Political Quotes

“Mr. President, my friend the Republican leader spoke as if George Orwell wrote his speech. This is ``1984,'' where up is down, down is up, east is west. All one needs to do is look at the press. We have a situation where we have a good day for the anarchists. Why? Because the government is closed. Speaker Boehner and his band of tea party radicals have done the unthinkable: They have shut down the Federal Government. Now, for us, that is hard to comprehend as being good. For them, they like it. In Nevada today--7 o'clock in the morning out there--they are closing the Great Basin National Park. There will be some security folks around, but the visitor center will be closed. The Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Las Vegas where we have 600,000 people a year visit--not anymore--it will be closed. The Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area--over 1 million people go there every year. No, the visitor center will be closed. This situation involves people who work cleaning offices, people who are security folks for our Federal buildings--they will probably be able to hang around--people who really need a job. I talked last week a little on the floor about a woman who came to my event last Thursday. She works for the National Park Service. She has worked there all of her adult life. She knows what it is like to have a government shutdown because she was there when the last one occurred. They never got that money back.…”