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WASHINGTON, June 23 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Republican presidential candidate Gary Bauer issued the following statement today following Gov. George W. Bush's comments at a Pennsylvania news conference refusing to rule out a pro-abortion running mate: ``What is emerging is a man who is operationally pro-choice. He refuses to pledge to only appoint pro-life justices to the Supreme Court and federal bench. He refuses to say whether he agrees that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned. And now he refuses to commit to selecting a pro-life running mate. ``If Gov. Bush were serious about the Republican platform -- which is ...

Clinton's speech in Slovenia: an abysmal display of ignorance By Barry Grey 23 June 1999 In considering US policy in the Balkans, it is at times difficult to determine the dividing line between great power scheming, deliberate falsification and sheer ignorance. A case in point is Clinton's speech Monday in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. Clinton sought to hold up Slovenia, the most economically developed of the former Yugoslav republics, as a model of prosperity and democracy, while enjoining the Serb population to overthrow Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. In the course of his address Clinton provided a version of recent ...

For most of our nation's history the Supreme Court did not get involved in state controversies concerning school prayer. But the Court was not silent, as some might try to argue, because it approved of such practices. Rather, the Court became involved only after it has settled the issue of whether the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated portions of the Bill of Rights (i.e., made the Bill of Rights applicable to the states). The Court began incorporating the Bill of Rights in the late 1800s. In 1947, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the establishment clause of the First Amendment ...

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. Looking at Balkans route for Caspian crude By PAUL MICHAEL WIHBEY United Press International June 23, 1999 WASHINGTON, June 23 (UPI) -- The U.S. government has given Bulgaria a half-million dollar grant to explore building a pipeline across the Balkans to pump Caspian Sea oil to the West, sending shock waves through Turkey, a key U.S. ally that wants the potentially lucrative pipeline for itself. On June 2, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency announced it had awarded the $588,000 grant to Bulgaria ...

Bush's Actions Contast With His Image as Centrist on Abortion WASHINGTON, June 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following was released today by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League: George W. Bush is attempting to portray himself as a centrist on the issue of abortion while on the Presidential campaign trail, but his fervent opposition to a woman's right to choose and his record as Governor of Texas contrast starkly with his centrist image. In fact, a National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) analysis of 1999 state legislative activity on abortion and reproductive rights shows that, under ...

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Did anyone else hear that today HR 1218 was passed along party lines? Reps for, Dems against?HR 1218 would make it "a federal offense to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of obtaining an abortion in contravention of a state law requiring parental involvement in a minor's decision to obtain an abortion (or judicial waiver of such a requirement). A violation of the Act is a Class One misdemeanor, carrying a fine of up to $100,000 and incarceration of up to one year."More information at HR 1218.

How the words "UNDER GOD" came to be added to the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. The Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag of the United States originated on Columbus Day, 1892. It contained no reference to Almighty God, until in New York City on April 22, 1951, the Board of Directors of the Knights of Columbus adopted a resolution to amend the Pledge of Allegiance as recited at the opening of each of the meetings of the 800 Fourth Degree Assemblies of the Knights of Columbus by addition of the words "under God" after the words "one nation." ...

Anti-abortion website censored again                   | | | |                                 WEDNESDAY JUNE 23 1999               Anti-abortion website  censored again 'Nuremberg Files'  dropped by another ISP By Stephan Archer © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com After Neal Horsley's anti-abortion website was removed from the Internet by MindSpring, the determined Internet crusader moved the infamous content to another location. Now BellSouth.net, the Internet service provider supplying Horsley with a connection, has announced it, too, will ...

Nato and UN clash as KLA terror campaign goes on By Philip Smucker in Pec NATO and the United Nations traded blame yesterday as Albanian rebels continued a campaign of terror aimed at ousting Serbs from their homes in western Kosovo. Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas encircled the 14th century Serbian Orthodox patriarchy in Pec where several hundred terrified Serb refugees have taken refuge recently. One KLA official, calling himself a military policeman, threatened to shoot our driver after we offered a ride to an ageing Serb woman wishing to visit her son. Fresh graves and burning houses lined the roads ...

WASHINGTON, Jun 23, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Russian mercenaries are believed to have participated with Serb paramilitaries and other Serb forces in attacks on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said Tuesday. "We certainly know that Russians participated. Russian volunteers, mercenaries we believe did participate with paramilitary and other Serb forces," he said at a Pentagon news conference. But he said the Pentagon did not have "firm evidence" on the number of Russians who took part or where they operated. Newsday, citing ethnic Albanians and a source in the Serb security apparatus, reported Tuesday that some ...

The ongoing linguistic turmoil is over the term “compassionate conservatism.” CC has taken hold as the designation chosen by Texas governor George W. Bush to characterize his campaign for president and, if elected, his tenure as president. FDR chose New Deal; Truman, Fair Deal neither of which word-assemblies told us very much, but compassionate conservatism seeks to make moral and political points. Gov. Bush has stuck by the formulation and told Americans, in his Iowa declaration two weeks ago, that he would be guided by the lights of the concept. Two voices have shed light on the idea of compassionate ...

MOSCOW, Jun 23, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Russian paratroops could fly to Kosovo to bolster an existing 200-strong contingent on Monday should senators approve the deployment, said Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, Interfax reported. The minister had previously said reinforcements could leave for the troubled Yugoslav province within five hours of a positive vote by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of parliament, expected Friday. "I think on Monday the first planes will take off for Yugoslavia," he told journalists. Russia is to send some 3,600 troops to take part in the KFOR peacekeeping operation in Kosovo. Sergeyev is ...

Is Trixie persona non grata? Why no announcement or comment of her new website? Will she dish dirt on the story she said was in the wings regarding the pervert in chief till the, err, umm, "conflict' in Kosovo was over? What of her forum? Too much like FR?

F.B.I. Hopes to Identify Victims at Sites of 2 Mass Killings By DAVID JOHNSTON WASHINGTON -- A team of FBI forensic investigators began the grisly task of investigating two sites in western Kosovo on Wednesday in an effort to identify victims of two mass killings cited in the war crimes indictment of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, law enforcement officials said. The sites are in the vicinity of Djakovica, a town in a sector of Kosovo under the jurisdiction of Italian troops. One is a house in which war crimes prosecutors have said that 20 Albanians were gathered in April and ...

President Boris Yeltsin on Sunday gave the United States government a strange and unexpected peace offering: the Soviet KGB's formerly secret files on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The thick stack of KGB files, reportedly containing some 80 documents, is said to include surveillance information about alleged Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald - who lived in the Soviet Union from 1959 until 1962 - and details about Moscow's reaction to Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Yeltsin dropped the blockbuster on U.S. President Bill Clinton in Cologne, Germany on Sunday as the two met to begin ...

IN AMERICA / By BOB HERBERT Criminal Justice George W. Bush put his vaunted compassion on hold Sunday night and vetoed a bill that would have modestly improved the abysmal quality of legal representation available to indigent defendants in Texas. Mr. Bush has only been Governor for four and a half years, so perhaps he hasn't noticed that the criminal justice system in Texas is a joke. If more Americans were aware of what is going on there, Texas would be a laughingstock. Rodney Ellis knows. He's the State Senator from Houston who sponsored the bill, which was so mild ...

June 23 update -- An important vote was scheduled in the House today on H.R. 1658, the much-needed reform of the Assets Forfeiture Law. The vote has been put off until tomorrow; I hope that isn't an indication that the bill is in trouble for the existing law is much too broad and has been much abused. The bill is sponsored by Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), Ranking Democrat John Conyers (D-Mich.), and hard-line conservative Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and unabashed liberal Rep. Barney Franks (D-Mass.), which is as unlikely a four-horse parlay as you're likely to find. ACLU, ...

Russian files on Oswald can shed new light on JFK assassination By Karen Gullo WASHINGTON: Documents given by Boris Yeltsin to President Bill Clinton on Sunday could shed light on whether Lee Harvey Oswald schemed to kill President John F Kennedy while he was an American defector living in the Soviet Union, assassination researchers said. Yeltsin's surprise gift to Clinton declassified papers containing information gathered by Russian intelligence agencies about Oswald are a ``monumental breakthrough,'' said Historian Kermit Hall, a former member of the assassination records review board. That federal panel, which went out of business last September, was created ...

The motto IN GOD WE TRUST was placed on United States coins largely because of the increased religious sentiment existing during the Civil War. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase received many appeals from devout persons throughout the country, urging that the United States recognize the Deity on United States coins. From Treasury Department records, it appears that the first such appeal came in a letter dated November 13, 1861. It was written to Secretary Chase by Rev. M. R. Watkinson, Minister of the Gospel from Ridleyville, Pennsylvania, and read: Dear Sir: You are about to submit your annual ...