John Ensign

And do you think that that maybe appeared--has at least an appearance of a potential conflict of interest?

I think part of this hearing is to find out whether you were actually market manipulators instead of just market makers.

I want to go to a deal that Goldman Sachs did, known as Hudson 1.

I think for anybody to defend what the rating agencies did would be ludicrous at this point.

How do you justify taking BBB-rated products, repackaging them, and getting the rating agencies to re-rate those as AAA-rated products?

Yes, but it operated the same way as cash being in there, didn't it?

I think most people in Las Vegas would take offense at having Wall Street compared to Las Vegas, because in Las Vegas actually people know that the odds are against them.

There is a lot of spin that happened in your terminology in dealing with all these financial products.

I asked the question: How much money are we spending now, how much money is going to be needed in the future, and for how long is that money going to be needed? ... I think a conservative estimate, for many years to come, is that we are…

First of all, we were flying over the Kandahar Province in the southern part of Afghanistan in these Black Hawk helicopters, visiting a few of the forward operating bases--one for training, the other one for trying to provide stability for…

My general impression of what is going on in Afghanistan--I was initially very skeptical when I went over there. I thought we got an honest assessment. I thought they talked about the positives, the negatives, and the challenges ahead. I…

I believe that in the world of network neutrality that has been proposed by others, that you can end up with a situation of unintended consequences.