Last week my wife WENDY and I attended a national newspaper meeting at the Del Coronado Hotel in San Diego. The history and setting of this hotel on the Pacific Ocean makes it one of the finest old Victorian hotels in the country.

Besides the business meetings, speakers included former President GERALD FORD, Dr. LAURA SCHLESSINGER and Energy Secretary BILL RICHARDSON. ... A museum visit was one of the highlights of the trip.

Ford was surprisingly articulate, looked great and answered questions with a knowledge of current events. He wouldn't criticize Clinton ... but responded to questions by saying he didn't vote for Clinton ... twice!

He informed us that he supported the bombing in Yugoslavia and so informed Vice President Al Gore who called Ford and former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George Bush to brief them the day the first air strike took place.

The museum exhibition was titled "WWII THROUGH RUSSIAN EYES." Dramatically displayed were more than 500 objects never before this year displayed in the West. The 22,000-square-foot display included a replica of Hitler's bunker with personal artifacts thought previously destroyed.

More than 50 years ago, in merely a four-year span, the Russians lost an estimated 27 million people, both civilian and military, about the same as all of the other Allied forces combined (according to the exhibit).

The history of their nonagression pact with Hitler and Germany, the eventual invasion of the USSR by Germany and the military strategy were fascinating.

Some of my self-described problems seemed to dissipate when I realized how quickly I would probably have died in such an environment.

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Jeopardizing 50 years of work: The Clinton administration acknowledged, through Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, that an espionage suspect in the Los Alamos National Laboratory case transferred secret nuclear weapons data from a classified computer network to an unclassified system vulnerable to outsiders. About the compromised data, a former Los Alamos researcher said, "It's the distillation of 50 years of work, over 1,000 nuclear tests and thousands upon thousands of man-hours." According to New York Times columnist William Safire, the Justice Department makes some 700 court applications a year for surveillance taps. A Justice Department source says possibly once or twice a year it refuses the FBI's request, and this case -- involving Clinton's China policy and our nuclear arsenal -- was the one. This defies belief.

Parents Matter: Social science has been called the elaborate demonstration of the obvious by methods that are obscure. But sometimes the obvious needs to be reinforced. A study presented this week at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies in San Francisco found that parents who keep tabs on where their children are and what they are doing are less likely to produce children involved in risky behavior. Researchers observed that children living in public housing in Baltimore who believed that their parents set limits and talked with them were far less likely to use alcohol and marijuana or sell drugs than counterparts without parental intervention. The study, led by Susan Feigelman of the University of Maryland, surveyed 383 children aged 9 to 15 and included questions about whether their parents knew where they were after school and at night and if the children were expected to call and say where they were going and with whom. After 18 months, 12 percent of children with less supervision said they were dealing drugs, compared to 5 percent among those who were more closely monitored.

Tuesday's New York Times featured a front-page story on steps that parents are taking to protect their children from the dangers of the Internet, after the shootings at Littleton. These steps range from moving the computer to a common room to reading teenagers' e-mail regularly. According to a new study by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, about 32 percent of American parents in online households use software to try to block Web sites containing sexually explicit or violent material. Sadly, this means two-thirds do not. -- Washington Update

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Ten Commandments removed again: A tiny item appeared in The Washington Post last week that has gone largely unnoticed across America, but it has profound implications for our country. The item describes an incident from Manhattan, Kan., where a 5-foot granite tablet engraved with the Ten Commandments has stood outside City Hall for over 40 years.

Last week city officials decided to remove the tablet to avoid a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU sued the city, saying that the Ten Commandments violated the separation of church and state.

There are two questions here that I think need to be asked. First, how is it that the words "separation of church and state" have come to be so misused? The phrase has its origin in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, and it was intended to make the point that the president's power was not religious in nature. But these words have been twisted to justify everything from taking prayer out of schools to barring nativity scenes in public squares. Now, they're being invoked in taking the Ten Commandments down from City Hall.

The founders of our country had no problem with the public display of religious faith. In fact, Thomas Jefferson himself began attending weekly worship services inside the House of Representatives only two days after writing the letter where the phrase was first used. Throughout his presidency, Jefferson allowed worship in federal buildings.

Second, I think it's important to ask, why were the Ten Commandments on display in front of City Hall in Manhattan, Kan., for over 40 years? The answer is simple: For decades we have understood that our liberty comes from God. Our country and its ideals are rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Our laws are based on the Ten Commandments; their display is simply an acknowledgement of that fact.

We now live in a culture where there is more outrage over a student bring a copy of the Ten Commandments to school than there is over students wearing jackets with Nazi insignias like those worn by the two boys in Littleton, Colo., who killed themselves, 12 of their classmates and one of their teachers. No one confronted the two boys about displaying Nazi paraphernalia -- probably out of fear of violating their First Amendment rights. But if a teacher had told them that God loved them and had a special place for them, that teacher undoubtedly would have been reprimanded and probably fired.

Our rights are inalienable because God is the author of our liberty. Until recently this was a fact taught in our schools. Now, God is allowed into our public discourse only in the wake of tragedy. The events of recent weeks remind us that there is no more important issue than how we address the virtue deficit. It will continue to be a centerpiece of my campaign. -- Gary Bauer

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Victims of pornography: May 1 was the first day of Victims of Pornography Awareness Month, and there are many victims to be acknowledged. The May 10, 1999, Fortune cover story quotes a nationally recognized sexual addiction therapist who says that in the last year he has treated four Fortune 500 CEOs with problems of compulsive sex, prostitutes, porn and cyber-porn. Also, he estimates that 6 percent of the population struggles with sex addiction. Another notable therapist says "the fastest growing group" of sex addicts is successful professionals.

The abundance of pornography on the Internet has contributed to the growing number of pornography victims. The CNET.com report "Sex on the Web" estimates that there are anywhere from 20,000 to 7 million active X-rated sites on the Net. Andrew Edmond of Sex Tracker, which monitors traffic in adult Internet sites says, "There are 160 million people on the Net, and we track 32 million individuals every day who access adult sites."

Next to nothing has been done by the Clinton administration to address this problem. The Justice Department is not enforcing the federal obscenity laws as President Clinton promised to do when campaigning for office. As a result, our communities and now our homes are just a click or two away from depictions of child molestation, rape, torture, bestiality and excretions. These are plainly and simply outside the protection of the First Amendment and the Justice Department should stop acting as if they aren't.

A blow to Henny Penny: Scientists have spent a lot of time trying to determine what is causing deformities in frogs all over America, fearing that these deformities may presage more widespread malformations in other species. The suspected culprit? Well pollution caused by evil humans, of course. Now, new research reported in the journal of Science suggests that the deformities are likely caused by a natural parasite and not by pollution. Now that is a relief. According to an April 30 front-page article in the Los Angeles Times, "The findings do suggest that the intense environmental alarms over frog deformities may have been premature." This is not the first, the only, nor will it be the last example of agenda-driven, premature, environmental hysteria. -- Washington Update

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