Washington in brief

Lawmakers at party say they were duped

More than a dozen lawmakers attended a congressional reception this year honoring the Rev. Sun Myung Moon where Moon declared himself the Messiah and said his teachings have helped Hitler and Stalin be "reborn as new persons."

At the March 23 ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., wore white gloves and carried a pillow holding an ornate crown that was placed on Moon's head.

Details of the ceremony - first reported by Salon.com writer John Gorenfeld - have prompted several lawmakers to say they were misled or duped by organizers. Their complaints prompted a Moon-affiliated Web site to remove a video of the "Crown of Peace" ceremony two days ago, but other Web sites have preserved details and photos.

Moon, 85, has been controversial for years. Renowned for officiating at mass weddings, he received an 18-month prison sentence in 1982 for tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. In a 1997 sermon he likened homosexuals to "dirty dung-eating dogs."

Among the more than 300 people who attended all or part of the ceremony was Sen. Mark Dayton, D-Minn., who now says he simply was honoring a constituent receiving a peace award and did not know Moon would be there. "We fell victim to it, we were duped," Dayton spokeswoman Chris Lisi said Tuesday.

Some Republicans who attended the event, including Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., said they did so mainly to salute the Washington Times, a conservative-leaning paper owned by Moon's organization.

The Senate voted Tuesday to substantially increase fines for broadcast indecency, responding to months of public outrage over racy radio and television broadcasts that culminated with the exposure of Janet Jackson's breast during CBS's telecast of the Super Bowl halftime show in January.

An amendment attached to a Defense Department authorization bill likely to be voted upon today would give the Federal Communications Commission authority to increase the maximum fine for each incident of broadcast indecency from $32,500 to $275,000 to as much as $3-million a day.

A House committee approved similar legislation earlier this year, but it stalled.

The IRS said Tuesday it would examine some 400 foundations to determine whether the philanthropic institutions, which control billions of tax-exempt dollars, were complying with tax laws, as part of the agency's contribution to a broad regulatory effort to better police the nonprofit sector.

That effort officially got under way Tuesday with a wide-ranging hearing before the Senate Finance Committee on nonprofit practices and abuses and ways to improve oversight of charities.

Leading Republicans said Tuesday that Congress is unlikely to pass patient rights legislation this year, despite lawmakers' pledges to revive it after a Supreme Court ruling limiting lawsuits against HMOs.

Some Democrats said the issue could be potent in the presidential campaign. Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a co-author of the bill, said he learned in his campaign for the Democratic nomination, "It's still an enormously important issue. It's real out there on Main Street all across the country." Edwards, a trial lawyer, is frequently mentioned as vice presidential running mate.

Sen. John Kerry, the likely Democratic nominee, said the legislation "has bipartisan support, and it could become law tomorrow if the Bush administration was not standing in the way."

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