Committee Chairman

WASHINGTON -- A Senate committee investigating the fate of Americans still unaccounted for from the Vietnam War has turned its attention to reports that satellite photography may have picked up messages from prisoners as late as 1988.The panel, the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, plans to hold hearings on this issue Oct. 15 and 16 but has not decided how much will be open to the public, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., the committee chairman, said yesterday.The committee has been holding closed intelligence briefings on the issue, and many once-classified government documents have been made public.

While the first official test event for the 2012 Olympics was taking place nearby, local sports fans Neal Weekes and Gordon Cunningham were talking about the Summer Games over a beer at the Mitre Hotel pub in Greenwich. "Greatest thing ever to happen to London," Weekes said. "Wouldn't any city in the world want to have the Olympic Games?" Weekes said he had applied for $14,000 worth of Olympic tickets. The controversial ticket lottery gave him $1,600 in seats for swimming, basketball and the men's soccer final.

New Windsor Mayor Jack A. Gullo Jr. recently presented the first Mayor's Award to resident Jack Coe.Coe, the town's planning committee chairman and town plumber, was recognized for his dedication to the town.The town presented Coe with a plaque.FireNew Windsor: Firefighters responded at 7: 34 a.m. Thursday to burning electrical wires on Route 31 at Church Road. Units were out 12 minutes.Pub Date: 10/12/98

WASHINGTON - -In the face of mounting Republican opposition to its health-care agenda, the Obama administration received a boost Wednesday, winning a preliminary agreement with leading hospital groups to cut federal payments to the industry over the next decade. Under the plan, negotiated primarily by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, hospitals would accept $155 billion in cuts if the administration and its congressional allies succeeded in extending health insurance to tens of millions of people who are now without coverage.

The chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee proposed what he called a five-year, $317 million education aid package for Prince George's County yesterday, but coupled it with a demand for "accountability" such as the state imposed on Baltimore schools earlier this year.A leading Prince George's legislator described the proposal as "gratuitously divisive and inflammatory" and said the actual new spending in the package comes to about $90 million.Del. Howard P. Rawlings, a Baltimore Democrat, raised the politically charged issue in a letter dated yesterday to Gov. Parris N. Glendening.

As chairman of the NCAA men's basketball tournament selection committee, Jim Livengood is livin' dangerously. How else do you explain some of the decisions Livengood and his committee made in seeding the 65 teams for this year's tournament? Considering that Liven- good's day job is as athletic director at the University of Arizona, there's a good chance his most valued employee, basketball coach Lute Olson, might have reason to be a little miffed for the company the top-seeded Wildcats were given in the West Regional.

Gov. Parris N. Glendening deftly cleared an obstruction to his environmental agenda yesterday by naming a longtime legislative adversary to a powerful regulatory position. Del. Ron Guns, a conservative Cecil County Democrat, will quit the General Assembly and resign from his full-time job with telecommunications giant Verizon to fill a vacancy on the state Public Service Commission. The position pays $93,600 a year. Since 1991, Guns has served as chairman of the House Environmental Matters Committee, which had become a graveyard for bills on water quality and other environmental issues.

As a landmark air pollution bill heads for a critical vote today, a flash point for debate is a loophole that would allow power plants to avoid penalties if the cost of adding filters "may significantly increase electric rates." Senate Finance Committee Chairman Thomas M. Middleton, who has a power plant in his Southern Maryland district, inserted the language into the Healthy Air Act before it was approved 33-14 last week by the Senate. Middleton, a Democrat who has received at least $7,750 in campaign contributions from the power industry since 1999, said he added the "safety valve" to protect customers, given the uproar over a large rate increase expected this summer because of the deregulation of electric utilities.

Supporters of a proposal to ban discrimination against gay men and lesbians in Maryland picked up a key vote yesterday when Sen. Leo E. Green said he will back the legislation. "I would vote in favor of it with the amendments I've worked on," the Prince George's County Democrat said in an interview. "I can support it now." Until yesterday, Green had been one of two undecided senators on the 11-member Judicial Proceedings Committee - the General Assembly panel seen as controlling the measure's fate.

Thirty-one lawyers, including a former judge and former Republican committee chairman for the county, are seeking 10-year appointments to two positions on the District Court bench. At least seven candidates are current or former prosecutors, at least two were unsuccessful Republican candidates for local office and one is a federal EPA lawyer. Several are past applicants for judgeships. David S. Bruce, a former District Court judge appointed to Circuit Court, lost a race in November to retain his position on the Circuit Court.

Maryland officials have barred Alan B. Fabian, an entrepreneur and one-time Republican fundraiser now in federal prison, from doing business with the state for an indefinite period. Fabian, who lived in Cockeysville, pleaded guilty last year to mail and tax fraud in connection with a $32 million fraud. The Board of Public Works, a three-member panel with purview over state contracts, approved the action Wednesday without discussion. Fabian had been notified of the proceeding and did not request a hearing, according to board records.

A spokesman for Michael S. Steele defended the new Republican National Committee chairman yesterday against claims by a convicted felon that Steele misused campaign funds from his 2006 Senate bid. Curt Anderson, a political consultant and Steele spokesman, said the allegations had been "fabricated" by Steele's former campaign finance chairman, who was seeking a more lenient sentence in an unrelated criminal case. The Washington Post outlined the accusations in yesterday's editions, including a claim that Steele's campaign paid money to a company owned by his sister for services never performed, and the improper use of tens of thousands more in campaign money.

After suffering double-digit drubbings in the last two elections that left House and Senate Republicans in the minority and Democrat Barack Obama in the White House, the GOP is desperate for new leadership and fresh ideas. The election last week of former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele as the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee signaled party loyalists' desire for a different tone and direction. But unless Mr. Steele, a frequent political commentator on television talk shows, can persuade Republican lawmakers in Congress to break with the disastrous policies of former president George W. Bush, it's hard to see how he alone can rebuild the party's ranks and help win back the power Republicans recently wielded in Washington.

WASHINGTON -- House Democrats, opposed to the Senate's focus on helping homebuilders, moved yesterday to reshape housing legislation to help more homeowners. "We need to provide relief to the buyers and families themselves, not just the banks and builders," Rep. Charles B. Rangel, a New York Democrat, said in a statement. House Democrats intend to put "families first," he said. Today, Rangel's Ways and Means Committee will vote on his legislation to provide tax breaks to homeowners, first-time homebuyers and developers of low-income housing.

WASHINGTON -- The "substantial" downturn in home sales has slowed the U.S. economy and "is likely to remain a drag on economic growth for a time," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told Congress yesterday. Still, Bernanke sees no recession on the horizon. The economy should "continue to expand at a moderate pace," he said, and price inflation may ease even as wages rise. "The weakness in housing and in some parts of manufacturing does not appear to have spilled over to any significant extent to other sectors," Bernanke told the Joint Economic Committee, made up of Senate and House members.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Finance Committee voted yesterday to rein in the tax breaks that sweeten the huge compensation packages corporations often bestow upon executives. The crackdown was tucked into legislation to raise the federal minimum wage by $2.10 over two years to $7.25. In a unanimous voice vote, the committee approved the wage increase, along with a package of tax reductions and credits aimed at helping small businesses. In a surprise to many lobbyists who didn't see it coming, one provision was aimed at top executives of hundreds of large companies.

Terry R. Gilleland of Linthicum, a former student member of Anne Arundel County Board of Education, has been appointed to fill a District 32 vacancy on the county's Republican State Central Committee. Gilleland replaces Michael W. Burns, a former delegate and state party official who resigned from the committee effective March 1. The committee chairman, Robert A. Costa, said Burns noted personal and professional considerations in a letter of resignation. The new member is an account manager for Prometric Inc., a computer-based testing company, and expects to receive a master's degree in business administration from the University of Baltimore in May. He served as student member of the school board in the 1994-1995 school year and, among his political activities, ran as a candidate for the party's state central committee in 1998.

WASHINGTON -- In a sign of growing partisan division over domestic eavesdropping, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee defended yesterday the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the secret program and accused the committee's top Democrat of changing her position on the issue. Also yesterday, 27 House Democrats sent a letter to President Bush asking for information about the National Security Agency program, including whether communications from or to members of Congress and journalists were intercepted.

The ever-sensitive slot machine issue will be Howard Del. Frank S. Turner's baby in this year's House of Delegates, thanks to the House speaker, Del. Michael E. Busch. Turner, a four-term Democrat who is no fan of slots, is chairman of the innocent-sounding Finance Resource subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee. That means any bills having to do with gambling, horse racing or the lottery must pass muster with his subcommittee before they can proceed. "The speaker felt very comfortable with me taking over that area," said Turner.

WASHINGTON -- Among the decisions facing Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi, few are trickier than the selection of a leader for the sensitive post of House Intelligence chairman. Many Democrats say her likely pick is Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, a Florida congressman and longtime committee member whose personal history could become a political liability for the party. Before his election to Congress in 1992, he was impeached by the House for bribery and perjury and stripped of his job as a federal judge.