GRETA VAN SUSTEREN

All right. Let me ask you about, just a couple of high-profile cases. Michael Jackson, and Kobe Bryant. What are your thoughts on those?

O.J. SIMPSON

Well, I don't see how either one could be, uh, [SIGHS] with "reasonable doubt," or whatever, be convicted, you know? Uh.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN

You don't think - ? You don't know how they could be convicted?

O.J. SIMPSON

Could be convicted. I, I just, at this point, can't see it. I, uh - . As far as I am concerned, uh, they are "innocent until proven guilty." Nothing that I have heard, has proven them guilty to me. Uh. In Kobe's case, uh, uh, I think every high-profile, and not high-profile athlete, have found themself in a situation like that before. I have certainly in my life, have had girls come to the room, and go back, and come to the room, and walk to, and say "no," or say whatever, whatever, whatever, whatever. And when I was a kid growing up, just about every girl said "no" once. [LAUGHTER] You know, they had to, because you'd, you'd think they were a slut or something. But I just can't believe that, that, uh, this girl could continue to come to the room that way. From what I know from girls, even my oldest daughter, uh, about Kobe, is he is a complete gentleman, you know? Uh. And, uh, and, uh, in situations like that, I, I don't know. In my opinion, "date rape," and "stranger rape," are two different things [LAUGHTER] entirely, you know? Uh. "Date rape," you have really got to - .

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN

You believe there is a difference?

O.J. SIMPSON

I think a "date rape," you really - . All these "shield laws" and things that they have. You know? Both persons' credibility is on the line. And to me, when you have a person who, who knows a person, uh, it's gotta be open. I mean, in the courtroom, uh, in the court of law, you gotta be able to look at both persons' character, character, completely in a situation like that.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN

How about, how about - ?

O.J. SIMPSON

Plus, plus, from the way I understand how they did it. You know, any adult, [LAUGHTER] who has had any active sex life, understands that you can't have sex that way without both parties helping out. [LAUGHTER] It's impossible.

Germany's struggling economy is showing some signs of vigour. Industrial production rose in April by 2.2%, the biggest rise since October. Inflation in wholesale prices ran at 3.6% in the year to May, the fastest pace in over three years. Exports rose strongly in April. But not all the news was good: the ranks of the unemployed rose for the fourth straight month in May, by 9,000. The jobless rate was unchanged at 10.5%.

intelligent, well-read and a very nice guy indeed. It's rare to meet a politician at his level who is so up-to-date on details. He even knew the Swedish unemployment rate. Bush is easy to speak with, makes you feel respected and seen and he gives you the chance to make your case. He's really under-appreciated in Europe. He's described as a person who doesn't know what he wants. That's not true. He's goal-oriented and knows exactly what he's doing.

I never had that blind hate towards the American society, the USA is a fantastic nation. Rich, large and complex -- which is often forgotten. There's not one political view or a criticism that's not better articulated in America than in Sweden.

GENERAL EISENHOWER HAS ORDERED INTEGRATION OF WHITE AND NEGRO TROOPS

in the European Command. The order went into effect last month, means that as much as one-third of some units will be colored. It also means Eisenhower will have a good talking-point in winning Negro support for his candidacy.

Someone needs to help this institution, and it's not a consulting team hired by the same institution, nor is it a batch of investigators operating under terms defined by the U.N., nor is it a grand gathering of staff members being urged to risk reprisals by telling tales of earlier reprisals. A better place to start is the proposal by Sen. John Ensign that the U.S. withhold part of the U.N.'s budget until the institution comes clean on Oil for Food. Better yet would be to tackle the system that engendered Oil for Food. To do that would probably require setting up a competing international institution, based on openness and accountability--and give the U.N. a run for its money. For now, I'm working around to the belief that in the matter of reforming the U.N., the only thing worse than having the U.N. ignore a problem is to have the U.N. investigate it.

Just over a year ago, in one of those wretched Security Council performances before the Gulf War, the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, turned to Colin Powell and offered the umpteenth variation of the familiar argument that, if we Europeans are resistant to ze idea of war, it is because we have seen so much of ze horrors of ze war. The reality is the other way round: the reason they've seen so much of the horrors of war is because they're so resistant to the idea of it - until it's too late and conflagration is all that's left.

Well, they may be Little Englanders, but they're getting bigger, and the big parties are getting littler. In Sunday's results, the only two governing parties most Britons have ever known couldn't muster 50 per cent of the vote between them.

. . . as Peter Oborne pointed out in last week's Spectator, poll after poll shows that up to half the British electorate wants out of the EU . . .

That's why Labour's decline to its pre-Great War vote share is as telling as the hit the Tories took. Neither of Britain's two main parties reflects the real division on the critical issue of the day.

At the time of going to press, the UK IP had won 16.8 percent of the vote - double their score in the previous Euro election. The Labour party, with 23 percent of the vote, looks like getting its worst results since before the First World War. The opposition Tories, who expected to rout Labour, managed to win 27 percent of the vote: The Conservative's [sic] lowest share of a national vote since 1832.

Sinn Fein, the political front organisation for the IRA terror group, won a seat in Ireland's EU election and is expected to win another in Northern Ireland. . . . Like the UK IP, Sinn Fein ran a fiercely anti-EU campaign.

Seperatist [sic] party Vlaams Blok pushed the ruling Liberal Party into third place in Belgium's Euro-vote. . . . The Liberal Party leader, Guy Verhofstadt, was a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq. Last year he played "Mini-Me" to France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder when he hosted the "praline summit" of anti-war leaders.

And as for the major opponents of the Iraq war? France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder were among the biggest losers.

. . . Chirac's UMP party fared even worse. In what was France's lowest ever election turnout, the President's party secured only 16.6 percent of the vote, far behind the mainstream opposition Socialists who pulled in 28.9 percent.

. . . France's numerous extreme-left groups, who led the noisiest campaigns abetted by sympathetic media coverage, barely registered on polls. However, Philippe de Villiers and Charles Pasqua, who lead 'Sovereignist' anti-EU parties, did well: De Villiers' party scored 7% of votes.

The European parliamentary election confirmed a clear trend in German politics: The SPD and Chancellor Schroeder are on their way out. Today, Sunday, June 13, the Socialists registered their worst election loss in postwar history . . . The conservative Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) took advantage of the Socialist's [sic] collapse to claim two times as many votes with a projected 45% result, giving them the largest number of seats from Germany's 99 designated seats in the European parliament. . . .

The question now is whether the captain, Schroeder, will go down with the ship, or jump overboard before it is too late. . . . If the current trend continues, it is unlikely that the Chancellor will politically survive 2004. . . .

How much longer can a party supported by only 22% of the populace govern?

Despite the finding [that a majority of voters thought Blair was too close to Bush on Iraq], the poll found that government policy in Iraq was the least important issue determining how people cast their vote.

Just 5% of respondents felt that it was an important issue, with improving public services such as health and education at the top of the list with 46%.

Humbled Blair faces party anguish

A humbled Tony Blair has returned to Britain to face Labour Party critics after a voter backlash against the invasion of Iraq led to an unprecedented trouncing in local elections.

Blair counts cost of war after hammering

Tony Blair was today counting the political cost of the war in Iraq following Labour's hammering in the local council elections.

Prime Minister Tony Blair took a beating as his governing Labour Party fell to third place Friday in Britain's local elections, a result he and colleagues blamed on voter anger over the war in Iraq.

German Chancellor Schroeder wants to write a mystery novel with Mankell about "Bush, USA and Iraq"

Berlin (dpa)-

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has made an offer to Swedish mystery author Henning Mankell to co-write a "Crime Story" about George Bush, the USA and the Iraq war. "But much later," added the Chancellor on the n-tv show "Sandra Maischberger."

US President George Bush proposed a NATO role in Iraq at the Group of Eight summit on Wednesday but the main opponent of the war, French President Jacques Chirac, said the alliance had no mission there. . . .

"There has been a remarkable change in the American foreign policy," said the German chancellor. US officials described Bush's meeting with Schroeder on Tuesday as the warmest between the two leaders in more than a year.

"American colleagues understood they have to play ball and they did play ball," said Chirac.

Today my patients included a baby who decided to catapult itself out of it's mother's birth canal-"bungee-jumping" using the umbilical cord and landing on the floor.

Luckily mother and baby were both fine.

I first met Ronald Reagan, along with my wife Anne, in the late summer of 1965 while he was traveling up and down California seeking to determine if there was sufficient public interest in his running for governor. We spent two days with him on the road and in the back seat of his car. At the end of the second day we were invited to his home in Pacific Palisades overlooking Los Angeles. He and his wife Nancy went into the kitchen to make some iced tea, affording me the opportunity to inspect the books in the shelves lining the living room. They were not Book of the Month or Reader's Digest selections, but real histories and biographies, studies of economics and politics. I remember three books in particular: Witness by Whittaker Chambers; The Law by Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French classical liberal; and Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. Not the usual reading for a Hollywood actor or a would-be politician. And the books had obviously been read--pages were dog-eared, passages were underlined. Here was no Hollywood puppet dancing at the end of someone's string but a deeply read thoughtful conservative.

REASON: Governor Reagan, you have been quoted in the press as saying that you're doing a lot of speaking now on behalf of the philosophy of conservatism and libertarianism. Is there a difference between the two?

REAGAN: If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is really a misnomer for the liberals--if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can't say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don't each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are travelling the same path.

. . . REASON: Governor if the Republicans were to nominate a candidate that was unacceptable to you in 1976, could you support a Libertarian third party candidate?

REAGAN: I have to wait and see what you're doing and what you are standing for.

REASON: Are there any particular books or authors or economists that have been influential in terms of your intellectual development?

REAGAN: Oh, it would be hard for me to pinpoint anything in that category. I'm an inveterate reader. Bastiat and von Mises, and Hayek and Hazlitt--I'm one for the classical economists. . . .

REASON: What about Rand or Rothbard?

REAGAN: No. I haven't read Ayn Rand since The Fountainhead. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged. The last few years, I must say, have been a little rough on me for doing that kind of reading--for eight years I found that when I finished reading the memorandums and reports and so forth, then I found myself digging into nonfiction, economists and so forth, for help on the problems that were confronting me.

If we relieve the strain on the shaken Russian economy by aiding their enslaved satellites, thus reducing the danger of uprising and revolution, and if we continue granting concessions which reduce our military strength, giving Russia time to improve hers as well as shore up her limping industrial complex--aren't we perhaps adding to the Communist belief that their system will through evolution catch up and pass ours?

If we truly believe that our way of life is best aren't the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged so the contrast is apparent? Inhuman though it may sound, shouldn't we throw the whole burden of feeding the satellites on their slave masters who are having trouble feeding themselves?

What makes a boom different from a bubble? The answer is sustainability. Both booms and bubbles represent periods of rapid expansion: The difference between them is that a bubble is hollow and a boom is solid. Was the explosive jobs growth of the final Clinton years a boom or a bubble? How about the rapid but not explosive jobs growth this year under Bush?

In order to answer these questions, BuzzCharts has created a new employment-related statistical indicator -- the jobs sustainability ratio. Here's how it works: BuzzCharts has taken the quarterly profits as calculated by Economy.com and the rise in profits from quarter to quarter, and used those numbers to create a ratio which serves as a way to measure the sustainability of new jobs created during the same quarter. In other words, the jobs sustainability ratio is the average amount of new profit backing up each new job on a quarterly basis.

For establishment economists this statistic is very confusing, but for actual real-world entrepreneurs nothing could be clearer. Businesses are able to hire and retain people only to the degree that these new people generate additional profit. The jobs sustainability ratio tells us, therefore, the "solidness" of the jobs that were created at the end of the Clinton boom compared with the jobs that are being created now.

The numbers are dazzlingly clear: During the late 1990s, rapid jobs growth was supported by weak growth in profits. Not so under Bush. In fact, in the first three years of the Bush administration, each new job was backed up by an average increase in profits of $285,000. Unfortunately, during the last three years of the Clinton administration each new job was backed by an average decrease of $28,000. It's no wonder that those jobs did not last long and were entirely swept away by the first recession that appeared.

Ironically, the fact that jobs are not appearing at a hyper-growth rate during this current recovery demonstrates most conclusively that this is boom, not a bubble.

Election-year battleground states in the Midwest industrial heartland are reporting significantly lower unemployment rates compared to one year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In April, Michigan registered a 6 percent jobless rate compared to 7.2 percent in April 2003. Ohio's jobless rate fell to 5.8 percent from 6.2 percent. Pennsylvania's dropped to 4.9 percent from 5.4 percent. West Virginia reported 5.4 percent from 6.6 percent a year earlier. Missouri's jobless tally dropped to 4.5 percent from 5.5 percent.

In view of the political significance of these states, it's surprising that administration officials are not loudly commenting on the remarkable ISM manufacturing report, including its sensitive jobs component. Did anyone say outsourcing? Did anyone say "hollowed out"? The naysaying is nonsense. The ISM numbers are consistent with 7.3 percent breakneck growth of gross domestic product.