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BY GORDON HICKEY AND CARRIE JOHNSON Times-Dispatch Staff Writers The new improved murals proposed for the outdoor gallery on the floodwall along the Canal Walk went on display yesterday, and the early returns are in. The people who braved the heat to see the images have pronounced them good enough. Almost everyone at the viewing yesterday agreed that Gen. Robert E. Lee was a part of history and deserved a spot on the floodwall gallery. "It's a very, very complicated subject," said Andy Thornton, co-owner of La Difference Inc., one of the first businesses to relocate to the Canal Walk, ...

0ur recent stories on "Aerospace in Crisis" clearly struck a nerve. We have received dozens of letters, e-mails and telephone calls so far. Almost all of them reinforce the broad frustration and concern that we found in the interviews that led to the stories (AW&ST June 21, P. 63, and www.aviationweek.com/aviation). Over and over, we heard that today's aerospace industry is plagued by a lack of vision at the top, a Wall Street-driven focus on stock prices and quarterly returns, endless downsizing and a mindless preoccupation with cutting costs. That message surely has reached the executive suites, too. But has ...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_williams/19990707_xcwwi_state_sove.shtml WALTER WILLIAMS State sovereignty © 1999 Creators Syndicate, Inc. Reading an article in this April's Chronicles magazine, "Cajuns Uncaged," made my day. Last October, by nearly a 60 percent majority, Louisianians approved Amendment 1 to their state constitution. Amendment 1 declares: "The people of this state have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free and sovereign state; and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power, jurisdiction, and right pertaining thereto, which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled." Louisiana's amendment would ...

Vice President Al Gore's military service consists of a brief stint in an Army p.r. office in Saigon during the Vietnam War. The experience apparently left young Al Gore Jr. a bit jaded.In a 1970 letter to his father, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore Sr., the future vice president wrote: "Creating, and if not creating, energetically supporting, fascist totalitarian regimes in the name of fighting totalitarianism ... to me, the best example is the U.S. Army."Considering that Vice President Gore now aspires to be commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, it would sem appropriate for him to answer the following question: Do ...

All the talk of bulging budget surpluses and an expanded Medicare obscure a bigger story that is overlooked by the press, excluded from political debate and ignored by Washington's think tanks. This is the slow conversion of the federal government into an agency for subsidizing America's retired. Consider: In 1950, Social Security was less than 2 percent of federal spending (there was no Medicare health insurance for the elderly). By 1998, Social Security, Medicare and other spending on the elderly exceeded a third of the budget. By 2020, the costs of the baby boom could push that toward 60 percent. ...

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on July 7, 1999. His mother grew up dirt poor, but that didn't stop her from dreaming -- and working to better her lot. When she was old enough to work as a waitress, she grabbed her blind sister and took off for Nashville. She hit the books, too, and was among the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School in 1936. You wouldn't know that such a scrappy, pull-yourself-up-by-the-sensible-shoes'-strap lady made a huge difference in Vice President Al Gore's life. After all, it's his father, Al Gore Sr., the former senator from ...

WASHINGTON -- Here's an item from U.S. News and World Report: "President Clinton has been pondering Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust scholar Elie Wiesel's plea to remember the psychological counseling needs of returning Kosovo refugees. Wiesel told Clinton many children were in denial over the loss of home and family. The president is considering sending American counselors to Kosovo as part of an overall relief effort." Picture the Kosovo airlift: Hundreds of can-do American grief counselors arrive in (or perhaps parachute into) war-torn Kosovo, crying: "Let the healing begin!" How do you say "get in touch with your ...

The Rant In 1964, I was a kid growing up in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia when Lyndon Johnson came to our county to tell us we were poor. We didn't need a President, two squads of Secret Service agents and a gaggle of media showing up in our tiny community to tell us we were poor. We already knew it. Johnson also promised us he would do something about it. He was going to lauch a war against poverty. A few months later, a bunch of fresh-faced kids from the city arrived under a program called VISTA (Volunteers ...

James P. Hoffa, the new president of the teamsters' union, plans to hire a respected former Federal prosecutor to set up an in-house anti-corruption program for the 1.4 million-member union -- the first step in an effort to persuade the Federal Government to end its decadelong oversight of the teamsters. Teamster officials said Tuesday that Hoffa had selected Edwin H. Stier, who oversaw the cleanup of what was often called the nation's most corrupt union local, because of his work with unions to rid them of corruption. Several teamster officials and labor experts said Hoffa's choice of a well-known crime ...

It has been about a month since George W. Bush officially announced for the presidency and already he's learning some of the disadvantages of being a front-runner. One of the most prominent of these is the target he presents to a press always hungry to find ways to take some air out of the tires of a political bandwagon before it gets rolling too fast and flattens the story. After all, political writers have to make a living, and if something is perceived as too much of a sure thing, then it severely diminishes their ability to convince increasingly ...

By Thomas FerraroWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top health groups ripped into Vice President Al Gore Tuesday for hiring as his new media advisor an advertising guru who helped kill a landmark bill in Congress designed to curb smoking by children.The American Lung Association and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids charged that Gore undermined his own credibility as a self-described protector of children by bringing in Carter Eskew to help present his case as the Democratic front-runner in the race for the White House.``It shows poor judgement,'' said Paul Billings, deputy director of government relations at the American Lung Association.``We are very ...

What a disastrous week for the hapless Al Gore. Not only was his impressive fundraising total for the first half of ’99 dwarfed by George W. Bush’s astonishing $36.3 million, but his erstwhile bus buddy, Bill Clinton, was monopolizing the news cycle, doing his best to sabotage Gore’s flailing presidential campaign. No, there’s not a rift between the two, Clinton insisted, even though everybody knows that’s just another lie burbled from his lip-biting mug. Last Thursday, Clinton joined some of Bush’s GOP opponents and criticized the amount of money the Texas governor has amassed so far, saying Bush is ...

Budget There is good news from Washington - for the first time in 30 years, the federal budget is balanced. In fact, a surplus of $2.7 trillion over the next 10 years is projected. We need to keep working to make sure that as we draft the budget for 2000 and beyond, we live within our means. Pay Down tbe Nation's Debt The 30-year spree of deficit spending has left us $5.6 trillion in debt. That is $21,673 for each American. Right now, your tax dollars are used to pay interest on the money the government has borrowed. Combined, ...

NEW YORK (AP) - An attempted murder charge was dismissed against a police officer who shot an unarmed squeegee man in the chest. Supreme Court Judge John Collins on Tuesday dismissed the charge against Officer Michael Meyer, 29, along with a lesser charge, criminal use of a gun. Meyer could get 25 years in prison on each of two remaining counts of first-degree assault in the June 1998 shooting of Antoine Reid on an expressway off-ramp. Meyer was off duty and driving home from a baseball game when Reid tried to wash his windshield for a handout. Meyer bolted ...

Challenger, the bald eagle who pecked President Clinton on the left hand during a White House ceremony a few days ago, has been found dead, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. President Clinton expressed deep sorrow when he heard the news. He said "this tragedy only highlights the need to end the hate and for tougher gun control... we must do it for the children."

India, Pakistan 'close to the edge' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- By Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fighting in Kashmir raged unabated yesterday in spite of President Clinton's intervention on the weekend, and analysts say the peacemaking effort may have served only to destablilize the government in nuclear-armed Pakistan. "The crisis has only just begun," said Stephen Cohen, a former White House official and expert on Pakistan's military who is currently with the Brookings Institution. "Pakistan's army thinks that having nuclear weapons equalizes its relations [with the larger and more powerful India] and therefore they can push and poke the Indians without a ...

Even though the notion that there'll be multi-trillions of dollars in surpluses building up over the next dozen years or so is a result of wishful thinking (and double-counting Social Security funds) on the Clinton administration's part, there is, in fact, nearly $2 trillion that should be available in surpluses each year, but isn't. Lest we forget, a stunning government audit reported last spring that Washington bureaucracies failed to account for how they spent over $1.8 trillion in fiscal year 1998. The illusory surpluses cited by administration and even some congressional economists raise public hopes and thus shift attention ...

ME-FIRST LADY DELUDED BY SENSE OF GRANDEUR By ANDREA PEYSER There is a name for someone like Hillary. A name exists for a person who routinely cuts corners. Who has no problem appropriating the money or labor or talents of others to achieve personal gratification and glorification. There is a name for someone who exaggerates accomplishments. Who believes her innate superiority entitles her to obfuscate, evade and lie. There is something you could call one who is fundamentally incapable of carrying out any task to completion. A person who continually leaves those who count on her for guidance frustrated and ...

Hillary & Sharpton: So Happy Together The Hillary Clinton/Rudy Giuliani slugfest continues, as it will for months to come, but I got too lost in national politics to concentrate on the preliminary squabbles. The week started off with Jeffrey Toobin suggesting in The New Yorker that President Clinton might run for Senate in Arkansas in three years, a for-now far-fetched story that the White House lingered in responding to, presumably to keep Al Gore out of the news cycle. Then HillaryÕs house-hunting: Frankly, I donÕt care where she ends up (as long as itÕs not in Tribeca); itÕs simply not ...

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