Speech By: Rear Adm. Barry Black

Rear Adm. Barry Black:the chaplain, dr. barry black, will lead the senate in prayer. the chaplain: let us pray. creator of the universe, help us to find meaning in our work. train us to see your purposes behind our tasks,

Rear Adm. Barry Black:motivating us to focus on pleasing you. empower our senators. give them the will and strength they need. provide them with patience, so they will nether despair or grow weary in well doing. give them

Rear Adm. Barry Black:confidence that in following you, eternal lord, they are certain of ultimate triumph. let your peace guard their hearts and your wisdom direct their steps. we pray in your great name. amen. the

Rear Adm. Barry Black:presiding officer: please join me in reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under

Rear Adm. Barry Black:god indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. the presiding officer: the clerk will read a communication to the senate. the clerk: washington, d.c, may 1, 2008. to the senate: under the provisions

Rear Adm. Barry Black:of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable amy klobuchar, a senator from the state of minnesota, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: robert c.

Rear Adm. Barry Black:byrd, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: tidhe majority leader is recognized. mr. reid: following my remarks and those of senator mcconnell, if he decides to make such remarks, we'll be

Rear Adm. Barry Black:in a period of morning business for up to one hour. senators will be a thousand dollar speak for up to ten minutes each during that time. the republicans control the first 30 minutes. the majority

Rear Adm. Barry Black:controls the final 30 minutes. following morning business the senate resume consideration of the federal federal aviation reauthorization. madam president, five years ago on the deck of an aircraft carrier,

Rear Adm. Barry Black:returning from the middle east, american world war witnessed perhaps the greatest act of hubris our country's ever seen in wartime. resplendent in a flight suit, landing thee at trickically in a fighter -- landing

Rear Adm. Barry Black:in a fighter jet, president bush said -- quote -- said -- with a banner thatproclaimed "mission accomplished accomplished." with families, two and a half million, refugees. with no town in place,

Rear Adm. Barry Black:mission accomplished? when president bush put on his flight suit, 139 american troops had lost their lives. today the toll has reached 4,058 or 4,059. april, the highest death count in seven moths, 51

Rear Adm. Barry Black:americans killed. when president bush landed on the runway of the u.s.s. abraham lincoln, 548 americans had been wounded. today that count is far more than 30,000. many of those injuries are grave

Speech By: Harry Reid

Harry Reid:injuries. when president bush announced major combat operations ended the american taxpayers spent about $79 billion. today $526 billion and counting. we're spending $5,000 every second, seven

Harry Reid:days a week, every week of the month, every month of the year. and those costs are going up, not down. with experts predicting, including nobel prize-winning economist joseph stiglitz, the cost of $3 trillion

Harry Reid:will be the cost of the war. every penny of it borrowed. from japan tpr-rbgs china -- from japan, from china, from saudi arabia, even from mexico. in may 2003 many of our allies had already begun to

Harry Reid:stand apart from us on the war. today our moral authority in the world has been gravely damaged. not one american looks back in the five years since that aircraft stunt with any sense of satisfaction.

Harry Reid:the country looks back with grief, sadness, yet with a fierce and unwavering commitment to finally change the mission and responsibly end the war in iraq and bring our troops home. that day aboard the

Harry Reid:u.s.s. lincoln, our president told us that the war would not be endless. he said that americans want nothing more than to return home. he told the brave men and women aboard that carrier that home

Harry Reid:was the direction that day, that after service in the afghan and iraq theaters of war and after 100,000 miles on the largest carrier deployment in recent history, you are homeward bound. madam president,

Harry Reid:let me again read that quote. "after service in the afghan and iraq theaters in war, after 10,000 miles on the longest carrier deployment in recent history, you're homeward bound." to the men and women

Harry Reid:aboard the "lincoln" that day, that speech must seem a distant memory. they had imagined that day that many of their brothers and sisters in arms would be on their third, fourth and fifth tours of duty,

Harry Reid:the mission accomplished speech will rightly be remembered with great anguish by all. mam president, look at this. this chart, sadly, is a little behind, but it makes the picture. as i indicated, the

Harry Reid:troops wounded are more than 30,000 now. troops in iraq on that day were 5,000 more. the cost of the war to the taxpayers, you can see that. what does the -- what do the american people think about

Harry Reid:the war in iraq? was it worth fighting? you can see the numbers. estimated number of iraqi civilians killed, madam president, the johns hopkins university did a study, and their study says over

Harry Reid:200,000 iraqis have been killed. number of iraqis who have fled their homes? almost five million. number of iraqi security forces, we've trained them, we've paid for them. almost 500,000. iraqi prison

Harry Reid:population, number of daily attacks by insurgents and militias in iraq, today it's about 55. number of multiple fatality bombings in iraq, may 2003. now look at that. suicide attacks, almost 1,000.

Harry Reid:the price of oil may of 2003, $26.03 a barrel. yesterday we had a little drop in the oil price. it's down from more than $120 a barrel in the last few days to only $115 a barrel. the price of

Harry Reid:gas then was $1.50. if you're lucky, you can find it someplace in the united states for $3.62. that's the average. george bush, dick cheney and donald rumsfeld will be written in the pages in history

Harry Reid:as the man who rushed a peaceful, deliberate nation head first into war without the slightest notion of what it meant to run or to end. five years later the cost of the hubris is staggering, and lives

Harry Reid:lost and damaged, dollars spent and moral authority squandered. let's think back to the men and women aboard the u.s.s. abraham lincoln that day five years ago. the excitement they must have felt

Harry Reid:by a presidential visit, the encouragement of his words, the satisfaction of heading home to their families after a job well done. they did their jobs, but the commander in chief didn't do his. just as he's

Harry Reid:not done his job here at home with record gas prices, record oil prices and an economy spiraling into recession. i met with a bunch of home builders yesterday in 219. have we reached the bottom of

Harry Reid:the housing market? they said, no, we're not close yet. and with about 50 million americans uninsured for health costs. on his fifth anniversary of a sorry moment of our country's history we pause

Harry Reid:to honor the troops aboard the u.s.s. abe harm lincoln and awful -- abraham lincoln and all of our troops who continue to sacrifice in iraq. they deserve a new course, not the false hope of a slogan

Harry Reid:engineered by karl rove, the president's chief slogan maker. but the real hope of a responsible end to a war that has raged far too long. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the leadership

Speech By: Wayne Allard

Wayne Allard:time is reserved. under the previous order, the senate will proceed to a period of morning business for up to one hour with senators permitted to speak for up to ten minutes each, with the republicans

Wayne Allard:controlling the first half and the majority controlling the final half. a senator: madam president? the presiding officer: the senator from colorado is recognized. mr. allard: madam president, here we

Wayne Allard:go again. wee all know that the senate has limited time left this year to debate important legislation, it's becoming more and more clear that the democrat leadership is staunchly opposed to doing

Wayne Allard:anything that would alleviate the seemingly upward pressure on energy prices. given their unyielding desire to increase taxes on much of the energy industry, i can only assume that the democrats in

Wayne Allard:congress believe that steadily increasing energy prices simply provide political fodder upon which they can capitalize. democrats in both chambers appear beholden to the environmental agenda, a radical

Wayne Allard:agenda that wholly disregards america's economy. oblivious to prices at the pump and indifferent to from whom we import our oil, far-left environmentates and cohorts in congress are failing their duty to

Wayne Allard:the american public. the congress stymied efforts to produce trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, trillions of barrels of oil and prevented the construction of new refineries, nuclear power plants and hydroelectric

Wayne Allard:facilities. this is bad policy. america's economy may be struggling, but despite hard times, american businesses and consumers still demand energy. and oil -- in oil alone, we consume over 20 million

Wayne Allard:barrels a day. since we've only produced over eight million barrels a day, the gatt must be made -- the gap must be made by purchasing oil from hostile nations like venezuela, saudi arabia and nigeria

Wayne Allard:to meet our energy needs. we spend over $500 billion each year importing foreign oil and it is part time to rectify this unhealthy dependency. the global price for petroleum reaches new highs every day, and

Wayne Allard:petroleum-related imports have caused our trade deficits to increase by billions of dollars. korgd a constituted -- according to a study by the congressional research service in 2005 and 2006, our trade

Wayne Allard:deficit rose by $120 billion. as oil prices continue to rise and domestic energy production is further obstructed, america's trade balance will only fall deeper into the red. as a senator from energy-rich

Wayne Allard:colorado, i'm on the forefront line of the battle to increase our domestic energy production. the democrats continue to delay efforts to tap into natural gas reserves, the naval oil shale reserve, often

Wayne Allard:reserved to as the room plateau that contains approximately 8.9 trillion cubic feet. we need this clean source of energy now. this is in colorado. moreover, below the vast lands of colorado, utah

Wayne Allard:and wyoming lies roughly 1.5 trillion barrels of potentially recoverable oil. this amount dwarfs the reserves of saudi arabia and other petro-rich nations and new technologies continually emerging would allow us

Wayne Allard:to responsibly extract this oil to help meet our demands. the benefits to colorado and the american economy would be tremendous. i think that police forces, fire deposits -- fire departments, hospitals

Wayne Allard:and other state and community services benefit from that kind of money. i think the taxpayers benefit from that kind of money. all of us here also know that national environmentalist groups have

Wayne Allard:succeeded in pressuring members of congress to mandate a lockdown on what could be an immense treasure treft of oil in the arctic national wildlife refuge. not only have these groups subverted widespread

Wayne Allard:local support of alaskans by prohibiting the pential extraction of oil, environmentally stubbornly resist moving forward with comprehensive testing that could result in the environmentally responsible development

Wayne Allard:of parts of the anwr. there could be 5 to 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil there. there could be much, much more. or much less. the point is we don't know because the extremist environmentalists

Wayne Allard:have convinced their friends in the house and senate to prevent us from finding out. it makes one wonder what we' afraid that we might~ moving another part of the country in april the u.s. geological

Wayne Allard:survey announced that three to four billion barrels of technically recoverable oil exists beneath north dakota and montana's bacon formation this is 20 times more than estimated to have existed in

Wayne Allard:199 5. these numbers are staggering. and there are other examples where our aversion to responsible development justifies common sense. of course we must continue our dedicated efforts to explore alternative

Wayne Allard:sources of energy to meet our demand. i have long advocated for a diversified energy portfolio, but i don't believe it is possible to develop sections of the wildlife refuge, extract natural gas