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The debate in Dallas probably would not have got started without a chapter of the ACLU there to challenge the shotgun squads in a provocative way. Austin and Houston also have chapters, but every large and medium-sized Texas city should have one. A Gas. The 1961 dedicated reserves gas tax has become the third gas tax passed by the Texas legislature in the last 13 years to be declared unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court last month left unchallenged the lower court orders invalidating the tax on grounds that it was a burden on interstate commerce. The farcical struggle in the 1961 legislature to prevent lawmakers from fouling up their own law to make it unconstitutional will be remembered by Observer readers. Taxing the long-line gas companies is becoming a perennial cause, the good thing the Establishment knows when it sees it. Every few years, you see, a pre-invalidated gas tax makes a juicy sop to toss to _the people in the legislature and the electorate who object to Republican principles of tax finance. \(These principles recently were lucidly simplified by Senator John Tower, who explained that the way to war on poverty is to give the rich more Calm Down or Fire Off Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said and meant one important thing in his recent policy speech on the Senate floor: that the United States should not invade Cuba. He reasoned that we should get over our Cuban fixation and proceed calmly. Coming at the outset of the Johnson administration and a political year in which much more will be heard from Cuban adventurers Goldwater and Nixon, Fulbright’s speech was a public service. We were pleased to read in a Houston Post editorial that the Post thinks, too, that we should calm down and realize that Cuba is not such a menace to us as alarmists would have it. From two of our Texas politicians, however, there has been a different kind of talk. Sen. John Tower said in Dallas he favors air strikes in North Viet Nam to knock out enemy depots and marshalling yardsexpand the war, he says. In response to Fuibright’s sensible and courageous speech, Cong. Jim Wright; Tower’s prospective opponent in 1966, said Ful bright’s suggestion “would be to abandon principle entirely . . . to abandon the brave Cuban patriots who want to liberate their country and leave them to despair.” We are going to need a better choice than a choice between such warlike words as these in 1966. A Curious Disparity With a careful attention to see that the prerogatives of a free press are not infringed, the Texas legislature should provide for the limited regulation of professional poll-takers to the extent that they submit the results of their polls for publication. There should be no prohibition against the publication of any result, nor any requirement about the content of any publication of a given poll sample. The law, I believe, should undertake to require: That if a polling organization submits for publication in the public press one or more of its polls on a given election or primary, it must so submit all of its polls on that given election or primary; And that a detailed and specific statement be filed, for public examination, perhaps with the Secretary of State, in which the polling organization states whether it was paid by anyone other than newspapers for taking the poll and gives all the questions and results of its poll, including questions and results it chose to omit from its published version of the results. I recall that when, in 1956, I asked Joe Belden what had become of his poll on a primary then in progress, he said he had sold it to the conservative candidate, and it wouldn’t be in the papers any more. We have, we admit, received some requests, in the straightforward form of mutilated stickers, that we discontinue our best-selling line, “Goldwater in 1864,” so we have taken a professional marketing approach to the problem. First, we employed Bush, Bavaria, Davis-Morris St. Moritz, and Cox-Sox, the Republicans’ Answer to the Belden Pole-Axe, and we have learned that the more Goldwater stuffs his foot in his mouth, the more Texas Republicans realize that he is the very tangled-up, never-say umfluffluff, straightbackward spokesman of muffled alarm they have been looking for. Just the other day, according to a top-secret report from BBDMSMCS, the Texas GOP got an urgent request from Rockefeller to let him off the hook in the Texas presidential prithary, but they decided the Observer’s special “Goldwater in 1864” stickersthree by thirteen inch beauties, on a sickly green background suitable for framing invasions to look like tmcontroltable enthusiasm among the nativesthat, as we were saying, these slick stickers have given the Goldwater campaign in Texas such a boost, this was just the time to require Rockefeller to stand up and see if he can send outraged Texas spinsterhood as much as Goldwater can. Are we facing a similar situation this year? Belden reported Gov. Connally leading Don Yarborough “nearly eight to one.” This poll was taken after the filing deadline, but before Don Yarborough started campaigning in earnest. Would Connally’s forces be permitted to buy up the poll as it showed Don Yarborough gaining? Furthermore, what is one to make of this disparity: Belden’s poll shows Connally ahead nearly seven-to-one–\(not eight to one, for that was a curious lapse on BelChronicle survey” completed by a team of eight reporters, and published two days before the Belden poll, showed Connally’s projected margin of victory to be 57% to 43%, which is a tune of quite a different tempo. This we do know: The Houston Chronicle would never sell the results of its reporters’ survey-to a political candidate and fail to publish the survey. April 3, 1964 15 J. W. “TOMMY” TUCKER Appraisal of Real Estate 3317 Montrose Boulevard Houston, Texas 77006 JAckson 4-2211 We have not yet hired a copywriter in this division of Observer Enterprises, Inc., as must be apparent from this unfortunately circumlocutory blurb, but we do wish to inform you, anyway, that we have been flooded with orders against our “Goldwater in 1864” stickers, which are now in their 3,000sdth printing \(not counthelp to mail in the additional orders that we are requesting. Got that? Bahleave the syntax to the eggheads and send the dough. That, as every businessman knows, is what separates the bucks from the does \(a little joke to soften lots of 1,000 stickers or more for forwarding to Barry Goldwater’s Arizona store, which has been proposed as the Western marketing outlet for Goldwater fans who have been dead 100 years. 4$ 1.00 10$ 2.00 40$ 5.00 100$10.00 500$40.00 1,000$80.00 server, 504 W. 24th St., Austin, Tex.