General Petraeus is someone whose very name inspires the trust and confidence of America's friends and the fear and anxiety of America's enemies.

We are making progress in the battle against diabetes, but this is no time to take our foot off the accelerator.

I look forward to these hearings every session, and I do because they are so constructive.

today I am introducing legislation, along with my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Blumenthal, which will strengthen the content knowledge and instructional skills of our present K-12 teacher workforce. Our goal with this legislation…

Since I founded the Senate Diabetes Caucus, funding for diabetes research has more than tripled and now it approaches more than $1 billion this year.

We can sit back and continue to pay the bills and endure the suffering, or we can aggressively pursue a national strategy aimed at curing this disease.

I rise to speak about the National Fish Habitat Conservation Act, which I am introducing today along with my colleagues Senators Crapo, Tester, Bingaman, Murkowski, Whitehouse, Begich, Cardin, and Mark Udall. This legislation would…

I rise to speak about the fiscal crisis facing our country and specifically the dire financial situation of Medicare, which is a program that matters so much to tens of millions of senior Americans but also adds so much to our national…

we cannot support this proposal in its current form.

ending homelessness is not only the right thing to do, but also the fiscally responsible thing to do.

This is not the time to take away an important Federal program to help homeless people.

Title V is one of the important Federal programs that can help us do that.

I hope we can do the same for Chris Droney when he comes before the Senate.

I would like to bring to the attention of my colleagues a milestone that has been reached by an important cultural exchange program administered by the State Department. In 1986, the United States Information Agency, USIA, exercised its…

I always resist the business/government analogies because they are not quite perfect because government is held to other standards than businesses.

Thanks, Senator Collins. I agree with you.

I do not want to take really any more time on it, but one part is, if the debt ceiling is not increased, which I think most people think it ultimately will be--what kind of budget will we have based on projected revenues for next year?

But it has to come from OMB.

I am convinced that if we could eliminate redundancy, duplication, and overlap, that we can literally save billions of dollars.

Yes. I am going to look at that and maybe one of the other things we want to do here is to circulate the report, pull the report apart and circulate parts of it to the relevant committees, the subject matter.

But really, we are all accountable to the taxpayers, to say the obvious, and it is going to take a couple of big things, but a lot of small things...

In other words, those are efficiencies, elimination of waste, duplication. So I appreciate that.

The White House and Committee bills have a generally similar proposal, although as you know, we give DHS the authority to evaluate the plans as opposed to third-party.

It has proven difficult so far this year to find bipartisan consensus on many issues here in the Senate.

It is very much intended to be a light-touch approach, but one that we believe, over time, will move the private sector and critical infrastructure in the right way.