By now, the travel industry is plenty weary of offhand remarks emanating from the Obama White House.

First, President Obama chastised corporate largesse while promoting his economic stimulus package (PL 111-5) in February, saying he wouldn't tolerate recipients of federal aid flying on corporate jets, taking trips to Las Vegas or going to the Super Bowl on the taxpayers' dime.

The remarks so chilled business travel among executives fearful of being seen as spendthrifts that even Hawaii officials gently admonished the president, reminding him that cancelled meetings and incentive trips were costing his economically strapped native state tens of millions of dollars.

Then, on Thursday, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. went on NBC's Today Show and confessed that he told his family to stay off airplanes and other conveyances because of the swine flu outbreak. Asked what he would tell a relative considering air travel this week, Biden replied, "I would tell members of my family -- and I have -- that I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now."

Mignon Clyburn, daughter of House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, will be nominated to take a seat on the Federal Communications Commission.

The White House announced the pick of the younger Clyburn, a longtime member of the South Carolina Public Service Commission, Wednesday night.

"She is very competent and accomplished, someone of whom I am very proud," Clyburn said of his daughter.

-- Jonathan Allen

Flashback to the 2005 Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Chief Justice John R. Roberts Jr. Then-Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. pursued an aggressive line of questioning in trying to get the jurist and former Reagan administration lawyer to give his views on the Reagan White House's policy regarding Title IX discrimination. So aggressive that Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, became irritated and admonished Biden and fellow Democrats for not giving the nominee a fair shake.

Specter pointedly told Biden to give Roberts a chance to answer, prompting Biden to complain, "his answers are misleading, with all due respect."

"They may be misleading, but they are his answers," Specter shot back, eliciting laughter from the audience.

Though they've frequently taken opposite sides during high-stakes debates, the veteran senators from neighboring states long enjoyed a cordially cantankerous relationship, chiding each other about their politics and their parties. Specter on occasion would pause on Nov. 20 to publicly wish Biden happy birthday on the Senate floor. And the pair collaborated on disparate efforts such as a diplomatic mission to China, legislation to punish governments that carry out violent attacks against religious believers and even a long-shot attempt to force Major League Baseball and the National Football League to contribute more to the financing of new stadiums.

President Obama repeatedly invoked the spirit of discovery in his speech to the National Academy of Sciences on Monday morning, likening efforts to break U.S. dependence on fossil fuels to the pioneering days of space exploration, when the scientific community rallied to respond to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik.

"The Russians had beaten us to space and we had to make a choice: We could accept defeat or we could accept the challenge. And as always, we chose to accept the challenge," Obama said. "The scientific community rallied behind this goal and set about achieving it. And it would not only lead to those first steps on the moon; it would lead to giant leaps in our understanding here at home."

But while he paid homage to the manned space program's roots, Obama made no mention of the Thursday deadline NASA faces to decide whether to move forward with plans to retire the aging shuttle fleet. The shutdown was initiated in 2004 by former President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the Columbia accident but was put on hold by Congress last year so the new president could review the program. Obama appears content to stay the course and retire the fleet by Sept. 30, 2010 -- a move lawmakers from Florida and other shuttle supporters contend will idle skilled American workers and outsource their jobs to, you guessed it, Russia.

So it turns out even a disciplined, on-message operation like the Obama White House can get ensnared in a Shakesperian web of political schemery. One of its own making, no less.

The administration's decision last week to release Bush-era Justice Department memos justifying harsh interrogation techniques some have characterized as torture, and absolve the CIA functionaries who carried them out, has emboldened the left flank of the Democratic party to agitate for investigations of the officials who formulated the policies.

As a result, a move designed to validate Obama's decision to overturn Bush's policies has morphed into a highly contentious national security debate that's dividing Democrats on Capitol Hill, emboldening conservative administration critics and very, very effectively overshadowing Obama's top-tier agenda items.

The president and his aides have not made life easier for themselves by sending mixed signals about their appetite for inquiries and prosecutions. So at week's end, let's recap where things stand:

President Obama, whose aides insist isn't focused on chronologically imposed milestones like the 100th day of the new presidency, plans to hold his third prime-time news conference next Wednesday, April 29. Which just happens to be his 100th day in office.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed any significance to the timing at his Thursday afternoon briefing. But the administration is keenly aware of the ratings bounce the president enjoyed after his two previous outings with the White House press corps, in February and March, and polls suggesting the public likes seeing him on a regular basis.

"It's an arbitrary day in which presidents are measured. We get that. We're playing along," Gibbs said.

Obama has been trying to refocus attention on his agenda as Congress dominates the headlines and cable-news chatter, by puzzling over a possible review of the Bush administration's harsh interrogation policies. But he'll almost certainly get grilled on seemingly contradictory statements that he and top aides made about the wisdom of convening commissions to look into past wrongdoing. Call it "Dancing With the Press."

It’s been a long time since the power trio of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman made music together. Since the election, the former Republican presidential nominee and his Senate colleagues have been mostly working on solo projects, with McCain and Graham teaming up to send the occasional joint letter to the White House.

Today, they got the band back together — to ask President Obama not to prosecute the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the “torture memos.”

It’s been a long road for Obama, from ruling out prosecutions to passing the buck to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. But to the McCain trio, Obama’s first position was the correct one.

President Obama traveled to Newton, Iowa today to visit a wind turbine equipment manufacturer housed in a former Maytag Corp. appliance factory. The Earth Day photo op was built around the message that renewable energy is a growth industry -- a not-too-subtle prod at Congress to get serious about passing climate change legislation this year.

White House offiicals have to hope this visit works out better than the last time the president used a stop at a Midwestern manufacturing plant to make a big political point to Congress.

On Feb. 12, Obama visited the Peoria, Ill. headquarters of Caterpillar Inc. to sell his $787 billion stimulus plan (PL 111-5). "You can measure America's bottom line by looking at Caterpillar's bottom line," Obama said during the appearance. "What's happening at this company tells us a larger story about what's happening in the American economy."

With Congress intent on investigating the tick-tock that led to the financial crisis, expect to hear the name Ferdinand Pecora come up with regularity in the next few weeks.

The long ago chief counsel of the Senate Banking Committee is hardly a household name, even among confirmed political junkies. But he's largely credited for jump-starting a Depression-era congressional probe of the stock exchange and financial manipulation on Wall Street that provided the justification for major initiatives launched by the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, including the Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., recently began invoking Pecora's name as she called for a commission that would be responsible for making recommendations to Congress and the Obama administration on how to guard against another meltdown in the future. "We're going to have a commission ... even if it is only in the House of Representatives," Pelosi told the Commonwealth Club of California while back in her home state last week.

President Obama's decision to release four legal opinions on interrogation and torture developed by the administration of George W. Bush represented a big shift in national security classification policy. But Congress can't claim much credit for shaking the documents loose.

In statements on Thursday, Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder made clear that the legal opinions were released as a result of ongoing litigation -- a reference to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act that demanded the release of information about detainees held overseas by the United States.

The Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena for the documents last November but was stonewalled during the last weeks of the Bush administration. And in spite of his expressed hopes for better cooperation from the Obama White House, Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., was apparently unable to cut through all the red tape.

President Obama has taken pains to distance his administration from the policies George W. Bush authorized for detaining suspected terrorists. On his second full day in office, Obama fulfilled a campaign promise to close the controversial prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and ordered a review of detainee policies.

But that doesn't mean Obama is keen to keep flogging the issue in the international spotlight. Far from it, in fact. In an interview with CNN En Espanol on the eve of his trip to Mexico and the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, Obama threw cold water on a Spanish court's efforts to open a criminal investigation into charges that six former Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify torture of prisoners at Guantánamo.

In essence, Obama said he's already busy probing the allegations of mistreatment, and appeared to urge prosecutors to back off.

The first family would have paid nearly $20,000 more in taxes this year under President Obama's plan to cap the deductibility of charitable contributions for wealthy taxpayers. He and first lady Michelle Obama donated $172,050, or about 6.5 percent, of their adjusted gross income of $2.66 million, to 37 charities.

Their donations are worth a deduction of $68,131.80 this year, based on qualifying for the top income tax bracket of 39.6 percent.

But under Obama's plan, which would limit the applicability of deductions by couples making more than $250,000 to 28 percent of their contributions, the first couple would only have been able to claim $48,174 in deductions, costing them about $20,000. That sum is a small portion of the Obamas' income, which they revealed by releasing their tax return Wednesday afternoon.

With April 15 tea party protests breaking out across the country, President Obama on Wednesday sought to reassure Americans that he's working hard to make the tax code fairer and simpler.

Fairer by eliminating tax breaks for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. And simpler by directing his economic team to recommend ways to overhaul the tax code, close loopholes and recover hundreds of billions of dollars in uncollected revenues. A panel headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker is due to report back by December.

"We'll make it easier, quicker and less expensive for you to file a return, so that April 15 is not a date that is approached with dread every year," Obama declared during a White House meeting with working families.

But some experts believe it will be quite difficult for Obama to make good on his promises, let alone convince Americans to feel better about filing their returns.

President Obama's call for Senate ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty during his April 5 stop in Prague has set off a round of armchair quarterbacking in the arms control community about the salesmanship the administration might employ to win over reluctant lawmakers.

Obama is keen to avoid the experience of Bill Clinton, who signed the pact in 1996 and made its ratification one of his top foreign policy goals only to see it soundly rejected by a Republican-led Senate, 48-51, in October 1999. Sixty-seven votes are needed for ratification.

While the political composition of the chamber has changed quite a bit, some experts say Obama's best tack might be to go slow and encourage extensive hearings, to avoid politicizing a national security issue and boxing senators into a corner.

When he served in the Senate, President Obama enthusiastically supported federal mandates to produce more biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel, predicting they would help break America's dependence on foreign oil.

But some of the provisions that Obama backed as a legislator are putting his EPA in a tough spot, forced to decide whether to increase the proportion with which ethanol is blended with gasoline.

The recession is weakening demand for motor fuels, making it more difficult to meet a requirement in the 2007 energy law (PL 110-140) requiring 12.95 billion gallons of biofuels to be utilized in 2010. Energy watchers say if the economy doesn't pick up soon, the rapidly expanding ethanol industry could hit a demand wall and be forced to idle production.

Regular order has been restored to the chain of command for the U.S. Census Bureau.

University of Michigan professor Robert M. Groves, named as the bureau's new director Thursday, will report directly to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

The administration had planned to have the then-unnamed director report directly to senior White House officials after New Hampshire Republican Sen. Judd Gregg was picked to run the Commerce Department earlier this year.

Some polls dig a little deeper than others, by asking the kinds of questions that tend to resonate outside the Beltway bubble.

Like: Is the president relying too much on his teleprompter?

A Fox News survey of 900 registered voters conducted March 31- April 1 had the expected queries about the president's job performance, the economy and government's ability to solve the financial crisis. But it also attempted to cast a long lens on the Obama mystique and break down just what about the president and the First Family's style clicks with voters.

It's hard to tell who's working harder at the Group of 20 summit in London: the spinners trying to tamp down expectations for a quick agreement on how to save the world economy, or the leaders trying to wallpaper over their disagreements about what to do next.

President Obama, representing the latter group, used a joint appearance with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Wednesday morning to chide the media for focusing on the potential for discord and described the "great symmetry" and "extraordinary convergence" that was forming around a plan to end the global recession.

He also seemed to pooh-pooh all those reports about European resistance to stimulus spending like the $787 billion package (PL 111-5) that Congress enacted and Obama signed in February.