Trump gives progressives a way to channel whatever guilt they might have - whether from preventing homebuilding, benefitting from unfair taxes and pensions, or depriving black and Latino students the teacher quality and school funding they need - into a sanctimonious tribal rage against Republican racism.

The results of inequity and bias impact everything from suspension rates, to housing access, to health outcomes, to medical interventions, to job opportunity and promotions, to criminal sentencing, and even to the very safety of the water one drinks and air one breathes.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

If Obama raises my company's taxes by 20 percent, how am I going to be able to survive as a company? Well, if I've got 30 employees, that means I'm going to have to lay off 10 employees so I can be able to keep up with the health and benefits and pension plans for my other 20 employees.

The humanities are not something that get you a pension and health insurance.

Everybody aspires to an affordable home, a secure job, better living standards, reliable healthcare and a decent pension. My generation took those things for granted, and so should future generations.

I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

I envisage there being absolutely no regulation whatsoever - no minimum wage, no maternity or paternity rights, no unfair dismissal rights, no pension rights - for the smallest companies that are trying to get off the ground, in order to give them a chance.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, "As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . ." When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith

Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.

A generous basic state pension is the least a civilized society should offer those who have worked hard and saved through their whole lives.

I respect the state workers and I respect their unions but we simply can't afford to pay benefits and pensions that are out of line with economic reality.

You can't have bank holding companies acting as hedge funds. You can't have them taking a million-dollar pension plan for Joe Schmo the bus driver and treat it with the same risk appetite that you treat George Soros' pocket money. It's fundamentally ridiculous.

Musicals are by nature theatrical meaning poetic meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

However my parents - both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

Col. Shaffer is prohibited by his lawyer from talking. He's at great risk. They want to take away his pay and his health care benefits so they can hold it over his head and not allow him to talk while he's under suspension. This is not America.

But at the end of the day we need to represent the taxpayers who have made enormous sacrifices. Many have lost their jobs. Many of them have seen their companies - they don't have a pension - they have seen their companies cut the match for their 401(k). They have seen their health care benefits be shredded.

I don't know of a Democrat - whether they're a conservative a centrist or a liberal Democrat - that doesn't think that it's important to have quality jobs that pay decent wages so that families can support themselves so that they can have the dignity of being able to afford health care put money aside for pension buy a home.

We cannot continue. Our pension costs and health care costs for our employees are going to bankrupt this city.