Barbara Mikulski

I want to talk to my colleagues about how we can promote the First Lady's initiative not only in the budget.

I understand we are in a frugal environment. That has been the point of the testimony and many of your comments.

I assure the Congress, the American people, and those who would seek to do our Nation harm, that we will be focused on warfighting, operating forward, and being ready.

All of the women in the Senate... are very concerned about women in the military, their ability to serve and to be promoted.

Our job is to protect them. And deployment and the rate of deployment, the ratio of deploy-to-dwell has a dramatic, demonstrable effect now.

So, for those who are active duty, Reserves, and part of our civilian workforce that supports the Navy, we really just want to say thank you in every way and every day.

The Comfort, since the Comfort has deployed since 1987, I think, 9 or 10 times, two-thirds of that has been during hurricane season.

Now, we feel real bad that we are going to lose the Comfort. And in fact, we feel so bad in Maryland that it has the same magnitude, if you were in Baltimore when we heard the Comfort was going to leave us, we have had the same feeling as…

We are losing out on ourselves, aren't we?

So my colleague from the other side asked excellent questions about, you know, the issues about the availability of scientists, are they going elsewhere to do research, should we change our immigration policy, give every new Ph.D. a green…

But why gang up on them? Why try to single them out?

To have that kind of dedication characterized in the way that seems to be done in a sweeping way by people talking about Federal employees as if they are somehow a parasite upon the public is really deeply hurtful.

This ongoing hazing, harassment, snarky comments, throwaway one-liners

I think we need to look at the Alzheimer's funding

The prevention money has been used as a bank to fund other things

I've now heard about promising science, and I'm going to continue to support it, but the promise of science needs to have deliverables.

We came together, and we really moved on a national agenda, and this then goes to, picking up on Senator Shelby, the acceleration of drugs.

We hope that we have the adequate resources, and at the same time, we are deeply troubled that, as Federal employees are under attack, they seem to forget that you are the Federal employees we need and we turn to in the national interest.

I was stymied in this institution, okay? I was stymied in this institution on taking a look at this.

I think we need to stop this bashing of our Federal employees.

I cannot say enough about Senator Burr's work, how we are working together.

The goal was two things: one, not only to improve access, but by improving quality, we could save lives and save money.

I want to thank you for your respect of implementing the laws that the Congress passes, your respect for the Constitution and all of its amendments.

Oh, I sure did, and it was deja vu all over again, I say to my colleague from California, because it was like the Anita Hill hearings. The Senator remembers what happened there.

Isn't that a sweet ending to the story? So let's have more sweet endings with big smiles.