Political Quotes

“Mr. President, there are life experiences that come along with growing up depending on one's family and where they grew up. In my part of the world, part of the Midwest, there was a rite of passage that seemed so commonplace that we never questioned it. It was the air raid siren going off in the middle of the night and your dad would come into your room and say: We have to go down to the basement; there is a tornado warning. That was part of my life. I didn't think twice about it. It happened every year--sometimes not in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of the day, but we became accustomed to it because that is what happened where we lived. When I was elected to Congress and then to the Senate, I spent my time visiting locations all over my State where tornadoes had struck. So I have seen my fair share of tornado damage in the Midwest, but I have to tell you what I saw on Saturday was extraordinary. I went to southern Illinois to two towns, Harrisburg and Ridgway. They were hit the previous Wednesday by what is known as a stage 4 tornado. A stage 4 tornado is a tornado with winds up to 175 miles per hour. That is a tornado so violent that the winds, from what I am told, were even greater than those of Hurricane Katrina. It hit this tiny little town in southern Illinois, and I looked at the devastation afterward. We expect obvious casualties in a tornado.…”