It is indeed a distinct honor and a privilege to have been selected to chair this very important Subcommittee.

It is my hope, however, on this and further issues that we will be able to work together in a positive fashion.

I'm concerned about the nature and the targets of these loans and lending practices.

There has been an inordinate percentage of minority families who have been tied up in what we can affectionately call a mess.

I worked closely with my compadre in the Texas Senate, Senator John Whitmire, who is a Democrat.

I agree we are not talking about the energy issue right here.

Well, we happen to have a proposal that might. Actually, they are going 200-plus on a proposal.

I am a conservative Republican. I started asking them where, you know, who are these guys that are out there?

Texas has a history of spending lots of money on building prisons.

The vast majority of them said, you know, they had some pretty good redeeming qualities. They just made some terrible mistakes.

The roving wiretap still is one of the more valuable types of tools that I think--I hope at least--that you will find is something that is critically important to our folks.

These are obviously very difficult economic times and every area of our economy, and I know school districts are looking for every way they can to try to recoup the tremendous overhead that they are seeing.

We truly believe that USDA needs the authority to regulate everything in the district, because then we can all conform to dietary guidelines.

I think this is an area that we need to address in this legislation and your testimony this morning on that has been very valuable.

I want to particularly welcome my school nutrition folks from Georgia who are here and who do such a great job of making sure that Georgia's children are prepared to be educated.

It will save us money in the long run if you do have more families participating in the program.

What we tend to do as policymakers here in Washington all too often is that we create these programs and they are all great programs.

I think the problem we have got, Mr. Chairman, is that with the cost of fuel particularly increasing, skyrocketing in such a fast manner, all school boards had a significant issue all of a sudden that they didn't anticipate at the…