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Personal Service Quality Insurance ALICE ANDERSON AGENCY INSURANCE & REAL ESTATE 808A E. 46th, Austin,,Texas 459-6577 of Teachers, AAT President Betty Medlock let Governor Briscoe have it. Discussing teachers’ need for higher incomes in her personal column, Medlock wrote, “In Texas we are handicapped by a ‘sit-on-his-hands’ governor who ‘keeps the faith’ only with big business interests by holding down state spending \(at our to meet growing needs.” Two views Oh ‘ the difference perspective makes. We ran, by chance, into two different members of the House recently and got two wildly different impressions of what’s going on there. The first representative was one of the Daniel insiders, last session and is clearly an outsider this time around. He claimed to be taking it easy so far, enjoying his exclusion from those late-night strategy sessions and especially relishing, as he put it, the freedom to issue a press release without worrying about whether it will embarrass the speaker. He’s filing his bills, doing his committee work, but generally not trying to be one of “Texas’ young leaders” \(said any good this session anyway. Still, he claims to be worried that the House seems to be slow getting started, and claims to foresee a lot of trouble for progressives at the end of the session, when time will be tight and the bills blessed by the speaker will be sailing through. It could be changed a lot, he said, by the coming-unstuck of the coalition that got Billy Clayton elected, that strange alliance of conservatives and libs. Mostly, says our anonymous outsider, he sits around and waits for the coming-unstuck part. Our second encounter was with a member of the alliance, Rep. Chris Miller of Fort Worth. She was decidedly optimistic. Maybe it seems that the House is slow starting, but “things are moving in the depths.” For one thing, Clayton’s committee assignments distributed power evenly among his diverse 10 The Texas Observer troops, Miller said. Even more encouraging, there is a healthy chance that the coalition will work, and that good legislation will be the different constituencies of the speaker’s people, both the leftish urban folks and the rightish rural ones, all want the same things this session. Most of all, she says, they want utilities relief and a better school system. And, she predicted, those common desires will make for a unifying, and progressive, pressure on the House. What worries Miller is the possibility that unnamed outsiders will actually try to scuttle good legislation for the sake of speakership grudges. Erwin may lobby Frank Erwin may be on his way to becoming a lobbyist for the UT System. Former governor and new regents’ chairman Allan Shivers met with the Travis County delegation recently to tell them the system was interested in keeping Erwin’s services as a successful winner of legislative hearts and minds. That produced a flurry of reactions from the delegation, from pleasant surprise that Shivers would bother to inform the members, to Rep. Wilhemina Delco’s opinion that there’s nothing the legislators can do about it, to Sen. Lloyd Doggett’s expression of opposition to the idea. Doggett had previously promised to invoke “senatorial courtesy” as a means of fighting a reappointment of Erwin to the board of regents. Austin American-Statesman reporter Steve Wisch broke the story of the prospective hiring the morning Shivers met with the delegation. Wisch quoted an anonymous “veteran observer of UT politics and a present UT official” as predicting that Erwin would get a salary in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year. Shivers has since denied that Erwin will be paid that handsomely, referring to the job opening as a “dollar-a-year” position. U.S. Sen. John Tower has been appointed to the Senate committee which will investigate reports of widespread domestic political surveillance by the CIA and FBI. Tower will be the ranking Republican on the committee, and it has been reported that his interest in accepting the appointment lies in keeping U.S. Sen. Howard Baker of Tennessee out of the vice-chairman’s position. Tower says he is especially concerned that the investigation not become a “witch-hunt” and that confidential information does not leak from the committee. Tower has expressed reluctance to take the appointment, pleading greater concern for legislation affecting energy and economic policy. As ranking Republican of the standing Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Tower is faced this session with the problem of dealing with a new chairman, liberal U.S. Sen. William of fellow arch-conservative U.S. Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama, Tower might have been less hesitant about leaving the committee’s work in Democratic hands. One-way tickets Remember the bumperstickers that said “America: Love it or Leave it”? U.S. Rep. Jim Collins, the right-wing Republican from Dallas, apparently remembers them quite well. He has introduced legislation that would permit any citizen over 21 to apply to the Secretary of State for free transportation to the foreign country of his or her choice. Applicants would forfeit the right to re-enter the U.S. for 60 years. It’s not that Collins really wants to spend money on the ingrates. He’s hoping to prevent hijackings by providing “potential hijackers” a pre-paid ticket out of the country. The Corsicana Daily Sun has beaten the rest of the state to what may be the last Baylor football joke of the 1974-75 season. The Jan. 8 Sun reported that Baylor coach Grant Teaff had been successful in appealing a speeding ticket to county court. The local district attorney himself requested that the charge be dismissed, on account of the speed limit signs for the westbound lane of the pertinent highway are rusted, obscured by other signs, and “barely visible in the daytime.” The d.a. also said any other appeals from tickets received in the area would get the same treatment. And he made it clear that Teaff was not getting preferential treatment; it’s just that the coach could afford to hire a lawyer, and the lawyer could have “torn us up in court.” The Sun printed a couple of photographs of speed limit signs alongside its story, and the signs did in fact appear to be rusted, obscured, and otherwise barely visible. That was fine until the Jan. 9 Sun hit the stands, containing the intelligence that Teaff was headed east, not west, when he was ticketed. This new light on the case was provided by the local police chief. The Sun’s reporter provided a photo of an extremely readable speed limit sign posted next to the eastbound lane, and the news that both the d.a. and the county judge are graduates of Baylor.