LAW ENFORCEMENT LANDMARK: Voters in Dallas County, Tex., have achieved one for the record books (and Ripley's Believe It Or Not!): Lupe Valdez, a former migrant worker, has been elected Dallas County's first Hispanic lesbian sheriff. She is the first Democrat to win the office of Dallas County sheriff in nearly 30 years. As a candidate, Valdez was endorsed by the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which hailed her as the "first-ever Latina lesbian sheriff." According to an Associated Press article, Valdez noted that her "deceased mother looked down from heaven and watched her girl go from picking beans in a field to leading a 1,900-employee law enforcement agency with a $90-million budget."
RADICAL LAWYER: Lynne Stewart, the 65-year-old attorney facing a possible 40-year sentence if convicted of supporting radical blind cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence for seditious conspiracy to bomb New York City landmarks, including Manhattan's bridges and tunnels, under questioning by prosecutors in her trial, said last week, "I believe that entrenched institutions will not be changed except by violence." She also said, "I believe in the politics that lead to violence being exerted by people on their own behalf to effectuate change."
According to the Washington Post, Stewart was question by a federal prosecutor for ". . .her statements and support for a 'people's revolution'. . . [and] testified that her lifelong philosophy included fighting 'entrenched ferocious capitalism that is in this country today.'" In the past, Stewart has represented radical defendants such as the Weather Underground. According to London's Guardian newspaper, Stewart's lawyer, radical attorney Michael Tigar, called her case "an opportunity to confront the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft effort to destroy human rights and scare the country into lurching to the right."
GLOBAL WARMING: Global warming activists have not given up on creating a socialist global economy through controls on energy use. They are taking their grievances and scare tactics to the corporate boardrooms of America, says author Steven Milloy. By becoming shareholders of publicly owned companies and pushing for changes in corporate disclosure and SEC rules, activist-shareholders are attempting to steer corporate policy:
- American Electric Power will now report on the risks of its greenhouse gas emissions and the steps they are taking to reduce them.
- Cinergy Corporation, a coal-burning utility, caved to demands from church and state pension funds to report on its greenhouse gas emissions.
- About 40 large companies support the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
- The Carbon Disclosure Project, consisting of 87 investors managing $9 trillion in assets, is asking 500 large companies to start disclosing their "carbon risks" and the plans they have for reducing greenhouse gases.
Moreover, activist-shareholders filed resolutions with over 25 companies in 2003, urging them to reduce greenhouse gases. While none of the resolutions passed, many of them were significantly supported by shareholders with tallies as high as 32%. Activists are also pressuring the SEC to allow for "cumulative voting," whereby minority shareholders can elect members of boards of directors by throwing multiple votes toward one or more candidates. The idea is to get their own "green" members elected to push through more activist policies. Corporations seem unaware of what is going on. The majority of the 690 public comments regarding the SEC rule change were from activists supporting the proposal-only ten were from corporations or corporate executives. So reports Steven Milloy in "Global Warming Extremists Use Shareholder Actions to Pressure Corporations," Environment and Climate News, August 2004, Heartland Institute.
CORNELL DEFUNDS PAPER: Cornell University's student government has pulled funding from the Cornell American, a conservative student newspaper. The American was slated to receive money from a student activities fund this September, but the board that oversees the fund recently voted to rescind the grant. The American has been at the center of two controversies at Cornell this year. The campus chapter of the NAACP protested against the paper in April because it published an article opposing racial preferences in admissions.
