RUST COMMENTARY: FANCY CUP OF COFFEE NOW $2.75; NEWSPAPER STILL 50 CENTS

I was intrigued recently when I was at a coffee bar where someone was ordering a Cafe Breve for $2.75 and complaining about paying 50 cents for a newspaper.

Each newspaper has over 50 cents worth of ink and paper in it plus news content which is gathered either through expensive wire stories or by reporters who travel to an event and then write up the news which is edited by someone else ... before it is printed by a press crew and then it is delivered to your home (where, incidentally, the home-delivered subscription price averages about 35 cents per issue).

The question is the value one places on each product. One satisfies briefly, while the other brings information that can change one's life. We strive daily to make our newspaper a value to its readers much greater than its cost.

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Women's studies programs and obsession with sexual-harassment rules hamper development of strong female leaders.

With the re-election of Bill Clinton, the gender gap seems here to stay in American politics. Exit polls show that while men and women supported Bob Dole in equal numbers, more women than men voted for Clinton by at least a 16 percent margin.

Commentators are scrambling to explain this discrepancy, which is unconvincingly blamed on Republican opposition to abortion or on frantic, semimythical "soccer moms" who are less hostile than men to authority and look to government programs for relief.

Conservatives lament that polls show women allegedly less concerned than men about the "character" of the president.

The pursuit of the women's vote, along with Democratic claims that Clinton owes his re-election to women, unfortunately has reinforced outmoded sexist stereotypes. Why is it assumed that women always vote their private interest?

Pollsters' clumsy questions didn't catch the real truth about the last two presidential elections: A majority of women realistically assessed the candidates and concluded that Bill Clinton has the greater imagination, flexibility and mental and physical energy to lead America at this historical moment.

Discussion of the gender gap is too skewed in one direction. It's insulting to portray women as mysterious, distracted, half-enslaved beings whom male candidates must court and fawn over. -- Camillie Paglia in USA Today.

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Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish. -- Michelangelo.

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Drive a stake through it

"Mend it, don't end it" is the latest slogan by defenders of affirmative action, from Jesse Jackson to Bill Clinton. Yet everything about the history of affirmative action, both in this country and overseas, says that the idea of mending it is completely illusory.

The very reason why affirmative action exists at all in the United States is that laws about "equal opportunity" were changed, by verbal sleight of hand, into preferences and quotas by the bureaucracies and the courts. The related practice of "race-norming" test results to inflate the scores of minority applicants likewise arose furtively, without either legislative authorization or judicial mandate.

Even the ability to discuss the issues openly has been undermined by redefinition of the word "quota" to create a distinction without a difference between it and a "goal." College admissions directors routinely deny that they have quotas while saying that they want "representation" of "diverse" groups.

In short, three decades of dishonesty should be ample time for us to understand that good-faith application of standards cannot be expected if any opening at all is left for bringing back preferences and quotas by the back door. That is the door they have always used.

A whole class of affirmative action officials is not going to disappear from government academia or the corporate world unless what it does is plainly outlawed. The whole mindset that has been spawned will not disappear unless it is frustrated by law at every turn.

This kind of stuff is not going to go away. It is going to have to be killed and a stake driven through its heart. You cannot have a little bit of preferences any more than you can have a little bit of pregnancy.

The illusion that preferences can be doled out in carefully measured amounts has been disproven, not only all across the United States, but all around the world. In Britain, India, Pakistan and Malaysia, for example, preferential programs were put in place with the proviso that they would be "temporary." Far from declining over time, they have expanded to include more groups, more benefits and more fields of endeavor.

At one time the argument was made in academia that affirmative action meant nothing more than "special outreach" to minority high school students to get them to apply to colleges where they might not have felt. welcome before. After that, this argument went, they would be judged by the same standards and treated the same as everybody else.

Nothing of the sort has happened. Not only are there double standards in admissions, there are often double standards as to what kinds of behavior would be tolerated.

Those who say "Mend it, don't end it" assume a degree of control that simply does not exist. Once you have opened the floodgates, the water goes where it will. The only question is whether you are going to close those floodgates. -- Excerpts from Observations by Thomas Sowell.

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About 350,000 deer are killed each year on our nation's highways. A collision between a car and a 300-pound deer could cost about $1,000 to $1,500 in repairs. -- National Highway Administration.

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Pressure is when you've got 35 bucks riding on a four-foot putt and you've only got five dollars. -- Lee Trevino.

~Gary Rust is the president of Rust Communications, which owns the Southeast Missourian and other newspapers.