I am proud to represent these men and women who empower people in developing nations and promote the Peace Corps mission of peace and friendship. These volunteers are making major strides to improve the lives of people and communities around the world.

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

So the Marine Corps really did teach me to conquer fear and then to go for higher causes higher purposes.

AP promoted me to the White House beat because I knew Clinton his family friends and staff better than anybody in the national press corps. Those contacts helped me break a few stories and get my career in Washington jump-started.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Without tradition art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation it is a corpse.

Mr. Speaker I rise today to recognize the Peace Corps as it reached its 45th anniversary on March 1 2006.