Tele-health and tele-medicine is really a great opportunity for us to move out into these rural areas.

We are committed, as I know you are, to getting mental health services into these rural areas.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I will try to not use the whole time so that we can move forward.

Can you give me some specifics. So that is going to be counseling? Are there therapeutic services, an opportunity for suggestions about how to improve those processes, involvement in the services to the highest degree possible?

the Department of Defense has an obligation to do absolutely everything that it possibly can do to be open, transparent, comforting, supportive.

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a family member or a loved one in this kind of an incident.

But that information is available quarterly, or do you do kind of an annual report?

And how often are those reports or suggestions, is that annually? Do you do it quarterly, and I would suggest that we have more access to that kind of information in this committee, Mr. Chairman.

And given that each one of these tragedies is very difficult to accept, we want to absolutely evaluate it in the context of mitigating for the future but also supporting men and women and, again, the family members who suffer these kinds…

Sometimes. In any event, Mr. Chairman, thank you for that.

I want to start just by commending the work that he has done on stewardship contracts.

S. 1966 has some strong language bias, in my view, for timber contracts rather than stewardship contracts.

Reasonable environmental standards are not about burdens on the industry, they are protections for people and for taxpayers.

We must be vigilant to ensure that these cleanup costs are met by the company.

The West Virginia spill clearly highlights the huge impacts accidental releases of chemicals can have on our health and well being.

one of the reasons why the market has changed so much, is because of this technology that's been developed, horizontal drilling, but also hydraulic fracturing.

Our campaign finance system is failing and it is broken.

I strongly urge both nominees to work diligently to restore the role of the Federal Election Commission as a fully functioning independent Federal watchdog for the nation's campaign finance laws.