Free Republic

King of the roads (and airports)   June 24, 1999 BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST Rep. Bud Shuster of Everett, Pa., not only relishes his multibillion-dollar sway over the nation's infrastructure. He also wants to be criticism-free. So, on Monday, he faxed me a "personal" message: "Bob, Bob, say it ain't so!" I was wrong, he said, to contend that he passed an airport bill breaking spending restraints and loaded with goodies for individual lawmakers. But it is so. Contrary to protests from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman, the $56 billion bill approved by the House last ...

Why the dog keeps getting wagged - it's all in document RWP97-14 By Paul Burgess SF Examiner At a news conference months ago, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Henry Shelton, was forced to acknowledge that the timing of last year's two U.S. military operations was "absolutely incredible." His incredulity is understandable. On Aug. 20, 1998, American cruise missiles struck Sudan and Afghanistan three days after President Clinton's televised "mea sorta culpa" regarding his deposition earlier that day. Though the administration initially charged the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory with being a chemical-weapons plant, it recently unfroze $24 ...

Russia's military had a detailed plan to seize Kosovo's main airport days before 200 Russians drove there from Bosnia ahead of the NATO peacekeeping operation, according to Pentagon intelligence officials. "There was no confusion at all about this," said one official familiar with a recent report based on intercepted Russian communications. "The operational orders were worked out well in advance." The intelligence reports, according to officials familiar with them, further undermine both U.S. government and Moscow claims that the deployment ahead of NATO peacekeepers was the result of miscommunications among Russian civilian and military leaders. It raises new questions about ...

Rush hit on something today when he gave his interpretation of what Bush means by CC... Rush thinks it contrasts with Compassionate Liberalism, which if true, is an interesting campaign tactic. Afterall, Bush Sr. milked the demonization of Liberalism for all it was worth vs. Dukakis and this CC stuff could be a clever way to do the same thing. But I really really really wish W. would change his mantra to "Conservative Compassion." I know it may seem subtle, but to me the difference is outstanding, and I really could stand behind someone preaching "Conservative Compassion"...it'd be the next ...

NOVAKE, Yugoslavia -- NATO troops have pledged to do their best to keep revenge-minded ethnic Albanians from looting and burning Serb homes, but they were too late for this village. Crackling fire ate into wooden beams Wednesday morning. A roof collapsed. Tiles were strewn about. Stucco fell from walls. "They burn our houses, we burn theirs," said Shpetim Shijaku, a skinny ethnic Albanian 10-year-old who came from a nearby village to grab whatever fleeing Serbs had left behind. The looting of this Serb settlement of 50 houses in southwestern Kosovo began Tuesday, locals said, after villagers fled, fearing reprisals ...

for all interested parties there will be training sessions at the - 4th Annual Covert Operations Training - the dates are 12 - 16 July at the Conference Center at the Golden Nugget Hotel in Las Vegas and 16 - 20 August at the Ramada Suites Opryland South in Nashville - the material produced by the ADL, and Morris Dee's Southern Poverty Law Center will be utilized during the instruction - this is all being sponsored by a little know international police organization based in Loudon, Tenn - given top billing will be former BATF Supervisor Ken King, his biography ...

for all interested parties there will be training sessions at the - 4th Annual Covert Operations Training - the dates are 12 - 16 July at the Conference Center at the Golden Nugget Hotel in Las Vegas and 16 - 20 August at the Ramada Suites Opryland South in Nashville - the material produced by the ADL, and Morris Dee's Southern Poverty Law Center will be utilized during the instruction - this is all being sponsored by a little know international police organization based in Loudon, Tenn - given top billing will be former BATF Supervisor Ken King, his biography ...

KARGIL SPECIAL: CLINTON SENDS TOP MILITARY OFFICIAL TO PAKISTAN WASHINGTON: In a major development, U.S. president Bill Clinton has rushed one of his top military generals to Islamabad for talks with Pakistan's civil and military officials ''to pursue the United States' concern about ending the fighting in the Kargil sector of Kashmir.'' Commander-in-chief of the United States' central command general Anthony Zinni is accompanied by deputy assistant secretary of state Gibson Lanpher. Lanpher is in the office of assistant secretary of state for south Asian affairs Karl Inderfurth, reports UNI. During their day-long stay in Islamabad, they will have ...

A mid-level intelligence officer assigned to the CIA persistently questioned the targeting of a building that turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, but his concerns went unheeded inside the spy agency and at the U.S. military's European Command, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. "I'm not sure that's the right building," the senior official quoted the analyst as saying. Although NATO war planners say they meant to strike the Yugoslav Federal Directorate of Supply and Procurement, American B-2 bombers instead destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 7, killing three Chinese civilians, wounding more than ...

Three Serbs found killed in Kosovo capital PRISTINA, Serbia, June 24 (Reuters) - Three Kosovo Serbs were found killed in the provincial capital Pristina on Thursday, witnesses and KFOR peacekeepers said. The bodies of a professor, a night guard and a canteen manager were found inside the building of the economics faculty of Pristina University.

Sex Curriculum in Church To Change By STEPHEN F. HOLDER .c The Associated Press FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) - The Presbyterian Church's sex education curriculum will likely be revised to include a more abstinence-based stance, church leaders said. The 560 commissioners of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) general assembly voted Wednesday in support of revising the curriculum, which teaches abstinence but also offers contraceptives. The measure means some of the teachings phased in gradually since 1989 could be stricken altogether, particularly the option of contraceptive use, which some literature mentions prominently. The proposal that passed was somewhat less radical than an ...

Kosovo Refugees Prepare for US Life By MELANIE BURNEY .c The Associated Press FORT DIX, N.J. (AP) - Arber Halimi gave the correct answer to the question from his English teacher. Unfortunately, it was the wrong language: Albanian. The 12-year-old Kosovo refugee was among nearly two dozen refugees who gathered around wooden picnic tables at the resettlement village Wednesday for English language classes. Arber, a star pupil, quickly gave the correct answer in English. He sat attentively during the class and, when teacher Carole Gavin asked if he was tired, promptly answered, ``No!'' The voluntary classes are offered day and ...

Cam Projects JFK Assassination View By CHARLES RICHARDS .c The Associated Press DALLAS (AP) - For the first time, the whole world can look out from the perch where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed President Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. A camera mounted in the sixth-floor window of the old Texas School Book Depository pans and zooms to capture frequently updated images that can be viewed on the Internet at www.jfk.org. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., younger brother of the slain president, criticized the innovation at what has since become The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. The ...

Hingis Done at 1 .Filip BondyNY DAILY NEWS--6/23/99(excerpts).Martina Hingis was demolished by 16-year-old Jelena Dokic in a great first-round upset at Wimbledon, 6-2, 6-0 . . . Dokic was the No. 1 junior in the world last year, yet still had to qualify for Wimbledon with three pre-tournament matches. She played magnificently on the grass surface, rapping hard groundstrokes deep to Hingis' forehand as part of the game plan. Dokic, a Serbian-born player who moved to Australia in 1994, never bowed to the sort of nerves expected from such an upstart. Until this tournament, Dokic was most famous for ...

Saying he supports whistleblowers, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson tried over the weekend to justify the firing of an Energy Department security official who sought to brief Congress on lax security at one of the nation's nuclear facilities. In a report that appeared four weeks ago, that official, Edward McCallum, told the American Spectator's Kenneth Timmerman that security at Colorado's Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility had been drastically reduced as part of former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary's "openness initiative." Beyond Inside Cover's June 2 report: "Hazel O'Leary's Rocky Flats Horror Show", press attention to the Timmerman bombshell was slim to ...

Yeltsin says time to focus on rebuilding Yugoslavia MOSCOW, June 24 (Reuters) - Russian President Boris Yeltsin discussed the Yugoslav crisis with Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin on Thursday and said the international community should help Belgrade rebuild its shattered economy. ``Now one of the important things is to rebuild Yugoslavia,'' Interfax news agency quoted Yeltsin as saying at the start of his talks in the Kremlin. Yeltsin called for an assessment of the damage caused by NATO air strikes and said ``unified forces'' should target areas in the shattered Balkan country for reconstruction. However, Western leaders have made clear aid ...

Big, Big Picture: History Validates U.S. Policy, Values By Morton M. Kondracke What's it all about -- Kosovo, welfare reform, the Asian financial crisis, the Information Age, genetic engineering? Don't ask Bill Clinton or Bill Gates. Ask Francis Fukuyama. Who? Francis Fukuyama is a professor of public policy at George Mason University. But more famously, he's the author of the idea that history "ended" with the fall of communism. He didn't mean that nothing interesting or dicey would ever happen again, but that the great contest over which political and economic system was best had ended -- and liberal democratic ...

Whose Public Service Is It, Anyway? HILLARY. IT’S ALMOST A CULT. The First Lady inspires serious loyalty among her colleagues, past and present. Writing in the San Jose Mercury News recently, Dee Dee Myers had this to say of the First Victim: "She’s old-fashioned. That may seem ironic, since Clinton has become the far right’s poster child for the assault on ‘traditional values.’ But in truth, she is uncomfortable with many modern ideas and prefers the security of an orderly world in which public service is the highest calling and power derives from respected institutions." Myers, who offered valuable insight ...

THE WACO MASSACRE.6/23/99 Counterpunch has identified the two military men who took art in a Waco Massacre planning session at the Justice Department: Colonel Gerald Boykin, and his superior, Peter J. Schoomacher, the commanding general at Fort Bragg. Counterpunch says that NATO Commander Wesley Clark (who had served under Schoomacher) was not directly involved in the attack: "Boykin and Schoomacher were present because the Army's Fort Bragg-based Combat Applications Group -- popularly known as the Delta Force -- had been enlisted as part of the assault team on the Branch Davidian Compound. It appears that President Clinton had signed a ...

Starr’s Chamber Pot Ready to Spill Again The New York Observer by Joe Conason The campaign bookkeeping for next year’s U.S. Senate race in New York already looks complicated, thanks to Kenneth Starr. According to published reports, the independent counsel plans to stay in business long enough to issue a "blistering" report about Hillary Rodham Clinton, now the likeliest Democratic contender in that contest. For Republican election lawyers, the ticklish question will be whether they must include the Starr report’s sequel as an in-kind contribution (using taxpayer funds) to their candidate against her. It is hard to find any other ...