Maurice Hinchey

Well, thank you very much. I just want to express my deep sense of sadness for the loss of a very dear friend, someone for whom I had a great deal of respect and admiration. I know that sense is not unique. It is shared and expressed by a…

I hope that is successful, and I hope it moves forward very positively.

We very much appreciate what you are doing and your work on the humanities is very, very important.

There is very little federal public land in the state that I represent, but nevertheless, it is something that we are all deeply interested in.

I want to express my appreciation for this committee and the leadership of Norm Dicks for providing the funding that we need and that you are using so effectively.

I appreciate your interest in it and my assumption is that you are going to continue to be devoted to this.

I very much appreciate what you are doing, and it must be interesting for you to be engaged in this process.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Jim, it is a pleasure. This has been a very interesting pleasure this morning to listen to you and to listen to your statements and your response to the questions that were put to you.

I also want to thank you for your mentioning of New York several times. It is a very interesting place, and it has been very much involved in initiatives of various kinds over the history of this country.

When that bill passed here in 2005, it was based upon the false assertion that was made by your agency under previous Administrators, that there was no need to have this information out there.

There is no honesty now that is required in the context of having to reveal what they are putting into the ground, including the toxic chemicals.

I want to just thank you for all the things that you have done and all the progress that you are making, especially the renewed focus on the original mission of the agency to protect human health and the natural environment.

There are compelling reasons to believe that hydraulic fracturing may impact ground water and surface water quality in ways that threaten human health and the environment which demands further study.

Adirondack Park is the largest in the world.

Natural gas is a very good, high quality product that we should produce in effective ways, but it has got to be done in a way that is safe and sound and secure, that is not going to damage a lot of other people who may live somewhere in…

the fact is, we are going to miss him here chairing this subcommittee as well.

None of these legal actions have been successful against that operation which was set up, as I understand it.

There are a number of bills here in the Congress to try to achieve these designations.

Thank you very much for everything that you are doing.

it is one of the reasons why a number of us enjoy being here on this subcommittee.

That jobs bill is going to stimulate a lot of economic growth through the creation of jobs.

the sort of deregulation of the financial industry, which began back in the mid-1990s and which generated that Wall Street bailout was one of the major problems that we had to deal with

the loss of that money over this long period of time. The prescription drug plan and I mentioned the war in Iraq and all of those things are the issues that we are dealing with

The war in Iraq, which had no justification whatsoever and which has cost us huge amounts of money.

We have right now the greatest concentration of wealth in the wealthiest 1 percent of the people of this country since 1929.