Al Franken: “I want to echo what everyone has said. I had the honor of traveling on a codel with Chairman Levin to Pakistan…”

“I want to echo what everyone has said. I had the honor of traveling on a codel with Chairman Levin to Pakistan, Afghanistan, when I had been here just a few weeks. So I was traveling with the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. The respect he got from everyone--from the generals down to the privates, especially in Afghanistan--was remarkable. Carl fought to increase the ratio of our troops to contractors. When we took the majority back in 2006, Carl started doing the kind of oversight of the contracting that had led to a lot of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq. He has used PSI in the way it was intended by Harry Truman. I thank him especially for the work he did on the credit rating agencies, Wall Street credit rating agencies. Right now Standard & Poor's is being prosecuted by--or sued by the DOJ for about $5 billion. Part of what they are using are emails the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations obtained, in which basically the credit rating agencies internally were saying we better give this a AAA rating; otherwise, we are going to lose our business. That in no small way led to the meltdown we had because all this junk was getting AAAs and those were bets on bets on bets on bets and that is what led to the meltdown. Carl always seems to go to where that kind of top-down fraud or malfeasance is going.…”