Mark Kirk: “It's okay to criticize, if we find that in 5 rac{1}{2} ext{ months we haven't done as much as we had hoped. But…”

“It's okay to criticize, if we find that in 5 rac{1}{2} ext{ months we haven't done as much as we had hoped. But Americans, I think, at our core, look for solutions. This Congress has 18 months to go. So it's not enough just to criticize. You then have to put forward a positive agenda of not only saying we haven't done enough, and maybe we should not just consider 13 bills to name Federal property and 5 bills to extend preexisting law, but work at these problems. Then the question is, what is your agenda? To date, I haven't seen a comprehensive agenda for the other side. I know that a vast majority of Republicans and Democrats will join on this agenda. When we look, we have a critical problem with online predators, at any one time, 50,000 online predators contacting kids. There are hundreds of contacts in each month, in my own congressional district. Now, people like Julie Wachtheim, the President of Wheeling High School, who, minutes after putting her class photo on a new MySpace page was contacted by a sexual predator using an advanced search engine that obviously showed us that he was contacting not just her, but hundreds of other young girls, in an attempt to find someone. I am not sure if that is the case in the Atlanta suburbs as well, but I think this is beginning to be a real threat to Americans. This was not part of our growing up.”