■ What were House Speaker Tom Foley and Majority Leader Richard Gephardt doing in Texas just four days after the Labor Day break? They were attending annual picnic to honor Rep. Charles Stenholm (D., Tex.), chairman of the Conservative Democratic Forum in the House. Democratic leadership fears revival of the Boll Weevil bloc in House, first evidenced by recent revolt of six Southern Democrats who bucked Foley, Gephardt, and Dan Rostenkowski in House Ways and Means Committee, which Rostenkowski chairs. Hence the courting of Stenholm. Stenholm has told the leaders: “We are a minority, and we can be ignored or run over. But you’ll have difficulty winning without us.” . . . Problem is twofold. For first time in living memory there is no Southerner in a leadership position in House. Second, the new leadership team is not only liberal, but very liberal: Foley, ACU 4, ADA 85; Gephardt, ACU 10, ADA 75; William Gray (Majority Whip), ACU 0, ADA 95. . . . On Senate side, same thing holds: Majority Leader George Mitchell has ACU rating of 0, ADA rating of 95. . . . Leadership’s fear of Southern revolt is justified. Some Democrats, the most recent being Rep. Tommy Robinson (D., Ark.), are switching parties. And some Southern districts are switching columns, as did Claude Pepper’s Florida district last week when it fell to a Republican, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Commented Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater: “That seat has been a Democratic seat since it was created. For us to win it is a major victory.”
■ Can you believe the Soviets today any more than in 1962 when Ambassador Dobrynin flatly denied that Khrushchev had installed missiles in Cuba? No, says the State Department, which has published an intelligence report on Soviet and Eastern European shipments to Nicaragua of $300-million worth of military supplies since January. In May, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote George Bush that the Soviet Union had shipped no weapons to Nicaragua since January 1989; in July Eduard Shevardnadze assured James Baker that this was so. State’s report, which was unclassified, was picked up only by Washington Times, Washington Inquirer, Accuracy in Media, and the Japanese Sekai Nippo. … At Col. Muammur Qaddafi’s $300-million celebration of revolutionary Libya’s twentieth anniversary, Daniel Ortega gloated that Ronald Reagan, the scourge of the Sandinista and Libyan revolutions, was out of the action today, to which Qaddafi added that Reagan was “[with] Hitler and Mussolini in the dustbin of history.” . . . On August 15, Fidel Castro banned Moscow News and the Spanish-language Communist Sputnik from sale in Cuba. Too revisionist? . . . Amnesty International reports that at least 1,300 civilians were killed in suppression of freedom movement in Peking and Chengdu in June, and estimates subsequent arrests to be in the “tens of thousands.” . . . A recent student arrestee, Zhang Weiping, got nine years for talking to a Voice of America reporter. . . . Under martial law, none of the 130 foreign correspondents in Peking can interview anyone without prior authorization from a foreign-affairs office that has only one telephone line. . . . United Nations has again passed resolution calling for independence for Puerto Rico and acceptance of so-called 1,514 principles, which include: release of political prisoners and prisoners of war, cessation of repressive activities, return of political exiles, and reparations for the 91 years of colonialism. That was too much for Norway, which this year voted with the United States. . . . Gallup poll on hostage situation shows 66 per cent of American people favoring some kind of military action if diplomacy fails to produce results shortly.
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