Joe Manchin

Brenda, if you will, I know we talked about the consolidation of programs and things of this sort.

First of all, it's an epidemic in this nation, not just in West Virginia, not just in your county, or not someone in your family, because I don't think there's a person in this room right now, and I'm one of those people, that doesn't know…

In nutritional services, Florida receives 10 times more dollars than we do but only serves four times more meals than we do, and that just seems inherently unfair.

I would like to have one more, and then I'm going to turn to the Congresswoman.

That person still deserves that love and care no matter whether they have a family or not that can do it, and not everybody can do it.

I am committed to bringing these commonsense lessons to Washington so that we can keep our promises to our greatest generation.

I want to make sure that as we grow older, we know exactly that we can go one place and find out everything that we have available to us.

Our purpose for that was to reduce our cost but to give quality care and to have people have respect and dignity.

Let me tell you how this came to light to me.

We've always been supportive of [foreign military sales] but I think we can up our game a little bit. . . . Maybe in some cases take a look at taking a little bit more risk than we've been willing to take in the past.

General Grass, the Army has proposed divesture of the C-23 Sherpa, a non-standard airlift platform that is used by National Guard units for critical Homeland security missions, and by our special forces units in combat.

This path would constitute a rush to failure, place unnecessary risks on our forces, and I could not support it in any respect.

General Grass, if confirmed, would you work to find a cost-effective solution that would allow National Guard units to retain the C-23?

It is of critical importance that we address this issue, General Bostick, in the short term.

The recent storms that hit West Virginia left over a third of our State without power.

The President's repeated emphasis on withdrawal, without laying out what would constitute a successful and sustainable transition, has only fed the belief in Afghanistan that the United States is committed to getting out regardless of…

We could delay the further withdrawal of U.S. forces until 2014 so as to give our commanders maximum flexibility and combat power to achieve our goals.

General Grass, are you comfortable with the National Guard's ability to coordinate efforts and manpower with Federal agencies?

We are the fastest growing container port in the Nation. Last year, 12.5 percent of all containers that came in the United States came through Savannah.

If we do not get our act together at our ports, then not only are we not going to double our exports, we are going to have a hard time receiving imports with the ships that are going to be coming through the expanded Panama Canal at the…

I hope that you will advocate for actions that can limit the risk to our mission and increase our chances of success.

I would assume that you all think that would be a job creator for America if we built it through, into America?

Security should be the most factor, I think, the main factor of what we should be concerned about.

If we are to continue to take advantage of the bountiful resources in our Gulf, we need these industries which form the ecosystem of support necessary to continue drilling in the Gulf.

I have a hard time understanding why this has become a political football. It makes so much common sense that you want to buy off of your friends and not your enemies.