I heard a sigh from the American public and from our witness, and I hope we continue to have meetings in that way.

I have no idea why we would take this transference-of-wealth component out that--we have many environmentalists in our State.

Unless we are marking the bills as they go over, and I know they are not, I know the money is--the money is fungible.

I hope that at some point we will have the ability to affect what is getting ready to happen in TARP.

I do think that we can get in trouble sometimes by trying to make a program that we are working on better instead of just facing the facts.

I think the big, the 90 percent issue is that many of these banks know because of GAAP accounting on their accrual loans they haven't taken losses that they know are coming.

I am actually far more concerned about--I don't think we ought to have outside influences.

Thank you for having a very timely hearing. I appreciate it.

I wish we would just talk about a carbon tax, 100 percent of which would be returned to the American people.

my goal in this debate is to make sure that, as we move along this road to Copenhagen, that we also focus on things like energy security

I hope that we, in the Senate, will, instead of concocting some Rube Goldberg mechanism that basically disguises what we're doing from the American public, will do exactly the kind of thing that Vice President Gore has advocated, and that is, be transparent, be direct, let people fully understand what it is we're doing, return those monies to the American people, put a tax on carbon.