by Frank James
A quick guided tour of some of the morning’s most important or interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.
The Federal Communications Commission’s chairman is circulating a proposal to relax media-ownership rules to allow one company to own a TV station and newspaper or radio station in the same market but his plan appears likely to set off a congressional firestorm as a similar plan did in 2004.
Opposition leader and former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto returned to her homeland after eight years in exile, a move that was allowed by U.S. ally in the war on terror, President Pervez Musharraf, even though her return is likely to breathe new life into the opposition.
Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he disapproved of his predecessor Alberto Gonzales’s position on torture and appeared to have no real opposition to his confirmation to lead the Justice Department. A bipartisan group of senators agreed with the Bush Administration on changes to the wireless surveillance legislation that would grant telecommunications companies immunity for providing consumer data to the government in the past and that would put continued surveillance under court scrutiny.
President Bush declared his continuing relevance at a press conference, saying his ability to veto legislation assured that he couldn’t be ignored and he also sought to portray the Democratic-controlled Congress as a do-nothing institution unable to move legislation.
The bundling of political contributions has become a major contributor to campaign-finance wrongdoing as illustrated by the case of Norman Hsu, the disgraced former money-raiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton, which showed how easy it is for bundlers to hide illegal campaign contributions.
Airport security screeners failed to detect fake bombs carried by undercover agents in more than 60 percent of tests done last year, according to a classified Transportation Security Administration report.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel intends to soon launch a major effort to overhaul the nation’s tax code and plans to split his effort into two parts–a one-year fix to the alternative minimum tax that would keep millions of taxpayers from being caught up in it and the larger task of simplifying the tax laws.
Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee, has alarmed some of his congressional backers with a proposal that touches the third rail of American politics, Social Security, in which he advocates pegging benefits to inflation which would result in by some estimates a 25 percent cut in benefits.
