ustxtxb_obs_1973_11_02_50_00028-00000_000.pdf

Both barrels, as usual Archer Fullingim, editor of the Kountze News, often speaks out what many people are thinking. In his column in his Oct. 18th edition, he says: “Now we know that compared with Nixon, McGovern was a calm, sincere, honest Democrat who was lied on by the Republicans, and the worst part of it was that some Democrats believed it. Now they are paying for it. “It gripes me no end to have to pay over a dollar for five pounds of flour, which I use a lot of, and 48 cents for a loaf of New Orleans French bread. Strangely I don’t blame Nixon so much as I blame the pig-headed Democrats who voted for him. They should have known what to expect from Nixon. They had been watching him for 20 years. They knew all his dirty tricks, and yet they swallowed the lies about McGovern and voted for $1 flour and $2 a pound sirloin. They voted for Nixon for law and order and Nixon took lawlessness and disorder off the streets and set it up in the White House. “Nixon’s chief apostle of law and order was Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, and look what happened to him. When old Spiro stood in that courtroom in Baltimore and told the federal judge that he had accepted kickbacks that he didn’t report in his income tax, that wiped out all of Agnew’s mouthings of five years for law and order. It put him in a class with Nixon who has not yet resigned, who has not yet admitted that he knew about Watergate and covered it up. “I was never an admirer of Agnew, and I think he got exactly what was coming to him. . . . He was a mean, spiteful man. He lived a lie; he posed as an heroic figure but all the time he knew that he was guilty of government crimes. . . . So it didn’t sadden me about Agnew. I always thought that he was not fit to be vice-president of the United States, and so I say good riddance. The country would be better served if Nixon himself would resign and let Speaker of the House Albert take over, but Nixon is tricky.. . . “For four long years, Spiro Agnew condemned permissive judges in vitriolic language, and in the end a permissive judge saved him from jail. The judge is not so much to blame as Elliott Richardson, the head of the Justice Department. . . . I did not believe Richardson when he said that Nixon did not dictate mercy for Agnew. . . . Richardson’s decision was typically Nixon. Now I am inclined to believe that Nixon knew all along that Agnew was a criminal and that he blew the whistle to get the public’s mind off Watergate and his tapes. “In the future, any official who has been bribed can go to the Justice Department and complain that he has been punished enough and should be put on probation. Was Agnew punished enough? Of course he wasn’t. He should have been sent to jail, just as any ordinary citizen would. Now there is a separate law for elected officials like Agnew in which they don’t go to jail, and another harsher law for the average citizen. . . . “Richardson has made , the Justice Department look bad. His decision to let Spiro go free was the antithesis of law and order. It was a slap in the face for law and order. What Spiro did was far worse than what Rap Brown, Seale or the Berrigan brothers did. A jury should have decided Spiro’s case, not the attorney, general, Nixon and the permissive judge. . . . In the end, despite all [the shifty-eyed attorney general’s] claims to integrity, he did exactly what Nixon told him to do.” 28 The Texas Observer Dallas street corner newsracks in need of a little loving care and attention The Observer needs a friend in Dallas who would be willing to attend to the newsrack route for a commission based on sales. The job involves making the rounds of the 10 racks every two weeks to stock the new issue and collect the money, plus occasional mechanical adjustments to the racks and, whenever appropriate, relocating some of the racks to more profitable corners. If you think you might be willing to help out, please call Sam Milling in Dallas 328-8576 after 6 p.m. for additional information. Congress have failed to make anything useful from this civic rage in us. That is their failure, and the good we are entitled to get out of Watergate is that the Congress correct their failure. A movement should form, within and outside the Congress, to institute felony penalties for invasion of privacy commensurate with the penalties for such crimes as bribery, extortion, and tax evasion. The second good we should get out of these waves of scandals is the structural reform of our system of campaign financing. Senators Kennedy and Scott have introduced the measure that will serve as a basis for this structural reform, the public financing of national elections. Clearly this should entail free television time for all bona fide candidates, and the reform should also go from the top to the bottom of our politics, national, state and local, and root out in one violent democratic effort the corrupting power of big money in our political discourse. A second movement should form, then, within and outside the Congress, to make the penalties for the corruption of the people’s elections with money commensurate with the penalties for such crimes as bribery, extortion and tax evasion. What might citizens of Texas do toward these ends? We have a powerful delegation of men in Congress from Texas, mostly but not without exception mossbacks. From Texas, most notoriously a breeding ground for political corruption, we could well launch demands on our own congressmen that they individually and together make invasions of privacy high felonies and help us form a national movement to root big money out of all of our elections. The vital thought to hold, I think, is that we must refuse to be satisfied or shut up or grateful or accepting when these politicians throw us a sop, like words against Watergate or a new law prohibiting individuals from giving more than $25,000, or more than $3,000, to campaigns or candidates in a given year. Women, blacks, chicanos and even white males should get ready to run against the cop-outs. Deep, structural reform is all that can bring us back from the historic trouble that our country is in. October 21 Nixon’s abolition of the Special Prosecutor’s unit, rupturing the authority of the courts and breaking faith with the Senate with the expressed approval of Gerald Ford, along with the FBI’s seizure for Nixon of the Special Prosecutor’s files and evidence, make what seemed heresy Friday very nearly obvious Sunday. I now believe that Nixon should be impeached, Ford not confirmed, and Albert become President. R.D.