Agriculture was the first manufacturing industry in America and represents the best of all of us.

If we pulled out of Iraq tomorrow, Islamic jihadism is on the rise. And they continue, as we see in Lebanon, to seek to destroy the State of Israel and seek to drive America back and bring us to our knees. We must stand tall and straight.

Today the people from my State of Tennessee would listen to this debate, or even talk about a reference to God on our money or in the Halls of Congress or in our Pledge and say, please, let common sense and logic win the day and prevail versus legal mumbo jumbo.

We should not be afraid to go into a new era, to leave the old beyond.

Over this August district work period, like many of my colleagues, I spent a lot of time with the men and women in uniform from my home State. The 196th Field Artillery Brigade just got back from a year in Afghanistan.

Failure to properly control our borders costs citizens in many ways: schools become overcrowded, medical resources are stretched too thin, other government services are overtaxed, and taxes increase further.

With only 2 percent of the world's proven reserves of oil, we in the United States can pump until we are blue in the face and it will not change the fact that we need more diverse and more secure sources of energy.