Free Republic

WASHINGTON (UPI) - In the face of a mounting electricity shortage, the Bush administration is preparing to encourage the construction of new domestic nuclear power plants for the first time in decades, with three new plants waiting in the wings, government and industry officials said Thursday. The White House is scheduled to release a closely held comprehensive energy policy next month, focused on increasing domestic energy supply. While proposals to expand domestic oil exploration have grabbed most of the headlines, the White House also is expected to announce steps to boost nuclear power output and construct plants - one of ...

Are police in Cincinnati racist? Does the city have too few black police officers? Is the city doing enough to recruit black officers? Judge for yourself. • Cincinnati is a city of 331,000 people, with a black population of 43 percent (155,570). • Of the 35 recruits in Cincinnati's current class of officer candidates, 12 — 35% — are black. A court consent decree requires at least 34 percent of each class to come from minorities and 23 percent to be women. • Currently, 290 (or 28 percent) of Cincinnati's 1035 police officers are black. • In order to ...

You have probably seen the commercial for Nissan's Pathfinder sport-utility vehicle (SUV) in which the trucks are used in lieu of horses to play a bracing round of polo. "Not that you would. But you could," reads the text on the screen. Then there's the commercial for Mazda's just-introduced Tribute SUV, in which -- zoom! zoom! zoom! -- the entire Mazda lineup storms down a secondary road at high speed, escorting the Tribute, each car violently maneuvering in acrobatic fashion to display its sporty handling attributes. The Tribute matches these moves and then plows off the pavement to carve ...

I SPENT many years working in Sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in the Republic of the Congo, but also in Angola, Zaire, South Africa, and Mozambique. I saw the AIDS onslaught first-hand. All you had to do was to walk to the cemetery in Brazzaville once a week and count the abundant fresh graves. All of us had friends who were dead or dying from it. Brazzaville was in many ways the best place to learn about AIDS, because an excellent hospital and the regional headquarters of the World Heath Organization were there, both staffed by some marvelous doctors and researchers. ...

ON March 24, 1999, NATO began its bombing campaign to stop then Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic from committing genocide, or ethnic cleansing or something really bad in Kosovo. Two years later, all is groovy in the Balkans. In Kosovo, Albanians and Serbs are holding hands and singing "Kumbaya." Borders are secure and stability reigns region-wide. Just kidding. Actually, everything skeptics of our intervention predicted has come to pass. President Bush, who'd like to extricate 5,600 American troops from Kosovo, has been persuaded that to do so would result in a crisis of confidence in NATO, though he did withdraw ...

Because the influence of the Rev. Jesse Jackson is national in scope, the revelation that he had an extramarital affair that produced a child should have long-range reverberations. The precipitous rise in out-of-wedlock births, after all, is calamitous for black communities. For the most part, however, black leadership, black clergy and black women, in particular, have chosen to remain silent on the issues raised by Jackson’s misconduct. In fact, after monitoring the recent telephone calls to black-oriented talk radio and comments in daily publications, it would appear that the tendency throughout much of the black community is to forgive the ...

It was a fundamental belief of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that equal access to the opportunities of this nation should be at the core of the American dream. He championed the belief that Americans of all persuasions who work hard and play by the rules can, on the basis of their individual merit, win for themselves and their families deserved rewards. At no time in the black American experience has the King dream been more of a reality. While America still struggles to become a color-blind society, wealth ownership and asset accumulation has become the accepted equalizer. ...

All this week we’ve been talking about a proposal to build solar panels on the moon which could transmit the sun’s energy to Earth in the form of microwaves, and in the process provide us with a virtually unlimited source of power. Today some thoughts on what the impact of such a system might be. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont. “I think the lunar solar power system has to be very seriously considered and implemented for a whole range of reasons. The first is that the energy needs of the world ...

Gun-control advocates often forget one victim of gun violence: the suicide. How many fatal, impulsive decisions have been aided by the presence of a handgun in the home? Too many. And African-Americans are doubly at risk, given their rising suicide rate and an appalling availability of handguns in their communities. Handguns are the leading method of self-destruction, accounting for 57% of the more than 31,000 U.S. suicides in 1998. Homes with handguns are five times more likely to experience a suicide. Although suicide rates among minorities remain much lower than among whites, the African-American suicide rate has risen alarmingly, particularly ...

Any newcomer stepping into the role of the leader of the world has a stature problem, especially a mere governor like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton or now George W. Bush. Bush arrives particularly hampered by the closeness of the election, the bizarre way it was decided, and the honeymoonless reception he’s consequently received from official Washington and the loyal opposition. How to assert himself? The inaugural address just won’t do. Bush is not very good at speeches, and with very few exceptions (notably John Kennedy’s) even the inaugural addresses of those who are very good leave no impact. ...

Through the window, where you can see the glow from our neighbors’ Christmas lights and our menorah on newly fallen snow, my thoughts turn to Eddie. He moved downstairs from us in the apartment on LaSalle Boulevard when I was in the fourth grade. It was just Eddie and his mom. His father had died of a heart attack a few months before, he told me, and they had to sell their house and move here. Although he shared none of my interests in sports or music, we fell into a sort of friendship. Especially in winter, when my mother ...

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Democratic Senility and Corruption Personified!?

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Republican presidential candidate Texas Gov. George W. Bush speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Ore., Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2000. In the closing days of the campaign, Bush is giving longer speeches and delivering them more vigorously. He prowls the stage, pivoting full-circle, looking audience members in the eye.

Macomb County sheriff's deputies on horseback broke up a clash between Al Gore and George Bush supporters at Sunday's rally, which resulted in two Gore supporters being detained in handcuffs. The scuffle began as a group of about 75 Bush supporters, many armed with Bush-Cheney placards, attempted to enter the outdoor rally at Macomb Community College. The Bush backers said a line of Gore supporters, mostly union members, clasped hands and blocked their entrance. A confrontation ensued, with pushing and shoving, profanities shouted and a few punches thrown. Several mounted deputies moved in to separate the two groups. No ...

President Clinton said the right things at the memorial service for the 17 sailors killed when suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole in the harbor of Yemen’s capital city. He thanked "the men and women of our armed forces for a debt we can never repay, whose character and courage more than even modern weapons makes our military the strongest in the world." Meanwhile, Mr. Clinton’s State Department was saying something else. It killed an editorial that the Voice of America was planning to broadcast condemning the attack on the Cole because the "17 or so dead sailors ... does ...

In one of the most preposterous claims of the political season, Vice-President Al Gore this week declared himself the candidate of smaller government and pledged not to add a single worker to the federal payroll if elected president. Mr. Gore has committed to $1.3 trillion in new federal spending during the next decade, an average of $130 billion a year. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, estimates Mr. Gore’s proposals would add a minimum of 200,000 new workers to the current 2.7 million federal workforce. But even if he can launch all his new government programs without adding ...

PRESIDENT CLINTON, in seemingly evenhanded fashion, called on both the Israelis and the Palestinians to cease fighting. This was a little like telling both the victim and the mugger to stop as soon as the victim tries to protect himself. Soon after the Arab mugging, meeting fantasy with fantasy, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, of another Arab country, Yemen, informed the world that the explosion which had just occurred in the harbor of the port city of Aden was merely the result of a collision between small boats: something that often happens in any busy harbor. While he made the announcement ...