RUST COMMENTARY: GROWING CHURCHES, PROGRAMS THAT REACH OUT ARE GOOD SIGNS

CAPE BIBLE CHAPEL'S new 1,600-seat auditorium is a beautiful, functional addition to this growing church and our community. I toured the facility during last Sunday's open house.

LYNWOOD BAPTIST is hosting an improve-your-life seminar to a large attendance this week, and numerous other churches are continuing to grow and become more active. These are all good signs for our community.

A lot of us will be following the partial-birth abortion and criminal-law revision legislation in Jefferson City this week.

As with Hurricane FLOYD, there could be a lot of fallout.

Since most of us have friends and relatives along the East Coast (I also have property 15 miles from NASA in Cape Canaveral) we can do little but watch and listen to developments of the chaos predicted by this monster storm.

Do you still believe man really controls his own destiny?

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Princeton's "Dangerous Philosopher": Parents paying for a new year of classes for their daughters and sons at Princeton University are buying them a chance to hear common sense and morality trampled by high-octane utilitarian Peter Singer, Princeton's first professor of bioethics. A recently published article in the New Yorker, entitled "The Dangerous Philosopher," quotes Singer as saying, "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him." What Singer calls "the total view" ("totalitarian" might be more apt) omits any idea that human beings have unalienable value, not because of their physical capacities, but because they have been created in the image of God. Singer tells the article's author that "the notion that human life is sacred just because it's "human life is medieval."

In the 1100s, the first organized medical school in Europe, the School of Salerno in Italy, drew from the medical knowledge of several cultures and instituted an eight-year study program to earn a doctor's degree. Other practitioners of medieval ethics were the Benedictine order of monks, who stressed medical education and provided health care for lepers and the poor. New ideas aren't always cultural advances. Far better to be called "medieval" than to condone Singer's view -- a barbarism that would lead society once again into the killing fields of negative eugenics. -- Washington Update

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PBS lists helped Democrats: The Boston Globe reported that an inspector general's report looking into the Public Broadcasting System's donor list controversy has concluded that only one party benefitted from the list giveway: the Democratic Party.

The report, recently released, concluded that out of 183 public TV and 408 public radio stations, 53 of them, or nine percent, made their lists available to political groups.

The list of stations that shared is impressive.

The release of the report coincided with the resignation of PBS president Ervin S. Duggan, who will step down on Oct. 31 -- most believe as a result of the scandal. However, PBS officials deny it.

In July as the scandal heated up, Republicans threatened to end a congressional debate over a $525 million PBS funding increase because the coveted lists were reported to have fallen into predominantly Democratic hands. Democrats spun that Republican groups too were getting the lists. This was a bipartisan scandal!

According to the Globe's Anne Kornblut: "Some stations did share their donors' names with groups that sounded like Republican organizations. ... But the investigator found the vast majority of those groups were not connected to the Republican Party. -- Drudge Report

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Governor Bush's Web listing: We wonder if the campaign-reform movement actually thought it would reach the promised land before the Internet rolled past them, as it has everything else. Late last week, Gov. George W. Bush announced he was going to post all his campaign contributors on the Web, as California's GOP congressman, John Doolittle, has proposed to do legislatively. It's all there, across hundreds of pages to occupy reporters and other political obsessives. And the House, once again, has debated the Shays-Meehan compaign-finance reform bill to restrict political contributions in a way most legal scholars agree would be found at least partly unconstitutional if it ever became law.

The two approaches spring from completely different views of human nature. After Watergate, the Common Cause-Ralph Nader model of reform triumphed and has dominated our campaign laws ever since. This is the instinctive control freak's vision of politics: Government can and should decide who speaks in elections and how much, and somehow the controllers will keep pace with the constantly changing political marketplace.

There wouldn't be any debate if the reforms had worked. Instead they've produced a political landscape littered with exhausted candidates, candidacies unlaunched and years of adverse court rulings. Sailing straight into the wind of this failure, Shays-Meehan believes that soft-money donations that were spawned by the Watergate reforms should be banned and issue ads by independent groups regulated by the Federal Election Commission.

The Supreme Court and over a dozen lower courts have held that campaign giving and spending are forms of political speech protected by the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken, a Clinton appointee, just threw out San Francisco's strict limits on how much "independent expenditure" campaigns can have in local elections. She cited the many court precedents that link political speech with free speech.

It looks to us as if Governor Bush has just abandoned this sterile debate to seize the future. Unlike the Common Cause model, his Web posting doesn't dream the impossible dream of expunging money from politics, but instead tries to give voters, of all things, information.

He supports both instant disclosure and making it easier for candidates to raise money from a diverse group of donors. He notes that the current limit of individual contributions was set at $1,000in the disco era now depicted on Fox TV in "That '70s Show." It hasn't been increased for inflation since 1974. The incredible amount of time it takes to raise a campagin budget in $1,000 increments has caused many candidates to abandon all hope of running for federal office.

Last week alone produced two significant casualties. Republicans lost Gov. Christie Whitman as a Senate candidate in part due to the grind of fund raising. A day later, Democrats saw Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa leave that state's U.S. Senate race. She called the political process a game that "rewards those who will spend hours and hours each day raising money, rather than seeking solutions."

One way to keep quality candidates such as these from dropping out is to raise the long-frozen $1,000 contribution limit. If that limit had just kept pace with a quarter-century of inflation, Governor Whitman and Attorney General Del Papa might have been able to spend less time raising more money. Does anyone really believe that a typical Senate candidate who raises $10 million would sell his vote for a mere $4,000 if the limit were raised?

"Americans will be able to look for themselves to find out who is helping to fund my campaign," Mr. Bush said in announcing his daily posting of contributions on his Web site. Larry Makinson of the liberal Center for Responsive Politics called Mr. Bush's move "three-quarters of a step in a very good direction."

While Mr. Bush's Web site list of contributors is comprehensive, it obviously needs a search engine for research purposes. It's striking, though, that news reports said few other Presidential candidates were likely to do the same. We certainly hope Governor Bush asks all of them over and over why not. What's to hide, Mr. Vice President? We can see why Mr. Gore might not have wanted to list everyone on the Web during the last election cycle, but hey, let's all try to make a clean break with the past.

Instead, the Gore campaign put out that the Bush initiative was just a "token." And clearly the Beltway establishment is miffed that the Governor has stolen a march on their most hallowed crusade. The fact is that one candidate has done something we're supposed to believe no politician would want to do-display his contributors for the whole world to see. Nits aside, what's the problem? -- The Wall Street Journal

(I've reprinted this because letting everyone know who's donated and how much is the best singular campaign reform that we can have. BUSH did this voluntarily without legislation. Let's see if any other candidates follow. -- GWR)

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