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8 STORES IN DALLAS. 4535 McKINNEY AVE. RICHARDSON: 608 LOCKWOOD FARMERS BRANCH SHOPPING \(FR. SW CORNER, VALLEY VIEW IN AUSTIN: 1514 LAVACA 8103 BURNET RD. 16 The Texas Observer MIlte Observer volunteers Biweekly work session at Observer office, 600 W. 7th, Austin, 7:30 p.m., Wed., March 30. Clip ping, filing, typing, or ganizing, beer and skit tles. Everyone welcome. PRESS Union printing with competitive prices. Support the movement, help us build the ideal. Come to I.D.A. for your printing needs. 901 W. 24th St., Austin 477-3641 15 HALF PRICE RECORDS AkAG AZ INES “Not sick or senile, says Kazen, I’ll run again,” went the headline. “I don’t have any plans to retire any time soon,” the congressman told the Express. “I’m just getting started up there.” As for the Pentagon budget, not a word appeared in print. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., one of the country’s “Big Eight” accounting and consulting firms, conducted a comprehensive crime study for the Texas Organized Crime Prevention Council and reports that business frauds –from organized bank scams to the sale of phony insurance policies cost Texans at least $200 million a year. Floyd to parole board? Looks like bad news for parole conscious inmates of Texas prisons. Gov . Dolph Briscoe is considering the appointment of Jay Floyd to the State Board of Pardons and Paroles. The 53year-old conservative lawyer is the governor’s executive assistant for clemency matters and the man responsible for rejecting about 30 percent of the paroles recommended by the state board. Floyd would replace board chairman Clyde Whiteside, whose six-year term expired in February. Briscoe, not noted for haste in filling vacancies, plans to wait until the Legislature recesses in June before naming Floyd, according to informed sources. The delay would prevent senate liberals, especially Austin Democrat Lloyd Doggett, from blocking the appointment. Whether Floyd follows the governor’s orders or makes decisions himself, Briscoe is turning down nearly three times as many parole recommendations as former Gov. Preston Smith did, and 50-60 percent more than John Connally. What distresses liberals even more is Floyd’s \(or oners already on ten-hour-per-day work-release programs. Governor Briscoe, enlivening an otherwise intolerably dull speech before the Austin chapter of Sigma Delta Chi on March 23, tossed a few harpoons at his Great Brown Nemesis, La Raza Unida. Briscoe urged the members of the professional journalists’ society to report the “positive.” Then, the governor trailed off into a little dissertation against “a few who would tear down our beliefs, a few who would destroy.” Sam Kinch of The Dallas Morning News asked Briscoe whom he meant. The governor answered, “As you know, I would include La Raza Unida in that.” Joel Smith of Houston’s KPRC-TV then suggested that the governor had it in for the chicano party. Briscoe, who recently blocked a federal grant to the Raza-dominated Zavala County Economic Development Corp., denied he was carrying out a vendetta against La Raw. He said, though, that “when any group espouses the theory of socialism espouses the theory of the Cuban government or has as its motto ‘kill the Governor Dolph Briscoe gringo,’ I don’t look upon that very kindly because that means me.” That’s all well and good, but it’s La Raza’s upstart status that most alarms Briscoe and other house-broken Democrats. The governor is again pushing for legislation that would require third parties \(read: to win 20 percent of the vote in the next general election to appear on succeeding ballots. Bank shot Legislation to create a National Consumer Cooperative Bank \(“one of the three most important consumer bills in the past generation,” is what U.S. House of Representatives. The bank would capitalize groups forming health, food and housing coops, credit unions and other similar ventures. Sixty-eight House members none of them from Texas have signed on as cosponsors of the measure. Cris Aldrete, long-time aide to Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, is in line for ap pointment to the cochairmanship of the board of commissioners of the Southwestern Border Economic Development Region. This U.S. Department of Commerce agency deals with trade problems along the U.S.-Mexican border. The Houston Post’s Harold Scar lett, one of the few reporters in the state covering environmental issues full time, has won an Environmental Quality Media Award from the Environmental