First, let me begin by thanking each of you and the companies for what you all did to save lives, to save property, to restore the communities along the Gulf Coast.

Democracy still has a real hope and chance in Iraq, and true freedom in this country would be the greatest testament to those who gave their lives for it.

When you first become an EMT, you are extremely gung-ho, with a sense that you save lives, ... You are the antidote to all of life's miseries. You make people rise from the dead. But when you are an EMT for a length of time, you come to the grim reality that the number of lives that you actually save are small. You stabilize people until they get to the hospital. You make sure they can breathe and don't bleed to death and nothing more.

I agree that we must expand opportunities for retirement saving, but we must not undermine this worthy effort with a flawed privatization scheme that takes the 'security' out of Social Security.

While my state experiences unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression, it is unconscionable that illegal workers would be brought into Louisiana, aggravating our employment crisis and depressing earnings for our workers.

For the last 50 years, the federal government has taken out of the Gulf Coast $165 billion in taxes that came from oil and gas off of our coast that went to the federal Treasury, to rebuild all places in America except the place that it came from.