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Bill Johnson The policeman's job reconsidered A Denver cop the other day sent me what follows. At first, I resented it. "You don't seem to care for police much," he wrote. Now, that's a lie. I just don't like -- and I blast in this space -- only the bad ones. He does apologize for the bad ones, saying the majority of cops are good people trying to do the best they can every day. Yet people like me, he says -- cop-haters who get to speak to vast audiences -- jade the public, which never fully recognizes or ...

WASHINGTON --- A day before they were to square off in a New Hampshire debate, the six Republican candidates jostling for their party's presidential nomination intensified their courtship of Jewish voters. During Wednesday's daylong event marking the 15th anniversary of the founding of the Republican Jewish Coalition, the candidates delivered speeches to Jewish GOP activists and took some questions from the crowd. After politely listening to the five candidates trailing Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the polls, a standing-room-only crowd of several hundred Jewish activists and politicos gave the GOP front-runner a rousing reception and surrounded him after he ...

With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com StaffFor the story behind the story... Sunday December 5, 12:12 PM Who's That White House Blonde? Who was that dazzlingly attractive twentysomething blonde seen leaving the northwest gate of the White House Saturday afternoon? Starr report connoisseurs may recall that particular portal as "Monica's gate," the entryway used by the former Clinton intern to visit Bill Clinton after she was banished from the White House. Protesters from the Web site Free Republic regularly monitor White House comings and goings and tell NewsMax.com that the comely young lady was squired off the grounds at about 1:50 ...

Don't Bet on China's WTO Entry Brought to press last week before the WTO talks collapsed in seas of tear gas and acrimony, Marty Peretz's "The New Republic" was brimming with confidence. "China is going to enter the WTO. Deal With It" was the arrogant headline on John Judis's piece. Judis, once a sixties radical, has grown to love the power of transnational corporations.  MFN status for China will pass Congress easily he says -because the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce see a "windfall" in the China market, and have started a ...

Prosecutors and police seldom pursue criminal charges against store employees or people who use deadly force trying to protect property from theft or robbery. But Davidson County prosecutors will ask a Criminal Court jury this week to convict a liquor store clerk of second-degree murder in the death of a man the clerk says was the getaway driver for a man who had just stolen a case of whiskey. B. Gordon Vanhooser Jr., a clerk at Bordeaux Liquors on Clarksville Highway, told police he grabbed a handgun and gave chase when a man ran out the front of the ...

Imagine that you are afraid of a knock on the door. Imagine that the knock could be the police, coming in secret to interrogate you. Imagine that they can demand you decrypt files for them, and demand you tell them your code keys, even to get evidence to use against you. In effect, they can force you to testify against yourself, and it is a crime to refuse. Imagine that for these offenses you are effectively considered guilty unless you can prove your innocence: mere failure to comply is the crime. If you do not have the key they demand, ...

SACRAMENTO -- Multimillionaire Ron Unz's departure from the U.S. Senate race makes U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell the clear favorite to become the GOP standard-bearer against Democratic incumbent Dianne Feinstein. A Feinstein-Campbell race would be one of the nation's top Senate contests next year, probably second in interest only to the matchup between Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. How the representative from Campbell moved so quickly and easily to the front of the GOP pack is also a significant story. Moderates such as Campbell have seldom had an easy time in California Republican primaries. It ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The National Institute of Mental Health uses just over one-third of its budget for research into severe mental illness and spends more to study AIDS than schizophrenia, according two advocacy groups. A study being released Monday cites what the groups contend are examples of money misspent on vague behavioral research by the premier mental health agency of the National Institutes of Health. But the NIGH director, Dr. Steve E. Hymen, said much of the contested spending is directed by Congress or involves important basic research. Also, he said, the agency has recently budgeted $100 million over five ...

Gene Amole Fox News doesn't fuss with balance Softball. I have been waiting for someone to take a crack at Fox News, but the Rupert Murdoch-owned TV channel continues to get away with journalistic murder. It hammers away at how "fair and balanced" its report is, but it is neither fair nor balanced. "We report. You decide," Fox says in its promotional spots. I have decided its political reporting tilts far to the right. I suppose Fox News was created to suck up to right-wing media critics who have complained for years that large newspapers, magazines and TV networks ...

As most of you know, ABC News correspondant John Cochran had a dinner party for Vice-President Al Gore last Thursday night. Among those in attendance were various members of the Washington media establishment. Clearly, activity like this is journalistically unethical and ABC News should be reminded of it. Ask ABC News why you weren't invited...you can do so by Clicking Here. Ask them how it is that Bob Zelnick had to leave ABC because he'd written a book about Gore and they believed he couldn't continue to be an "objective journalist" but Cochran can have a dinner party with Gore ...

Last October, Ted Ladd had a weird experience: He couldn't find any new Net porn sites. Searching out smut is Ladd's business, or rather the business of his company, Web-filtering firm Websense. It identifies porn sites and blocks them for big corporate customers, who don't want employees indulging libidinous urges on company time. "My database guy came to me and said, 'Our Web crawlers and our human searchers are having a hard time finding porn sites,'" Ladd said. This did not compute. After all, the number of new porn sites has more than doubled every year since Websense started filtering ...

Interview: Seattle MD Police spraying chemicals. Note the relaxed manner of the police. Does it appear they are being threatened? Protesters are sitting down, a classic non-violent tactic. Interview with an MD who treated people injured in Seattle (posted on www.emperors-clothes.com at 1 am 12-4-99) by Jared Israel and Jim Desyllas First, here is what happened according to Mayor Schell and the Seattle police Department: Hospitals have treated dozens of people for an assortment of minor injuries. No one has been seriously harmed or killed, officials said...Mayor Schell also praised police for showing "extreme discipline and patience." City officials ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Clinton plans to hold a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Joe Lockhart said today. Clinton will field questions from reporters in the Dean Atcheson Auditorium at the State Department, Lockhart said. "He wants to talk about the agenda for next year, what he's got in mind,'' Lockhart said.

Who are the Victims of the Battle of Seattle? I have received several on-the-spot reports of on the conflict between left-wing radicals who came to Seattle with the goal of paralyzing the city and preventing the World Trade Organization meeting from occurring. I gather from the reports that those sending them think I will be sympathetic because I have reservations about the WTO. They couldn't be more wrong. I have nearly a fifty year history opposing civil disobedience. By the 1960s, when Civil Disobedience was proposed as a means of stopping the testing of nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, ...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The head of the National Institute of Mental Health says many of the spending priorities under fire from critics of the agency are either ordered by Congress or involve basic research. A study released today by a pair of advocacy organizations cites what the groups say are examples of money misspent on vague behavioral research by the premier mental health agency of the National Institutes of Health. The groups say the NIMH uses just over one-third of its budget for research into severe mental illness but spends more to study AIDS than schizophrenia. The report was issued ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Department lawyers failed to keep the agency from shredding potential evidence in a lawsuit over American Indians' money, then covered up the shredding for more than 14 weeks and misled a federal court about it, a court-appointed investigator concluded. "This is a system clearly out of control,'' investigator Alan Balaran wrote in the report, released today by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. Justice Department lawyers had asked Lamberth to delay releasing the report, saying it "could result in severe and unfair damage'' to the reputations of seven Treasury Department lawyers interviewed in the shredding probe. ...

PHOENIX — Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his Republican rivals meet on Monday for a presidential campaign debate with a twist. For the first time in the 2000 presidential campaign, the candidates will quiz each other in front of a sold-out, live audience in Phoenix's 1,300-seat Orpheum Theater. The hour-long forum will be televised nationally by CNN at 8 p.m. EST. Previous highly structured formats in which moderators, reporters or selected audience members asked all the questions left little or no room for direct jousting among the White House contenders. Still, this debate is unlikely to degenerate into a ...

Source: Institute of Balkan Affairs Book Summary War of Words: Washington Tackles the Yugoslav Conflict by Danielle S. Sremac During Yugoslav ethnic conflicts that caught global attention in the 1990s, why did Washington target only the Serbs? What led the U.S. to bomb a sovereign country—Yugoslavia? Was America’s first intervention in an ethnic conflict in the post-Cold War era successful? In answering these and other questions, Sremac goes behind the rhetoric and propaganda to reveal how Yugoslavia’s Bosnian Muslim, Croat, and Albanian ethnic factions sought to win the heart of Washington and draw U.S. military intervention to help them ...

Business leaders have complained for years that public schools aren’t turning out graduates ready to take part in a skilled work force. Now, a new test suggests America’s schools aren’t turning out adults ready to take part in its democracy. Producing good citizens, after all, was the major point of requiring universal education in the first place. Yet the 1998 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress in civics showed major gaps in American students’ knowledge of how the U.S. government works and even how it came to be. But some experts think the situation may not be so ...