Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Digest

Senate works on $463-billion spending bill

By TIMES WIRES
Published February 9, 2007

Democrats controlling the Senate are pushing through a huge spending bill funding 13 Cabinet agencies as they wrap up the unfinished budget mess inherited from the previous Congress. The $463.5-billion measure debated Thursday would cover about one-sixth of the budget, combining nine spending bills that failed to pass Congress last year under GOP control. A vote to close debate is slated for Tuesday, and Democrats are confident they will prevail. The bill sticks within spending limits set by Bush, though Democrats created wiggle room through maneuvers such as cutting $3-billion from his request to implement a 2005 round of military base closures and $3.5-billion in phantom savings from highway spending.

Cronkite: Media too profit-driven

NEW YORK - Pressures by media companies to generate ever-greater profits are threatening the very freedom the nation was built upon, former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite said Thursday.

In a keynote address at Columbia University, Cronkite said today's journalists face greater challenges than those from his generation. No longer could journalists count on their employers to provide the necessary resources, he said, "to expose truths that powerful politicians and special interests often did not want exposed."

Instead, he said, "they face rounds and rounds of job cuts and cost cuts that require them to do ever more with ever less."

"In this information age and the very complicated world in which we live today, the need for high-quality reporting is greater than ever," he told journalism students and professionals at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. "It's not just the journalist's job at risk here. It's American democracy. It is freedom."

Chertoff takes heat in Congress

WASHINGTON - Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff got an earful at his first public sit-down with the new Congress on Thursday, with members raising concerns about cuts in state grants, increases in immigration fees and lax management of billion-dollar programs.

The hearing by the House panel that holds his department's purse strings served as a warning that lawmakers will be challenging the Bush administration on a long list of Homeland Security programs.

Several committee members with Hispanic constituencies were concerned about Bush's proposed higher fees for immigrants. Under the plan, an application for a green card could rise from $325 to $905, and those with green cards would pay $595 to become citizens, up from $330.

Chertoff acknowledged the higher fee is a hardship, but said Congress itself had ordered the program to be supported by user fees. "Without the money, we're going to be back with the backlog," he said.

[Last modified February 9, 2007, 01:08:30]