Posted by Frank James at 6:30 am CDT
A quick guided tour to today’s most important or most interesting (or both) Washington-related stories.
Now that President Bush has vetoed the Iraq and Afghanistan war-spending bill because it contained a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, Congress must still find a way to fund the military operations there while keeping the pressure on Bush to wind down the U.S. military commitment.
Rudy Giuliani’s ties to a Texas law firm that has helped him raise large amounts of money in Texas, may come back to haunt the former New York City mayor and popular Republican presidential candidate because of the firm’s successful lobbying for the coal-fired power plant industry blamed for contributing to global warming and air pollution.
Three million chickens produced in Indiana were fed pet food scraps containing melamine, the same chemical that was found to have sickened and killed numerous pets, but the Food and Drug Administration’s new food czar said there would likely be no health impact on humans who consumed the poultry.The Homeland Security Department will start using a stolen-passport Interpol database two years after it was made available to them, drawing criticism for allowing such an obvious gap in security to persist since such passports can ease border crossings because they are difficult for immigration officials to detect.
U.S. diplomats who were stationed in Iraq are returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder which has prompted the State Department to conduct a mental-health survey of its 1,400 employees who served in the war-torn nation.
House Republicans wrote Speaker Nancy Pelosi to keep a provision that would prevent lawsuits against fliers who accuse other travelers of acting suspiciously in a transportation-safety bill. The legislation resulted from a lawsuit by six Muslim imams who were prevented from boarding a flight in Minneapolis after other travelers accused the men of suspicious behavior.
Both senators and presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and John McCain have major financial supporters who are billionaires known for taking advantage of tax-avoidance schemes, placing the candidates in a dilemma: do they take the contributions from such contributors or say thanks but no thanks?
Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar of California may not be able to run for the presidency as a naturalized citizen but he hopes to be a major factor in the race for the Republican nomination and thus the final outcome nonetheless, appearing with many of the candidates but so far committing to none.
Harold Ford Jr., the former congressman who last year lost his bid to become the first African-American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, said Sen. Barack Obama could win the South with the right mainstream message on values issues. Ford heads the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.
President Ronald Reagan thought his secretary of state was completely paranoid, found Michael Jackson’s shyness surprising and refused to speak to his son Ron Reagan Jr. after the young man hung up the phone on him, according to details from diaries the president kept during his years in office, diaries whose contents will be published this month.
