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

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:

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.