KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ELECTIONS; THERE'S PLENTY TO SEE AND HEAR

This will be an unpleasant political year, but it will be necessary to stay tuned ... especially in Missouri. From the highly charged presidential race (BUSH vs. GORE) to the U.S. SENATE race (CARNAHAN vs. ASHCROFT) to the governor race (TALENT vs. HOLDEN), Missouri will be a battleground where control of the Legislature is also in play.

Don't try to make your decisions by headline reading or television and radio sound bites or ads.

We owe our respect to the above quality candidates to understand their positions as there are notable differences between them on the issues and the role that government plays.

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An unprecedented event took place Tuesday in Missouri ... Never before in Missouri's voting history has there been 200,000 more Republican votes cast than Democrat votes. Except for the St. Louis and Kansas City areas, every county in the state including Pemiscot, New Madrid, Dunklin and Stoddard in our area tallied more Republican votes than Democrat votes. Even in his home are of Jefferson County, Bill Bradley received fewer votes than George W. Bush. This was not only a phenomenon in Missouri, but all across the country.

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SAMUEL FREEDMAN, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is a member of USA TODAY's editorial board. The following column was run in Monday's USA Today.

It depicts the power of the media to selectively present or withhold information the voting public:

Why do Democratic candidates troop to Sharpton's door? On the holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr., a former lawyer named Steven Pagones happened to be watching the news. It showed Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Pagones' home state of New York, sharing a podium with Al Sharpton and talking about how she is "someone who unites, not divides."

As the next several weeks passed, Pagones caught a few similar reports. There was Bill Bradley, the presidential candidate, visiting the headquarters of Sharpton's National Action Network and later holding a personal audience with the minister. There was Al Gore, Bradley's opponent, holding a private meeting with Sharpton.

While New Yorkers vote Tuesday in one of the nation's most important presidential primaries, Steven Pagones will be going about his business as a private investigator. He used to be a district attorney in the Hudson Valley. He used to be married, too. He didn't always have $180,000 in debts.

But that was Pagones' life before Al Sharpton.

Twelve years ago, Sharpton accused Pagones, then a 25-year-old just a year out of law school, of attacking a black teen-ager named Tawana Brawley -- smearing her body with dog feces, writing "KKK" and "nigger" on her skin, and shoving her into a garbage bag.

Sharpton went on television to declare, "We stated openly that Steven Pagones, the assistant district attorney, did it. His lawyers say he may or may not sue us. If we're lying, sue us, so we can go into court with you and prove you did it."

Exonerated in both a criminal investigation and an exhaustive probe by The New York Times, Pagones eventually brought a defamation suit against Sharpton and two allies, Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason. In July 1998, a jury in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., ruled in Pagones' favor, assessing the three defendants $345,000 in damages.

To this day, Sharpton has never recanted his preposterous allegation. Pagones, meanwhile, lost his marriage and career and says he remains deeply in debt due to legal fees and his unpaid leave from work during the eight-month trial.

Amazingly, watching politicians troop to Al Sharpton's door the past several months, you'd think none of this had ever happened.

You'd think Al Sharpton had never excused the riot in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in 1991 -- during which rioters stabbed to death an Orthodox Jewish religious scholar -- with the comment, "We must not reprimand our children for outrage."

You'd think he had never urged Harlem blacks in 1995 to protest against the "white interloper" who owned a clothing store on 125th Street.

"We are going to see that this cracker suffers," declared one of Sharpton's backers in that campaign.

Suffer they did. An African-American man set fire to the store, killing seven employees, all minorities, and himself.

Al Sharpton may not have blood on his own hands, but he certainly inspires and excused those who do.

Politics provokes unlikely alliances and exaggerated rhetoric, and this campaign has seen plenty: George W. Bush seeking votes at anti-Catholic Bob Jones University; John McCain branding leaders of the religious right as "forces of evil."

But precisely because voters and the media have so criticized the Republicans for their tolerance of intolerance, we ought to hold the Democrats who pander to Al Sharprton to just as high a standard.

And the very politicians soliciting him -- Bradley, Gore, Hillary Clinton -- should be those most able to shun him because of their proven records on racial issues.

From the floor of the Senate eight years ago, Bradley bravely addressed the cycle of black crime and white bigotry, each reinforcing the other. In language rare for a liberal Democrat, he declared that "part of getting beyond color" is "refusing to make race an excuse for failing to pass judgment about self-destructive behavior." Bill Clinton and Al Gore won election seven months after that speech partly by echoing that candor.

Now, as candidates, Bradley and Gore and Hillary Clinton have retreated to the most cowardly sort of expedience. They have loaned their own stature to Al Sharpton's campaign to rehabilitate his image without actually changing, except for sprouting some gray hairs in his pompadour.

Redemption should be part of politics, because it is part of the human pageant. F.W. DeKlerk in South Africa and Milkhail Gorbachev changed the world by dismantling the tyrannical systems of their nations. Wheelchair-bound George Wallace rolled into a black church to ask forgiveness for his years as a militant segregationist. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, having made an anti-Semitic slur about "Hymietown" during the 1984 presidential primaries, reclaimed his place in the political mainstream with a spell-binding speech of contrition to the Democratic convention.

Al Sharpton has done nothing of the sort. He belongs in the company of Patrick Buchanan and David Duke, in the quarantine ward of American politics.

The fact that he takes the correct side on certain issues -- most recently, the killing of an unarmed African immigrant by four white cops in New York and their subsequent acquittal -- only makes him a more insidious demagogue.

Our Democratic aspirants should have been visiting Steven Pagones.

"It's appalling to see people bowing down to Sharpton, knowing the damage he has caused," Pagones says. "And it's disturbing to see him described as a civil rights activist in the media, again and again.

"This is a race-baiter, an opportunist. He's about dividing people. During my trial, people always used to try to get me to compare him to Martin Luther King. All I can say is, I don't think we'll ever celebrate Al Sharpton's birthday as a national holiday."

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"Trust but verify" as President RONALD REAGAN used to say. I should have verified an alleged NASA report before I ran it in my column recently.

Though the biblical references to the Earth stand as recorded in the Bible, I'm reprinting this response concerning the verification by NASA as previously reported in this column. I contacted U.S. Rep. JO ANN EMERSON for verification, and the following is the response she received.

Dear Ms. Emerson:

Thank you for your Feb. 10, 2000, letter concerning a report that NASA's computers have discovered a "missing day in time."

There is no truth to the "missing day" report, brought to your attention by a constituent. The story of the so-called "missing day" that was allegedly discovered by computers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center during the 1960s, appears to be quite widespread. The person most often cited as the source of this story worked briefly at GSFC in the early 1960s as a plant manager, a position that would not have placed him in direct contact with the center's computers or with people engaged in orbital computations. NASA has no knowledge of our computers ever being used in this manner. The task of projecting planetary alignments thousands of years into the future or past (a key to the "missing day" story) is irrelevant to the operation of satellites, which have lifetimes that rarely exceed a dozen years. Despite these facts, this story has become one of the myths of the early Space Age.

We appreciate your interest in this matter and trust this information will enable you to respond to your constituent's inquiry.

Sincerely,

Edward Heffernan, Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs, NASA

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