Jerry McNerney

I hope I am not beating a dead horse, but could you comment on that?

I think that that is a false choice. We can have jobs, and we can have clean air, and we can have clean water.

the majority party is willing to risk our ability to protect our communities from toxic waste

I spent 20 years developing wind energy technology, and because of poor government policy, I saw that technology go overseas.

This is certainly an issue that I think everybody is interested in in this country, space exploration, spaceflight and so on.

I truly wanted to create an avenue for our military athletes who now find themselves disabled, if in fact they can aspire to go and find access to the Paralympic Games.

I salute VA and all their partners for being pioneers in the adaptive sports arena.

Mr. Chairman, while you and I don't always see eye-to-eye, we are in total agreement on the value of using sports to improve the lives of our disabled veterans.

I want to say when I first came in here I was sleepy from jet lag. And hearing your testimony, it inspired me.

I believe that sports therapy is among the most valuable rehabilitative tools we can provide our wounded warriors.

Chairman Filner also introduced legislation, and we merged our ideas together into one bill which were signed into law last year as part of title 38.

This legislation was not about producing athletes for the U.S. Paralympic Team itself. It is about increasing the number of disabled veterans who participate in all types of sports.

I mean, it is important for them to see someone that has sort of been through the same thing.

I am proud that through our combined efforts, Mr. Chairman, we have also helped formalize the VA Sports and Special Events Programs and expanded sports therapy for disabled veterans.

It gives us the opportunity... to go back and help those guys.

I also introduced a bill that authorized VA to provide grants via the USOC to other local disabled sports programs.

I got inspired. Hopefully, you can too.

I felt it was our duty to help the USOC refocus on the athletes.

One of the things I am hearing is that the element of leadership that is missing as a clear, concise metrics.

The DAV, just a while ago, highlighted a need to collect more results-oriented data.

If the Chairman will indulge me one more question, what do we need to do here to make sure that the VA can provide these sort of home-based services, make them available?

We need to look at how to entice physicians, health care professionals of all kinds to come into rural areas.

How effective is that in terms of reaching a veteran with these sorts of problems as opposed to having someone that can actually touch their hands and look them straight in the eye?

One of the problems we are facing in California is that our prisons are severely overcrowded resulting in poor health care for prisoners.

As more and more of our nation's public policy decisions involve the use of complex scientific information, it becomes more and more important that our policymaking institutions make use of such information in a process that is free of…