ustxtxb_obs_1991_03_08_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

POLITICAL INTELLIGENCE DALLAS REPUBLICAN Congressman Steve Bartlett announced on February 19 that he’s running for mayor of Dallas. But judging by his initial reception from the minority community, including two city councilmembers, Bartlett will receive no honeymoon as a candidate or as mayor. “You’re going to have blood in the council chamber, because we’re not going to stand for it,” Dallas city councilmember Al Lipscomb warned. Lipscomb was quoted in the Dallas Morning News saying, “He was repressive when he was here [on the council], a young racist.” In addition to his record on the city council, Bartlett in Congress voted against the recent civil rights bill as well as against the creation of a federal holiday on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Bartlett says he will run an “inclusive” campaign. WHO WILL REPLACE Bartlett in Congress? Two Republican candidates who seem to be angling for the post include former city councilman Jerry Rucker, who last fall was trounced in a race against progressive Democrat incumbent John Bryant in an adjoining district, and columnist, businessman, and sometime political candidate Tom Pauken. According to the Dallas Observer, after Rucker chatted with Pauken on the latter’s KDNB-AM radio talk show last month, Rucker asked the station’s executive producer whether Pauken would be allowed to continue the show if he announces for Congress. The manager replied that Pauken’s show would be canceled if that happened. But the Dallas Times-Herald has not yet decided what to do about Pauken’s regular column should he run for Congress. VAN THE MAN strikes again. While vote against the Martin Luther King holiday in an attempt to dampen opposition to his quest for the Dallas mayoralty, former San Antonio City Councilman Van Archer wasted no time in proving that his candidacy for mayor of that city would not temper his penchant for outrageous statements. Speaking to the Republican. Business Women’s Club, Archer criticized his three so-far-declared opponents in the race for their support of a resolution honoring Nelson Mandela. “He’s not even an American,” Archer said of the most celebrated political prisoner in history. “He’s a convicted terrorist.” Archer, whose frequent verbal blunderbuss shots from the far right made him one of the, most unintentionally entertaining city council members in San Antonio, may be the right man for the time and place, however. San Antonio Express-News columnist Maury Maverick reports that the city’s WOAI radio listeners voted 63 to 37 in favor of dropping nuclear bombs on Iraq. And the ExpressNews’s editors have called for the assassination of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Citing an essay in Newsweek calling for such a move, the News editorialists opined: “We agree: It is appropriate to kill Saddam.” DALLAS BILLIONAIRE Harold Simmons, chairman of the board and CEO of NL Industries, will launch another proxy fight for control of Lockheed, after having a proposal to name himself and two of his business associates directors repelled by the Lockheed management. Simmons, who The Wall Street Journal calls a corporate raider, controls 19.8 percent of Lockheed stock. Like many corporate raiders of the 1980s Simmons wants to take Lockheed private by issuing large amounts of debtthe formula that recently landed Drexel junk-bond king Michael Milken in prison. Last year Simmons launched a similar proxy fight for control of Lockheed that was narrowly defeated. One of Simmons’s picks for last year’s board nominees was University of Texas System Chancellor \(and former Secretary of Mark have a long relationship at UT which was not harmed by Simmons’s spending $5 million for a recently-completed building at the UT-run Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. During the last proxy fight, Mark was featured in full-page ads in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers as an NL Industries spokesman. But even with Hans Mark’s help, the Journal reports that many of Simmons’s institutional supporters from last year have sided with management this time, and that Simmons might lose even worse than he did before. THE SUPER Conducting Super Collider looked like a federal boondoggle from the word jump, but recent reports of cost overruns by the Department of Energy begin to confirm early fears. A DOE report in January reveals a series of DOE low estimates and cost overruns for building the project. In the most recent leap, the cost estimate increased $700 million, from $8.6 billion to $9.3 billion, but estimates for the collider have increased dramatically since its inception. According to the report: “In its FY 1988 budget request, the Department decided to base its initial SSC construction request to the Congress on the Central Design Group’s cost estimate of $3,010 million [$3.01 billion].” Reagan Administration boosters upped the figure to $5.3 billion for 1988. From there, estimates went up to $7.8 billion, $8.3 billion, $8.6 billion, and now $9.3 billion, more than three times the original construction es timate by the Department of Energy. FREEDOM OF SPEECH gets only lip service in Round Rock. The editor of the Round Rock Leader was fired after running a front-page story quoting a Palestinian \(an George Bush a liar and condemned the U.S. attack on Iraq, according to the AustinAmerican Statesman. Leader publisher Ken Long wrote an apology to George Bush and the families of soldiers in the following issue of the Leader. In Orwellian fashion, Long’s editorial announcing the editor’s firing declared, “Free speech is one of the pillars upon which our great country was built.” TOXIC POLLUTERS in Texas are making national headlines. In the February 13-19 issue of In These Times, William Burke of Massachussetts describes a Superfund site in Southbend, a surburban Houston neighborhood, where the Environmental Protection Agency and 30 corporate polluters dump their toxic waste. A newsletter from the Brio Site Task Force in charge of the site, told resiimpermeable clay layer would prevent any toxic chemicals from entering Southbend’s underground water supply. A later study by the U.S. Geological Survey proved that claim wrong. And out of six Southbend women who were pregnant during recent incineration tests, five delivered babies with birth defects. Neighborhood groups are trying to stop plans to begin incineration of toxics until more reliable studies can be made. UPDATES. Here are some developments in stories that appeared recently in the Observer. Captain David Wiggins, the Fort Hood military doctor whose attempts to declare himself a conscientious objector were reported in our December 21, 1990 issue, is now facing court martial. Wiggins, who began a hunger strike last November in protest of the army’s refusal to grant him CO status, was involuntarily deployed to Saudi Arabia in December and has continued his civil disobedience since then. In January, he stripped off his uniform at a street intersection of an American military base in Saudi Arabia, to symbolize his shedding of his military identity. And he has refused to perform his assigned duties at a military hospital in Riyadh as part of his moral objection to supporting military activities; Wiggins’s lawyer says the hospital is overstaffed and so Wiggins’s refusal to work does not jeopardize soldiers’ lives. Wiggins has been charged with four violations of the uniform code of military justice; if convicted, he could be dishonorably discharged, confined for six months at 16 MARCH 8, 1991