On May 17 -- a little more than three weeks -- the Missouri legislature comes to its constitutional close. The ASSOCIATED PRESS Jefferson City reporters are gathering information on Missouri's financial status for an upcoming weekend report.

Preliminary information is that for the next five years -- unless our state government stops its runaway spending increases on already passed legislation -- the state's financial situation will get worse.

The state's economic climate and unwillingness to vote major tax increases give little hope on the revenue side.

Let's face it, spending has gotten out of hand as have demands for more services and grants by too many local and state government agencies.

The problem is not hard to resolve if the media will limit the political campaign demagoguery against those who make good-faith efforts to address the budget problem.

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Rural Missouri magazine is the official publication of Missouri's electric cooperatives. It asked its 440,000 subscribers to list what they considered the best places to eat, play golf and have fun. BENT CREEK Golf Course in Jackson was voted the best place to play golf in Missouri. A nice recognition.

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On April 18 a divided U.S. Senate voted against a major energy policy backed by President Bush that would have helped create more than 14,000 Missouri jobs and would have protected our national security by making America less dependent on foreign oil.

In a vote closely watched by environmental groups, U.S. Sen. Jean Carnahan and other Senate Democrats joined Tom Daschle in voting against oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In a letter, Carnahan said she realized that oil exploration in ANWR would "create a large number of good-paying jobs" but that she could not support the measure because of environmental concerns.

In my opinion, it was a miscast vote as the Senate failed to work together to support this proposal to help stimulate our economy and protect our national security. The proposal would increase our domestic oil production by allowing oil exploration in a 2,000-acre portion of the 19.6 million-acre ANWR. The 2,000-acre area is roughly the size of Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. America possesses the technology to explore for oil in the ANWR in an environmentally-sensitive way.

JIM TALENT, Carnahan's opponent for the U.S. Senate seat, commented: "It's clear that the Senate Democrats have decided that they are not going to give President Bush's domestic agenda a fair hearing. Today they voted against a common sense energy policy that could create more than 14,000 jobs right here in Missouri. Moreover, it would have increased our energy independence."

Talent, a former U.S. representative who served eight years on the House Armed Services Committee, said the Senate's failure to pass this measure is keeping America dependent on imported oil.

Last year the United States imported nearly 287 million barrels of oil from Iraq -- paying Iraq $6.58 billion. Saddam Hussein has paid $25,000 to the families of each of the Palestinian suicide bombers. In other words, we're giving Iraq the cash to reward those who are committing suicide and bombing innocent people in Israel.

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Mend it -- don't end it: Illinois Gov. George Ryan's commission on the death penalty is being heralded as a political body blow to capital punishment. However, and the real news is that its findings actually help death-penalty supporters.

Ryan declared a moratorium on state executions two years ago and organized a commission to study the system's flaws. The Republican governor then stacked the panel with death-penalty opponents, and its conclusions are -- not surprisingly -- what he wanted. The commission recommended that Illinois abolish capital punishment, or at the very least make its prosecution so cumbersome as to rarely be worth the effort. There's just this tiny problem of the facts... .

According to former U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, who sat on the commission, there were no findings of racial discrimination in the way capital punishment is being applied. White defendants receive the death penalty more than twice as often as black defendants... .

The study also revealed that the vast majority of death-penalty reversals have nothing to do with guilt or innocence. Reversals result instead from procedural mistakes made during sentencing, long after guilt has been determined... .

Death-penalty opponents have for years cited reversal rates as evidence of a careless system. The implication was that exoneration reflects the reliability of the verdict. But thanks to the Ryan commission, we now know this is completely bogus. ... -- The Wall Street Journal

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College campuses: The Luntz Research Companies, a respected polling company, conducted a survey this spring of the opinions of the liberal arts and social science faculty at Ivy League colleges and universities. The results explain the ideological indoctrination rampant on some campuses today and prove that Ivy League colleges' sanctimonious accolades to diversity are dishonest.

Only 3 percent identified themselves as Republican, while 57 percent admitted they are Democrats.

64 percent identified themselves as liberal, 23 percent as moderate, and only 6 percent as conservative.

Here is how they voted in the 2000 election: 61 percent for Al Gore, 5 percent for Ralph Nader, 6 percent for George W. Bush, and 28 percent either did not vote or refused to answer.

79 percent said George W. Bush's political views are "too conservative."

80 percent disagree that "if the federal budget has a surplus in any given year, this money should be returned to taxpayers in the form of a tax cut."

This survey was commissioned by David Horowitz and released by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Horowitz calls the biased faculty "institutional leftism." He says it is unfair for institutions that receive hundreds of millions of dollars and subsidies from the taxpayers to be so partisan in their hiring practices.

It's a well-kept secret how much money the elite colleges are getting outright from the federal government: Johns Hopkins $793 million; Stanford $391 million; Harvard $349 million; Washington University $347 million; MIT $301 million; Yale $300 million' Emory $248 million; Cornell $247 million; Duke $218 million; and Northwestern $204 million. -- Excerpt from the Schlafly Report

Gary Rust is chairman of Rust Communications.