Welcome General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for your service to our nation. Please express our deep gratitude to the brave men and women serving in Iraq both in our armed forces and in the civilian agencies of our government. (more…)
Mr. President, last year Congress passed a temporary bill with a six month time limit that would give us the opportunity to carry out a thorough, thoughtful examination of how to utilize complicated new technologies in the surveillance of suspected terrorists without invading the privacy of innocent Americans. In the months since we passed that temporary act, we have worked in a bipartisan manner to consider the best course forward for permanent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Despite the enormous complexity of these issues, we reached a bipartisan consensus on the key provisions contained in Title I of the bill we are considering today. (more…)
The most striking feature of any visit to Iraq is the bravery and professionalism of American troops. And their courage, combined with the increased Iraqi army capability and willingness to fight, has resulted in some reduced violence in some places in Iraq.
Despite that, there’s a continuing — as a matter of fact, I’d say a deepening — consensus that there is no military solution to the sectarian strife in Iraq, and that the only hope of ending that violence is political compromise between the leaders of the feuding groups.
But the political leaders continue to ignore the desperate situation that their people find themselves in, and recent discussions among top political leaders have apparently produced little or nothing.
That failure has reinforced the widely held view that the Maliki government is nonfunctional and cannot produce a political settlement because it is too beholden to religious and sectarian leaders.
Iraqi leaders have not met their own political benchmarks to share power and resources and to modify the de-Baathification laws and to schedule provincial elections and to amend their constitution.
So I hope that the Iraqi assembly, when it reconvenes in a few weeks, will vote the Maliki government out of office and will have the wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and a more unifying prime minister and government.
Click the play button to hear Sen. Levin
deliver the weekly Democratic Radio Address
(Download 4.0 MB MP3)
Text of the Address, as delivered:
Good morning, this is Senator Carl Levin of Michigan.
This week, the Senate had the opportunity to do what most Americans want us to do: change course in Iraq. Although a bipartisan majority of the Senators supported an amendment to do just that, we were blocked by the Republican leadership from voting on it.
Now in its fifth year, the Iraq war has cost more than 3,600 American lives, seven times that many wounded and over a half a trillion dollars.
President Bush claims that we must keep paying this terrible price to protect America from terrorism. But even the Administration’s own intelligence experts are saying that during the war in Iraq there has been an increase in the threat of terrorism and that Al Qaeda has regained its strength.
Last week, Senator Jack Reed and I offered an amendment to begin reducing U.S. troops in Iraq and to change their mission to get us out from the middle of a civil war.
The Republican leadership chose to filibuster our amendment to deny the majority the opportunity to vote on it.
Mr. President, I am introducing today, along with Senator McCaskill, the Stop Unfair Practices in Credit Cards Act.
Credit cards are a fixture of American family life today. People use them to buy groceries, rent a car, shop on the Internet, pay college tuition, even pay their taxes. In 2005, the average family had 5 credit cards, and American households used nearly 700 million credit cards to buy goods and services worth $1.8 trillion.
Credit cards fuel commerce, facilitate financial planning, and help families deal with emergencies. But credit cards have also contributed to record amounts of household debt. Some credit card issuers have socked families with sky-high interest rates of 25%, 30%, and higher, and have hit consumers with hefty fees for late payments, for exceeding a credit limit, and other transactions. In too many cases, credit card issuers have made it all but impossible for working families to climb out of debt.
May 7, 2007
The President
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. President:
Embryonic stem cell research is truly a life-giving process because of the extraordinary potential for healing living, breathing human beings with names, faces, and families. It could hold the key to curing diseases that no other research could cure, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, juvenile diabetes, spinal cord injuries, and many others.
How in the name of promoting life can you justify not using stem cells from embryos, which uniquely can become any other kind of cell, for a life-giving purpose when those embryos are going to be discarded anyway by fertility clinics who can’t use them?
I, and 8,578 people who have written to me expressing their support for this legislation, respectfully urge you to sign The Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007 to allow our scientists to pursue the full promise of embryonic stem cell research.
Sincerely,
Carl Levin
Enclosure: CD-ROM containing the names of all 8,578 co-signers
