Slouch by Jim Earle “Although 1 can appreciate your fondness for taxidermy, don’t you feel that we might give it a lower priority?” Opinion From Russia with... President Jarvis Miller is home — and with more, we suspect, than souvenirs from Europe. Gov. Bill Clements says the agricultural trade mission was a success. Some of the deals that were made or discussed on the trip will probably involve Texas A&M, enriching both the University and the foreign nations. One other benefit, however, may not be so apparent. That is the political pay-off. In addition to Miller, regents Clyde Wells and Norman Moser — agricultural leaders in their own right — accom panied the governor on the tour. A university president and two regents are rarely able to spend three weeks with the governor in such close quar ters. This is just speculation, of course, but Miller may have been playing catch-up as he was touring Russian wheat fields. Texas A&M and Jarvis Miller — then director of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service — had a good friend while Dolph Briscoe still had the governor’s chair. When he was defeated in the 1978 Democratic primary by John Hill, A&M’s leaders switched their support to the new man. But he was the wrong new man. Clements squeaked by Hill and took the mansion for the Republicans, for the first time since Reconstruction. And A&M’s leaders were without a good friend in the governor’s office. They still had powerful allies, of course, in the Texas and U.S. legislatures. But the executive branch is a fertile field to cultivate, especially since the governor can veto whole university programs on his whim. And so this three-week tour becomes more important. One A&M official said, in fact, that it was very valuable politically. We don’t doubt it. Welcome home. Dr. Miller. the small society by Brickman Woo-fa'-t! A Little /AMPA FEW A^f^ETAXE^**- AMP THEY CAM APP THE A^IPPLE- CLA^TC THE EMPAM^EfZEP ^FE^IE-^ LI-ST- Washington Star Syndi The Battalion USPS 045 360 LETTERS POLICY Letters to the editor should not exceed 300 words and are subject to being cut to that length or less if longer. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit such letters and does not guarantee to publish any letter. Each letter must be signed, show the address of the writer and list a telephone number for verification. Address correspondence to Letters to the Editor, The Battalion, Room 216, Reed McDonald Building, College Station, Texas 77843. Represented nationally by National Educational Adver tising Services, Inc., New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. The Battalion is published Monday through Friday from September through May except during exam and holiday Periods and the summer, when it is published on Tuesday hrough Thursday. Mail subscriptions are $16.75 per semester; $33.25 per school year, $35.00 per full year. Advertising rates furnished on request. Address: The Battalion, Room 216, Reed McDonald Building, College Station, Texas 77843. United Press International is entitled exclusively to the use for reproduction of all news dispatches credited to it. Rights of reproduction of all other matter herein reserved. Second-Class postage paid at College Station, TX 77843. Opinions expressed in The Battalion are those of the editor or of the writer of the article and are not necessarily those of the University administration or the Board of MEMBER Texas Press Association Southwest Journalism Congress Editor Liz Newlin Managing Editor Andy Williams Asst. Managing Editor Dillard Stone News Editors . .Karen Cornelison and Michelle Burrowes Sports Editor Sean Petty City Editor Roy Bragg Campus Editor Keith Taylor Focus Editors Beth Calhoun and Doug Graham Staff Writers Meril Edwards, Diane Blake, Louie Arthur, Richard Oliver, Mark Patterson, Carolyn Blosser, Kurt Allen Photo Editor . . .Lee Roy Leschper Jr. Photographers Lynn Blanco, Clay Cockrill, Sam Stroder, Ken Herrerra Cartoonist Doug Graham Regents. The Battalion is a non-profit, self- supporting enterprise operated by students as a university and community newspaper. Editorial policy is determined by the editor. Viewpoint The Battalion • Texas A&M University Monday • September 24, Broder Talmadge was denounced, not censured Ethics Committee acts as Senate umpire By DAVID S. BRODER United Press International WASHINGTON — What is so admira ble about the Senate Ethics Committee is that it handles the little cases and the big ones with equal aplomb. There were headlines across America last week when the Ethicsmen decided to recommend that Sen. Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.) be “denounced” for his use and abuse of Senate funds. Some people thought he should be “censured” and others thought he should be “condemned,” but after 15 months of deliberation the ethics committee was unanimous in saying that “denounce” was the appropriate verb form for the category of impropriety in which Talmadge was in volved. The clarity of the committee’s judgment came as no surprise. Ten days before the big decision on the Talmadge case, the Congressional Record included a compila tion of 92 recent ethics committee rulings, which cumulatively constitute perhaps the best display of ethical non-equivocation in America political history. Interpretive Ruling No. 236 of last March 19, for example, will go into the annals as “a page is a page is a page” doc trine of almost poetic purity. In its post-Watergate ethics fervor, the Senate decreed, among other things, that franked (or postage-free) newsletters should not be mere propaganda pieces about the senator distributing them. For that purpose, it set a limit of five “person ally phrased references to a senator per page.” • That seems straightforward enough. Even the dumbest senator can count to five, so its application appeared to be easy. But wait. Some crafty senatorial mind spotted a loophole and inquired cleverly: “What is the definition of a page’ for pur poses of the personal reference rule?” The source of the inquiry is shielded in anonymity, but the reply has been pub lished now for all the world to admire. It is a pleasure to quote: Non of the cases had the human drama of Talmadge’s ex-wife’s testimony about the suit pockets overflowing with cur rency. But several of them had their own fascination. “The committee has determined that a ‘page,’ for purposes of the limitation on the number of personally phrased references to a senator in a franked mailing, is each side of an 8% x 11 inch, or 814 by 14 inch sheet of paper, irrespective of the number of folds utilized in the design of the matter mailed. Thus, if a newsletter is on a legal- size sheet of paper and has print on both sides, it would be a two-page newsletter for the purposes of the franking regu lations, even if the paper were folded to resemble a four-page pamphlet.” Fold it as you will, the committee told Senator Anonymous, there can be only ten personally phrased references to yourself on that kind of paper. It was an admirable opinion, reminiscent in its logic of Ab raham Lincoln’s favorite anecdote about how many legs a dog would have if you called its tail a leg. But the committee but tressed its holding by noting that “this in terpretation is in accord with the defini tion of a sheet of paper used by the Com mittee on Rules and Administration for purposes of members’ paper allowances,” which seemed to put down anybody who might be inclined to quibble. Consistency, thy home is in the Senate. And virtue’s, too. Since the Senate got se riously into ethics coding a couple of years ago, the committee has issued no less than 242 of these interpretive rulings. They seem to come out at the rate of one every three days, as often as one can expect an assemblage of 99 men and a woman to generate an ethical quandry. The ethics committee has a staff of 18 to keep up with the work. They call the issues as they see them, just as good umpires are supposed to do. A can r< By El Bait Students w int ratio idler, in-de ght by p> here in now, if he wishes to get afewgitts fiddle players together and recoil! self singing, “I’ve Got Those Dowm Dumps-’Cause-Tve-Been-Denom jfancy anal And-I-Might-As-Well-Be -Ceis Blues.” But that’s just my reading. IfTi wants to be safe, he ought to Interpretive Ruling No. 243. (c) 1979, The Washington Post Ci ogram rsity. Dr. B. L. SI iversity He is a Univei lich certai urses are < Senate employee was given agoaii jrking with : taking travel expenses and an honoi terested in t from a foreign organization in com with a seminar on unemployment, told firmly that an expenses-paid trip on the weekend immediately ing the seminar would to be permi Weekend real-estate selling was out of line for another employee, third was told that he could ht isses. They senator-boss write a book in his of- rticular cur provided the book was not on sale in inimum nu in which the senator was up There are all sorts of fascinating! tions being drawn by the senate experts. One of the new rulings pen senator to draw royalties on record: has made, which will bringjoytoth of the fiddle-playing majority lea: recording star, Sen. Robert C & W.Va.). If I read that ruling right, there ing to bar Sen. Talmadge from a lired, he sa y departrr udgi / IM?NP (W ■ LKWDL.lt wasn't this bad last time.- y an invest based on 'en gold, sai finance e The first n sting in son iow your s |roth of Ter ance depa e of an ap [alysis offen Nothing ha place of c se and so d. While c< d a good i ice, it can te the bust t-buck pro “I’ve know doctors an ien taken, ople will vestment er the pho “When sor stment is j framing sign lead. There risk investim ■There is m he said, as la The asylum key-keepers have become the inmati The flap over Russian troops in Cuba is another example of what happens when grown men try to make sense out of non sense. It is nonsense to believe somebody didn’t know before two weeks ago that Russian troops were in Cuba, particularly when public officials have made it per fectly clear somebody did. It is nonsense to say the United States can enforce Salt II if its intelligence system was, as some contend, so inept that it couldn’t detect the presence of 3,000 Rus sian combat troops 90 miles from Florida. It is even more nonsense to believe it really makes any difference whether Rus sian troops are in Cuba or not when the Soviet Union is perfectly capable of an nihilating the United States with long- range missiles. It is nonsense to believe SALT II will significantly advance the cause of nuclear disarmament when the U.S. is planning to build an MX missile system not covered by SALT II and which can only encourage the Soviet Union to build similar missiles. It is nonsense to take U.S. or Russian politicians seriously when they have all become trapped in their own web of de ceit, pretending nuclear disarmament progress is being made even stockpile nuclear arms and troopsd kinds. The keepers of the keys to the a have become the inmates and donl it yet. The only thing the restofusJ is hunker down and hope somebody^ to their senses before it’s too late. Barre-Montpelier (Vt.) Times-Ai Letters Amino acids don’t explain the complex^ only an intelligent creator could build Editor: In a recent article (Sept. 11), Dr. Pon- namperuma claimed that his discovery on amino acids, which termed he termed “seeds of life,” on meteorites proves that life is at least 3.8 billion years old. The question is, however, just how close to life are these “seeds”? Dr. Richard B. Bliss, former science consultant for Educational Consulting As sociates, states the following in regards to the combination of amino acides into pro teins: “There are 20 different kinds of amino acids, and the average protein consists of 300-500 such units in a chain. The number of possible proteins with only 200 amino acids per chain 20 to the 200th or 10 to the 260 (the number 1 followed by 260 zeros)! The whole known universe contains far less that 10 to the 100th atoms and 20 bil lion years is far less that 10 to the 20th seconds. So even if these proteins were as numerous as atoms in the universe, and even if a new set of proteins were pro duced every second for 20 billion years, the chances of finding our particular pro tein with 200 specified amino acids is still about zero (1 chance in 10 to the 140th)!” The Russian biochemist, A.I. Oparin, who is the “father” of the modem view of chemical evolution, was very conscious of this problem when he wrote: .the spontaneous formation of such an j atomic arrangement in the protein molecule would seem as improbable as would the accidental origin of the text of Virgil’s Aneid (a Latin epic poem) from scattered type.” When considering that this type is still dealing with just the proteins (one step above amino acids) one can only be amazed at the complexity of an entire gene. Impossible is almost too mild a term for such an event, and living systems re quire much more than one gene! The only sensible alternative for the “organization” of such a complex entity as a cell, (and evolution even claims the entire universe evolved) is that it must, as all machines, art, music, etc., has an intel ligent Designer and Creator. If one would seriously consider the tremendous amount of scientific information which supports the case for special creation, I am sure that they would come to the same conclusion: It takes intelligence to design; irrationality only leads to further irrationality. —Gary L. Campbell, ’76 Editor's note: This letter was accompanied by 17 other signatures. No film politics Editor: In response to Mehmet Sahinogulu’s letter of September 20, we would like to express our views on MSG Aggie Cinema’s programming. We attempt to bring the students and faculty of Texas A&M Uni versity quality movies at a low price. MSG Aggie Cinema chooses its films largely on the basis of box office performance, favor able reviews, and popular demands. Through devices such as student survey polls and committee member input, we try to select a wide range of films which would satisfy various tastes. While “Mid night Express” dealt with sensitive subject matter, we presented it as entertainment and not as political a tural comment. —Christine Sn —Andy Hartn Just 1 thing to si Editor: To Lenwood S. Adams, ’80. Who are you to judge? —Tony Jenninj Editor s note: The above refers tot printed in The Battalion Sept. 20cot ing homosexuals in the church. THOTZ by Doug Gra) ■&vrt tiSTen, nuclear plant radial-ion has Killed nobody, bof each year, hundreds are Kd\ed Vn the Coa\ and oil industries.... €Lver> manufactur/n^ and 'mstaUinq Solar systems wooCq Kill more, workers than Would buildlncj iMgWy (ho cares ahosj-r worKersj Dont- you realize, tnat radia+Dn oniqWr norm thL beautify I people? 're. irnpo<-t