Political Quotes

“everybody knows we are in a recession. What America knows is that this body is deepening that recession by the delay in our airline security bill. There is a new fear of flying and there are enormous disincentives to flying that are having an atrocious effect on our economy. What will it take to make the pictures of September 11 and the Twin Towers recede? People want something close to a guarantee that it will not happen again, guarantees we cannot give them. What we can give them is a uniform system of public accountability for screening and airline safety. By definition, private contractors are not uniform. That, indeed, is one of their advantages. They give us diversity. It is not diversity we need when it comes to screening and airline safety. What the public is demanding in order to get them back in the air is that we maximize uniformity and that we maximize accountability. The only way to do that is to federalize in the air the way law enforcement operates on the ground.”