There are certain things that Americans expect their government to do. Our infrastructure is vitally important. Putting people back to work with construction is important. Our roads, our bridges, our sewers, our waterways, our dams - this is what makes our country so special.

The last six months of the Bush administration lost four million jobs and the first six months of the Obama administration lost another four million before any initiatives of the president could take action.

We talked about the resources that the justice department has available to help them -- the technical assistance to ensure that we're diffusing situations, not encouraging them to spiral out of control.

The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation. It was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities, a formal acknowledgement that Americans with disabilities are Americans first and that they're entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else.

A new era of responsibility is here.

Change is never fast enough to satisfy us. I still hear too many stories of women who go back to work too soon, but I do believe that we have been able to change the paradigm in attitudes towards family leave in that it's no longer a nice thing to do for women, it's a must do for competitiveness, and that's a big change over the last seven years. Changing it into an economic issue is a big sea change in the last seven years.

It is outrageous that at this time in our country, women are still not paid as much as men.