was on my own.

Ironically, it is only when disaster strikes that the shuttle makes the headlines. Its routine flights attracted less media interest than unmanned probes to the planets or the images from the Hubble Telescope. The fate of Columbia (like that of Challenger in 1986) reminded us that space is still a hazardous environment.

It strikes me as one of nature's greatest jokes that the types of food we all like to eat more than anything (especially in winter) are the very things that cause the most insane weight gain - mounds of fluffy mashed potato, hot, thickly buttered toast, huge, steaming bowls of pasta, great big... actually, I'll stop there.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

There's a theory about fame: the moment it strikes, it arrests development. Michael Jackson remained suspended in childhood, enjoying sleepovers and funfairs; Winona Ryder, an errant teen who dabbled in shoplifting and experimented with pills; George Clooney, a 30-year-old commitment-phobe, never quite ready yet to settle down.

The humanitarian aid system is built on a concept that when disaster strikes, outside agencies provide a temporary helping hand until people can take back control of their own lives. But across the world, we see millions of people caught in semi-permanent crises. As each year goes by, they are less and less likely to break free.

We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world).

I think with improv - and I say it all the time because it's become such a catch thing that you talk about improv - if the scene is well-written, you don't need to improv. But that being said, if something strikes you in the moment and, most importantly, you know where the scene is supposed to go, it's no different than method acting.

If the court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act, is that a 'liberal' result enabling gay couples married in states where gay marriage is legal to enjoy the same economic advantages that federal laws now grant to straight couples? Or is it a 'conservative' ruling, limiting the federal government's ability to override state power?

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.

In the 1970s in New York, everyone slept till noon. It was a grungy, dangerous, bankrupt city without normal services most of the time. The garbage piled up and stank during long strikes by the sanitation workers. A major blackout led to days and days of looting. The city seemed either frightening or risible to the rest of the nation.

Look, the umpires behind the plate? They're human. They're doing the best they can to try to call balls and strikes. I understand that there's a lot of calls that kinda are 50-50. They can go either way. And as a starting pitcher, you try to manage, 'Alright, if you didn't get that call, maybe you'll get it again here a few innings later.'

Writing a book is something I actually feel like I could do. I don't know when that would happen, but I feel like if the right idea strikes, whether it be short stories or a novel or even a memoir that would be more substantial than most of the comedian memoirs people put out where it's big font and all the chapters are like ten pages long.

Twitter is a place where you share your thoughts, yourself... you don't want a plain white backdrop for that. You want the entire page to say something about who you are. Designer or not, if the urge strikes you, go for it. Put up that watercolor you've never shown anyone. Take a photo of that hat you just knitted... whatever it is, share it.

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