Al Franken

I have a very specific thing that I am going to be actually introducing a bill about, which is LGBT youth being bullied.

I share Senator Bennet's and your passion and outrage at what we have now.

I'm proud that over 90 percent of insured Minnesotans get their coverage from a nonprofit health insurer.

I would like to work with you on this and explicit protections for folks on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender for kids who are--it is a very real thing that there is this bullying in school.

the Federal Government does something, it's bad, and it's good if private innovation does it.

I think that, along with these rate reviews that Senator Feinstein is proposing, minimum loss ratio is an important element in holding health insurance companies accountable.

the cause of these brownouts and the extra charges to the State of California was not caused by regulation, but was caused by companies like Enron ripping Granny off?

From 2000 to 2007, American families saw their premiums almost double. During that time, we saw more than 6 million Americans become uninsured.

your example is almost a perfect example of why we need regulation, not why we were suffering from too much regulation.

Congress' job of triage in this case, as Senator Franken noted, is to eliminate the glaring problems first.

The legislation that you have introduced and Senator Hatch has introduced on school leadership I think is an exemplar of what can be done in school leadership.

McNamara's fallacy is that things that can be easily measured will be measured and will be considered important.

I am going to tie together judicial nominees and administrative nominees. You heard from my colleague, Senator Klobuchar from Minnesota. She talked about how President Bush had, during his first two years in office, about 100 judicial…

I want to make sure that the Department of Justice--make sure that conditions, merger conditions would actually have enough teeth and have a long enough life that they would really impose real conditions to prevent the very thing I am…

I would hope that I could in my office and the folks over at DOJ who are looking at this can have an exchange of ideas on this because this is something that affects people in ways they do not understand, including just your cable bill.

On behalf of the Minnesota tribes, I want to thank the Chairman for his leadership in getting the Indian Health Improvement Act included in the health reform law.

We must learn from these tragedies. We must find models and fund programs that work to prevent suicide in Native communities.

Clearly, this model worked by intervening early and minimizing more damage, and clearly we have a problem as long as any suicide is occurring among our youth.

I rise today to speak about arms control and the President's negotiations with Russia over a replacement to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START. This new treaty will be an important enhancement to American national security, and…

I would urge you please to do that as soon as possible.

The basic one is lack of funding to hire more officers, and the responsibility for providing that funding falls on the Federal Government.

Crime on Indian reservations is an enormous problem in so many States, certainly in Minnesota.

To obtain minimal officer safety standards as determined by the BIA, Red Lake would need a minimum of 32 officers.

You would think you would need three and a half times as many as normal population.

So it can be more dangerous and it is more dangerous because you are underfunded and understaffed.