Tim Ryan

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Consistently inconsistent, just to clarify.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Our responsibility here is to identify what these problems are in order to change course for the country. We are not just sitting here talking amongst the four of us. We are here talking to the American people because we want to engage them in the discussions. Something that the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Brown) said and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Strickland) said that I want to identify with, when we talk about people not admitting their mistakes we have lost the constitutional balance in the legislative branch and our oversight ability on the legislative branch because it is all controlled by one party. We are in a very, very dangerous situation. I think this is something that maybe the American people do not understand at home is that, and I hate to use this as an example, but when President Clinton was in and this House was controlled by the Republicans and the Senate was Republican, the Republican chairmen of the committees had the ability to subpoena witnesses and call hearings in which they could oversee the executive branch. In this case it was Mr. Clinton. But today we have the Republicans who control these committees in the House. They control the committees in the Senate. There is no oversight of the executive branch, and so we are getting legislation and mandates coming out of the executive branch with no oversight from the legislative body. Article I, section I, the people should govern. We do not have the ability, the minority party, to subpoena witnesses and do what we have to do to oversee the executive branch. I think the American people need to know that. There is a reason why they are getting away with all of this and we do not have the proper oversight abilities.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Yes. This was not the Kendrick Meek Report, this was not the Tim Ryan Report, this was not the Democratic Caucus report. This was the U.S. agency's report. I just think it is important for people who are listening here tonight to say is that we can do better in the United States of America. Why would we want 250,000 people who want to go to college be somehow prohibited from going to college because of their financial situation? We know that if we invest in these people; and we did a study, I say to the gentleman, when I was in the State Senate in Ohio, the University of Akron did a study. For every dollar that the State would invest into higher education, they would get almost $2, there were two or three studies, but they would get almost $2 back from tax revenues. Because you get someone who graduates from high school, goes out and is working somewhere for seven, eight bucks an hour and paying taxes on seven, eight bucks an hour as opposed to someone who is college educated making 40 or $50,000 a year paying taxes on 40 or $50,000 a year. It makes sense for us to invest. We have to get return on our investments. That is not the reason we are doing it but we know the societal benefits. Less racism, more tolerance for people from different cultures, different walks of life, different religions, and not to mention the added benefit to our economy, the entrepreneurship and everything else. So the point is this is an investment we should make. The University of Akron study is applied to this particular proposal of $25 billion. It would mean an increase in revenues to the States by $50 billion. Each State would get $1 billion. Now, you go to a State like Ohio or Florida and say Governor Bush, Governor Taft, what would you do with an extra billion dollars? You would pump it right back into education. You would pump it back into health care. You would make sure your kids are healthy. You would be able to fund the No Child Left Behind that is underfunded.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Big time debt.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. The official Democratic proposal says that the Democrats would double the maximum petroleum grant to $11,600. Now, for many people that will cover pretty much most of your college television.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It is a big number.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We are talking Democrat and Republican. And there are several Republicans I think who have taken a very courageous stand on this particular issue. If you had an opportunity today to read the New York Times, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Petri) I believe had a marvelous, marvelous letter to the editor, or op-ed today. It was phenomenal and I cannot say enough about it. It basically said that the Federal Government should be directly loaning money to students. We do not need the banks involved in this. I do not think the banks are inherently bad people, but why would I give money to you for you to give it to somebody else and then you charge me more and I give you a little bit more so you can make a profit and then you give somebody else the money? We insure your loan. We guarantee you. So the Federal Government gives the money to the banks or we guarantee it to the banks so the banks takes no risk at all. Why not eliminate the banks, directly lend to the students, and give them the money and tell them to go to school and tell them that we are going to give him or her and many students like him or her around the country $25 billion. And when it is all said and done, we are going to make $50 billion on the deal.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Because the Federal Government guarantees the loans, now the banks have no real incentive to go capture somebody who defaulted on their loan. Why would they? They are going to get reimbursed anyway from us. So, actually, the Federal Government, if we eliminated the banks or removed the banks from this process, we would lend the money directly, and there would be more incentive for us to go and capture people who defaulted on the loans that we gave them. We would want there to be incentive because we would get the money back. The banks are going to get their money one way or the other. They are either going to get it from the student or the Federal Government. So there is no real incentive. Again, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Petri) was phenomenal today in his op-ed, and I cannot say enough about his courage to say if you are a conservative, if you do believe in the private, free markets, this kind of government intervention with the banks and playing all these games is no way to do it. It was very articulate, and I commend him for doing that and having the courage to do that.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, with regards to what you were just talking about in the middle class squeeze, and I do not know if you had an opportunity to talk about this or not, but I think it is so fundamental to everything that we are talking about tonight. CEO wages average $8.1 million, 300 times that of the average worker in the United States of America, 300 times. Now, we are not begrudging those people. God bless them. You are in America. Make as much money as you possibly can. Unfortunately, taxes on wages earned average almost 24 percent. So if you are out working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, make a wage, 24 percent. Taxes on income from investments like stocks and bonds average less than 10 percent. There is a shift in our tax code, our tax system, where we are moving the burden to wage earners. We are reducing the burden for those people who make money on stocks and bonds that has begun to divide the country, and there is this gap that is being created for the people who have a lot and the people who do not have too much. I think it is dangerous, and I want to share with my colleague a conversation I was having last week with an old school Republican, moderate, conservative, fiscally balanced budgets. I will not mention his name, but he was saying how this kind of system that we are running right now, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the middle class gets squeezed and tax burden goes on to those people who earn wages and the taxes are reduced for those people who make money on stocks and bonds and everything else, when we have a trading system that removes the good jobs to other places like China and India and they are not replaced by good paying jobs, where there is no health care, where people cannot find good employment, we begin to jeopardize the whole system. We begin to put the whole system at risk because we lose the stability that we need to have, and poor countries have revolutions because the poor get so poor that they just take up arms. Now, I am not suggesting we are at that point, but we are beginning to move in a direction where the very rich donate money to this place. They get the laws they want, the free trade agreements that they want, the tax structure that they want, the cuts in government that they want, the investments in government that they want, defense spending and something where the big companies can make a lot of money. There is no stabilizing force, and that is what the government is here for. We are here to stabilize this democracy and stabilize this country, and we have always been that country where people can look and say here is the middle class, the average people have an opportunity, average people are going to get educated, average people are going to have health care; everyone is going to have health care; everyone is going to have an education. I think we take a step back and we look how the government and what we are talking about, the investments that we are talking about, have a stabilizing force on our society as a whole and allow us to be that kind of example that we want to be for the rest of the world.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. That would be great. I will be here. Would you like for me to share the Web site?

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, and I think he is absolutely right. In places like Ohio, things are very difficult. The $300, $400, $500 increase over the course of a year in the gas effects people's lives. I know the gentleman from Florida is also concerned. But, Mr. Speaker, I have been very disappointed tonight, because several of the Special Orders tried to, I guess, address issues and make persuasive arguments I think that really do not exist, and one just wonders to oneself what the communities are like where these people are living. I know in Youngstown, Ohio, and in Niles, Ohio and in Warren, Ohio, and in Akron, Ohio, that people are feeling the squeeze; and people are losing jobs that pay $20, $25 an hour, health care benefits, pensions, 401(k)s, defined benefit plans, and they are losing those jobs, and the jobs that are being created are jobs that are paying $7, $8, $9, $10 an hour and no health care, in addition to the gas prices, in addition to these people trying to send their kids to school or to college. In Ohio, as I am sure it is going on around the country, that increase in tuition is 10 percent, 15 percent every single year. So the reason we are here, the reason we want to talk about these issues is because we think something needs to be done. I do not believe that we should just sit here and criticize, although I do believe that is part of our constitutional responsibility, to make sure that we identify our platform where we want to take the country and we compare that to where the country is or where the opposite political party would like to take the country; and we try to make a comparison. I just want to share a couple of ideas that are the Democratic proposals for some of the education squeeze issues that people are feeling. Senator Kerry, Presidential candidate Kerry, has several plans that we also agree with here in the Congress. A couple of them I would like to share with the American people here tonight. One of them is a tax credit for $4,000 for anyone who sends their kid to school or they are paying for their own school; $4,000 a year tax credit. Phenomenal. Not terrible; phenomenal. I think that is the kind of direction that we want to go in, when we can say to a young student, we are going to be here, the government is going to be here to support you. Now, some people may say, what is the responsibility of the Federal Government on the issue of education, at least on the issue of college education? Well, some of it is Pell grants where we can give actual grants. When the Pell grant program was started in the middle of the 1970s, it accounted for almost 80 percent of a person's college tuition. Today, the Pell grant accounts for nearly 40 percent of a person's college tuition. So the buying power of the Pell grant program has decreased, almost cut in half. President Bush, when he campaigned in 2000, said that he was going to increase the amount invested into the Pell grant program so that young students would have the opportunity to go to college, but that just was not the case. So one of our proposals is to also increase the amount of funding for the Pell grant program. Another specific proposal that I think is something that we really need to look into and hopefully act on the first of next year, although many people believe that we cannot wait, is the issue of the States not having the money, the resources to invest. Many of the colleges in the States are publicly funded through the State tax coffers, so the State aid to universities in Ohio, for example, has decreased. And because the State aid has decreased, the local universities and colleges have been forced to raise tuition to compensate for the lack of State funding. One of the issues that we are proposing here is to have $25 billion given across the country to the States with one provision: this money is to go to reduce the increases in tuition; this money is to go directly for State aid to our colleges. This will have a direct impact. It will lower the cost of tuition for many of these universities; it will allow access. Since 2001, I believe the statistic is, and I will have to get it, but I think it was 2001, 250,000 potential students, college-eligible, qualified to attend, proper test scores, proper GPAs, would be able to access the college system. I say to the gentleman, 250,000 have not been able to go to school because they cannot afford it. In the United States of America, that is unacceptable.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, this opportunity to share a few words about President Reagan. Mr. Speaker, when our country was confronted with a terrible menace of dangerous ideology, Reagan rallied America and united the world to decisively defeat the threat of Communism. We are grateful for that leadership. Ronald Reagan elevated the office of President. When mistakes were made, Ronald Reagan personally accepted responsibility. It did not matter what focus groups, polls, his advisers, political consultants said, he understood that the buck stopped with him and him alone. He was an American icon, forever remembered for his warmth and the respect he afforded to others, and our thoughts and prayers today are with Nancy and his children and his family at this very difficult time. Even when President Reagan broke the hearts of the Democrats, he was respected for his honesty, his beliefs, and the dedication he displayed in pursuing them. As a young elementary student during the Challenger disaster, it was enormous comfort to those of us who were all watching, because there was a teacher on the Challenger at that time, to listen to President Reagan as we began to question why America was sending these astronauts up into space; why was there a teacher on the Challenger at that time. And President Reagan said to us that the future does not belong to the faint-hearted, it belongs to the brave, and communicating to us what America was all about. I also remember as a young man President Reagan interacting with then-Speaker Tip O'Neill, in the way they got along, and they laughed and they talked and they joked. And that was a great example for those of us who were beginning to get acquainted with the political system. I remember the courage and the humor that President Reagan showed when he was shot, hoping that the doctors were all Republican and telling his wife, who was terrified, that he forgot to duck. I also cannot help but remember President Reagan, during the Washington Redskins ceremony at the Rose Garden after winning the Super Bowl, hitting Gary Sanders on the money as he ran a drag pattern across the Rose Garden. The differences then, despite our disagreements, were real; but because of the way President Reagan led, he taught us that there is a big difference between strong beliefs and bitter partisanship. Strong beliefs and a love of country are the only way to bring this country forward as we face the enormous challenges that we have before this body today. Ronald Reagan always stressed that we are a can-do country. Democrats and Republicans both believe this. And I believe it is that sense of optimism, as we look back on history, that the Presidents that moved the Nation forward were optimistic and believed the best and the brightest in this country would continue to move us forward. Mr. Speaker, I believe we can get back on the right track with strong leadership and a real commitment to confronting the problems that face American families today. In the words of Ronald Reagan, we can do better. With tolerance and inclusion, uniting rather than dividing, we can continue the legacy of Ronald Reagan. So when we return to work next week, I hope this House will be inspired by the leadership of Ronald Reagan instead of mired in the partisan politics that have too often affected our work as of late. We should be inspired by his patriotism and devotion to our country, and we should remember his faith, his optimism, and his unwavering commitment to his convictions as we do the work of the American people. In the words of President Reagan, those comforting words he gave us some 18 years, and we will never forget Ronald Reagan, nor the last time we saw him, for now he has slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. We will miss him.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, on Saturday, May 29, the National World War II Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall here in Washington. This memorial honors the courage and sacrifice of the millions of men and women who served our Nation during one of the most critical times in history. How this monument came about is a classic story of American democracy. The spark came from Roger Durbin of Berkey, Ohio, who made the request to his U.S. Representative, Marcy Katpur. With the help of America's veterans, Congresswoman Kaptur led the effort to pass legislation that authorized the memorial. I commend my distinguished colleague and good friend for her deep commitment to all our Nation's veterans and her extraordinary work on behalf of those who served in WWII. The story of this legislation was told in an article which appeared in a special section of The Washington Post Sunday Magazine on May 23. For the benefit of my colleagues, I present the full text of the article. [From the Washington Post, May 23, 2004] A Dream Realized (By Suzan Richmond) ``This is really an American story,'' Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Ohio) began. ``It all started at a township trustees fish fry, in February 1987. I was standing in the middle of a very large room, holding my plate. And all of a sudden, this big booming voice shouted across the large room: `Congresswoman Kaptur, why is there no World War II memorial in Washington, D.C.?' ``I turned. I see this man, standing erect, shoulders squared. The man was Roger Durbin, then age 67, a retired letter carrier from Berkey, Ohio, population 272, who once was a tank mechanic in the Battle of the Bulge. ``He had everyone's attention,'' Kaptur recalled. She replied: ``There is one.'' ``Oh, yeah?,'' he said. ``What is it?'' ``Iwo Jima.'' ``Wrong.'' he shot back. ``That memorial is to one service in one campaign. ``I'm telling you, there's no place. I wanted to bring my grandchildren to a memorial when I was in Washington to show them what had affected my life. It's not there.'' Once back in Washington, Kaptur did some research. ``I was stunned to find we had no central place in the capital to pay tribute to this generation. Durbin was right. I thought, this kind of omission couldn't be possible. ``I had been a member of Congress for a few years by then, but I really understood what being a representative was about after I met Roger,'' Kaptur continued. ``After that, we entered a marathon effort to pass the legislation essential to placing a memorial to World War II in Washington. I thought it would be easy. Boy, was I wrong.'' Indeed, from fish fry to legislation to site selection to design competition to winning design to construction to a World War II Memorial ready for dedication took 17 years. Roger Durbin died in February 2000 without ever seeing the memorial he inspired. ``In a sense,'' said his granddaughter, Melissa Growden, an art historian who has served on the WWII Memorial Advisory Board since 1994, ``the torch has been passed to me.'' Just after the war, she said her grandfather ``had the mindset of a lot of that generation. They went over there. They had a job to do. Then they went home and picked up life where they'd left it.'' It was only years later, Growden said, that Durbin began to talk in detail about his time with the 10th Armored Division, the force led by the legendary Gen. George Patton that stormed across northern Europe and into Germany. ``He did a lot of public speaking then,'' Growden said. ``And when he spoke he always cried.'' Over the years, she saw evidence of his wartime service. ``I remember once seeing his scrapbooks and its photos of a concentration camp--people stacked eight deep.'' ``My brother and I were raised with this incredible sense of patriotism and gratitude. Our grandfather said to us, `We fought so that you can enjoy the freedom and liberties that we have today. I never want you and your generation and the generations that follow to ever fight a war like the one we fought in.' ``He usually closed his talks by saying, `The World War II generation is an endangered species. Soon we'll be extinct.' With this memorial they won't be.''

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. $400,000 a month.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman very much. Over the past week, we had a break. We normally are doing our 30- something event on Tuesday nights, but we are here on Thursday night tonight, and we are going to take a little different twist here. Normally, we talk about issues that are facing young students, young people trying to make their way in the workforce.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Rockthevote.com to help with voter suppression across the country. It will inform you about whatever your situation may be locally. I just brought a couple of these that I wanted to read, because we are going to, obviously, move to another topic. We received a couple of e-mails that we pulled out here, one from a Luther Lowe from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and one also from Alleyn Harned from Columbus, Ohio, who lives in Delaware. I am going to read a couple of paragraphs out of the e-mail we got, because most adults will say why are kids not participating and being active in the process? There is youth voter apathy. I just want to read these. This is Luther Lowe from William and Mary. ``Rather than sit and watch our local representatives make laws which are unfair to young people, I decided to participate in my local democracy. I applied to register to vote at Williamsburg which required I also fill out a detailed two-page questionnaire in addition to the normal form. One week later, I received a notification of my registration denial. The reasons? I was claimed on my parents' income taxes. I drove a car owned by my mom who lives in Arkansas. According to the local registrar, I should have been voting in my parents' hometown. The problem with that is I have never voted in my parents' hometown. I voted for Al Gore from my boarding school in high school. I spend less than 2 months a year in Arkansas, so why should I be participating in local elections there? With the help of a local attorney from the ACLU, I fought back. It was only after two lawsuits that I was able to register on a technicality that I am a member of the Virginia National Guard and Governor Mark Warner is my primary commander in chief.'' Give me a break. Here is a kid that wants to participate in the system, and he has got to hire a lawyer from the ACLU to get a right to vote from the university.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. We will move on a little bit to the topic that we have been talking about a lot in the Committee on Armed Services and also been talking about a lot in Congress; and, obviously, the President of the United States has been talking about this a great deal. Notice the picture that I have next to me. The gentleman on my far right, on the gentleman's far left, is President George Bush II. And on my near right here is Mr. Chalabi, who was the main informant, the main intelligence gatherer for the United States of America in leading to the war in Iraq. The reason why we are going to talk about this is because some people may be asking, what are two 30-somethings that primarily have been focused on long-term debt for the country, increase in the deficit, annual deficits that we have in this country, student loans and college debt for students, debt for the country, debt for students, job access, outsourcing, we have talked about a lot of these issues, why are we going to talk about the war? I think, and I know the gentleman knows this, that there has been nothing that has damaged this country fiscally or with our political bank account more than the latest war in Iraq. I was against the war, as I am for full disclosure for the American people, for a lot of reasons that we are talking about today. And I see that there are some young students that are up in the gallery now, so we actually have a live audience here. Why should they care about what is going on in Iraq? Announcement By The Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, and that intelligence was based on information that they were getting from Chalabi, who is a known criminal. I mean, you are taking the country to war on intelligence, none has been true yet. We repeatedly hear: Saddam's ties to 9/11, treated as liberators, the whole list, use the oil revenue, whole list. All of that intelligence was wasted on information that we were getting from this guy. That is what is frustrating to me.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, one of the things I think we need to add on to what my colleague just said, as we welcome our good friend from the great State of Alabama here with us, is that after 9/11, and we all have agreed that 9/11 was an intelligence failure. Everyone has agreed on that, regardless of party. So if you are in a position of power where you are about to go to war and you know that your intelligence apparatus has just failed the country completely, you would think that you would ask a million more questions. Not a hundred thousand, a million. And you would think you would be shaking the intelligence community left and right to try to get accurate information. Instead, we were relying on a con man to get the information that we wanted to hear. So what I do not understand is why, after a major intelligence failure, you do not try to rectify that problem by having and assuring that you have good intelligence. Not to make a minor decision, but to go to war and to send 140,000 troops to war. Why are you not making sure we have good intelligence? I think that is something that maybe in many ways Members of Congress did not ask enough questions, the media did not ask enough questions, that we were not confrontational enough as to what the Iraqi policy was going to be. We have been talking here for a while, so I would like to yield to my colleague, the gentleman from Alabama (Mr. Davis).

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the comments of my colleague. The gentleman brought up General Eisenhower and spurred thoughts in my mind of the gentlemen of that day, of the Churchills and the Roosevelts and the Eisenhowers and the larger-than-life figures that participated in the greatest conflict. You just cannot help but to compare them to what the behavior is today. However, it just cannot be compared. If we look at how Roosevelt handled himself and when we look at how Churchill not only stood up and gave his great Nation an enormous amount of confidence at a time when no one thought England would be able to stand tall, the big contrast I can recognize with Churchill and President Bush is in the preparation that Churchill gave and the leadership that London gave their people before anything was happening. This is going to be a long struggle, but in the end it will be our finest hour. We are not going to surrender. Churchill just kept saying, we are not going to surrender. If you take it, you are going to take it by us being knocked senseless onto the ground, was one of the great Churchill quotes. The preparation. In this country, I think it was the exact opposite. We are going to be greeted as liberators. It is going to be great. Do not worry. It will be a drive-by war. We will use their oil. They are going to love us and hand us roses. Yet when you look at the monumental figures of that era, who, like the gentleman said, kind of raised everybody's eyes up and tried to put the institutions in line with the values of the country, I really did not see that during this.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I was just enjoying listening to the gentlemen talk. I want to clean up a couple of things that were mentioned. The gentleman from Florida (Mr. Meek) mentioned that now we want to make sure that our soldiers have the equipment that they need, we want to make sure that the vehicles are up-armored and they have the vests and the plates to go into the vests and everything else. We have gotten so caught up in the fact that we want to get it to them, we forget to ask, you are telling me we went to war and we did not have our troops properly equipped? Lack of preparation. In the Defense appropriations bill that we just passed out of the House, we reimbursed parents or whoever for people, parents who paid for vests for their kids. I mean, you have to be kidding me. We had to reimburse parents that paid for their protective vests for soldiers in Iraq. The general that testified about the prison abuse said that there were a couple of problems, major problems. One, lack of training. One, lack of supervision. To me, after almost 2 years on the Committee on Armed Services and a layman, civilian, lack of training and lack of supervision to me means we do not have enough troops there. If you are not training them properly, you do not have enough people to train; and if you are not supervising them properly, you do not have enough people to supervise. I think that is basic common sense to say this group has not prepared us for this war. One other thing I would like to say because some young people are probably sitting at home listening to this, remember as soon as President Clinton got in office, there were always investigations, investigating this, Travelgate, Nannygate, this gate and that gate. They were always investigating the man. Why? The House and the Senate were Republican. The White House was Democrat. We are now in a one- party rule system. The House is controlled by the Republicans, the Senate is controlled by the Republicans, the White House is controlled by Republicans. I am not saying that they are always wrong, and I am not saying that we are always right. All I am saying is when there is one-party rule, we cannot subpoena people out of this House because the gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) from the Committee on Government Reform is not the chairman of the committee. If he was the Chair of the committee, we could subpoena some of these people who wear the suits and bring them before committees in the House and have them sit and tell us what happened and why and make sure we are starting to hold people responsible for their actions. That is just what I want to say to the American people, is you cannot have one party rule the whole government. It is unhealthy for the institutions; it is unhealthy for the country. There is no balance right now. There is no one overseeing what is going on. We get fed a line from somebody like this, and no one can stand up and question it. That is not a good way to run your country. This country was founded on all the different aspects, the branches and everything else, in order to bring some balance to these institutions we have.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. And he is a National Guardsman. The kid loves his country, loves the State of Virginia, has not been in Arkansas all that much, and they are trying to limit his right to vote. I think that is the perfect example of why we are doing this, why we want to keep doing this, and slowly, over time, allow us to at least communicate to the young people of this country that sometimes it is a little bit of a fight. It should not be, but let them know that there are people here working on this for them.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. It would be funny if it was not so sad.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Why should we talk about Mr. Chalabi? Why should we talk about his relationship to President Bush? Why should we talk about his relationship to Vice President Cheney? This gentleman stood up in the gallery during the State of the Union address as a friend of the President of the United States; and now we see in the paper today, from CNN's Inside Politics, Condoleezza Rice is now downplaying the relationship that this administration had with Mr. Chalabi. And she says, we had a relationship with Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress just like we have relationships with a number of Iraqi organizations devoted to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. That is not true. It is not just like every other relationship they had, because this gentleman was sitting in this gallery during the President's State of the Union address which, as we know, it is an honor to be recognized here in this Chamber, whether it is legally or illegally acknowledged. But he was acknowledged as a friend of the administration.

Mr. RYAN of Ohio

Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commend Brigadier General Michael F. Gjede on his service to the United States of America. After more than 35 years in the Air Force, General Gjede will be retiring, and we in northeast Ohio have been very privileged to have him as the Commander of the Air Force Reserve 910th Airlift Wing at Youngstown Air Reserve Station in Vienna, Ohio. A graduate of Northeastern University in Boston, General Gjede earned his commission through the Air Force Officer Training School program in 1968. Once he had earned his wings, he served two tours in Vietnam flying B-52s and logging over 140 combat missions. General Gjede has held numerous command positions in the Air Force, and the 910th is the second flying wing that has had the opportunity to have him as their commanding officer. As our wing commander at the Youngstown Air Reserve Station, General Gjede's personal involvement, his encouragement, and intuitiveness have produced an overwhelming response, as recognized in the achievements of the wing's members. The 910th's functional areas performed flawlessly, despite a stressful and turbulent atmosphere caused by the events of September 11, 2001. His superior leadership was the driving force that kept all personnel properly focused, allowing them to consistently meet and exceed requirements. Despite the challenges of the most aggressive reserve operations tempo in history, the 910th immediately responded to the homeland defense initiatives in support of Operation Noble Eagle and the worldwide requirements for Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. General Gjede's continual involvement in base renovation and new construction projects, operation and maintenance facilities, and quality of life projects will produce benefits far into the future. The accomplishments of General Gjede culminate a long and distinguished career in the service of his country and reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Air Force. On a personal note, one of the unique experiences I have had with General Gjede was an opportunity to participate in the Youngstown Air Reserve parachute program. It is not really a program. It is a simulation of parachuting. General Gjede gave me an opportunity to put on the suit, strap myself in, and look down and do the virtual reality and try to land on a carrier. Well, needless to say, I had my suit pants on, so General Gjede got to see me with suit pants, a tie, and the equipment necessary for parachuting dangling from the ceiling at the air base and missing the boat completely and going directly into the water. I do not even believe I got the parachute out in time. So General Gjede has seen his Congressman in some very compromising positions. Luckily, there was no one in there with a camera to take any pictures. So that was a good experience I have had, among many, with General Gjede; and he is going to be sorely missed. But I would also like to say that behind every great man is a great woman. He has a phenomenal wife, Jerylynn, who we have had the opportunity, my wife Julie and I have had the opportunity to get to know. She is a tremendous, tremendous woman. She is a great First Lady for the 910th. She has an enormous amount of class and composure and brought a lot of elegance to the air base, and we will sorely miss her as well. So on behalf of the people of the 17th Congressional District, I want to thank you, General Gjede and your wife, and wish you and your family the best. On a personal note, I have enjoyed our time together, our dinners together, and hope that in the future there will be many, many, many more. We are definitely wishing and hoping that you will stick around in our community after your retirement, because our community certainly is a better place and a stronger place with you and Jerylynn in it, and we will not just miss the General and his wife but we will miss our friends. So I wish you the best of luck and hope that we get to see you in our community and look forward to many, many, many further experiences together on behalf of the air base.