On the recordJuly 12, 2011
On the floor today I think America and all of us in Congress are certainly concerned about the debt ceiling issue and what we are going to do and how we are going to be able to resolve it. But like many of my colleagues on the Democratic side, I am here today to talk about the war in Afghanistan. Madam Speaker, I have beside me a really profound photograph of a wife in tears and a little girl sitting on her knee, who is too young to understand that her father, United States Army Sergeant Jeffrey Sherer, is laid under the flag that is now folded, being presented to the wife. This is the pain of war, and I do say to Ms. Woolsey, thank you very much for what you have done to try to wake up the Congress and the American people. Ten billion dollars a month going to Afghanistan. We can't even fix the bridges, we can't fix the roads, we are cutting children's programs, we are cutting senior programs. And yet Mr. Karzai, who is known as a corrupt leader of Afghanistan, is going to get his $10 billion a month while these programs that we are going to cut are going to be denied $10 billion a month. It doesn't make any sense, Madam Speaker. That brings me to an article written by A.C. Snow. He is well-known in North Carolina, where I am from, for his writings in The News and Observer, which is a State paper in Raleigh, North Carolina.…
