Letters are posted as we receive them during the week, and before they are printed in the paper, so check back frequently to see new letters. If you'd like to send a letter to the editor, use this postmarks submission form, or email your letter directly to mail@austinchronicle.com. Thanks for your patience.

Dear Editor,
    A month ago, while cruising around Lady Bird Lake, my friend and I were thrown off of our bikes, beaten, and I had my wallet stolen. I understand wanting my wallet. Not the beating. It was South by Southwest week. These kids thought we had money. Blah blah blah. Take it. It's gone. We are both okay.
    A little more than a week ago, while cruising Sixth Street for a slice, my friend and I were punched in the face for being “faggots.” I am a faggot, tried and true. A faggot that is wondering what the hell is going on in Austin? A faggot that wants solidarity. A faggot that wants all the aggressive folks out there to understand why this is obviously not okay.
    I am a faggot that wants Austin to think about its obnoxious slogan "keep it weird" and actually do that exact thing. This city is growing and changing. Its problems keep growing and changing. Drunken tourism seems to be a stable and growing income for this town. Drunk or sober, let's not forgot that anybody can jaunt down down the street and deserves to do so peacefully.
    With this said … I know that I am not the only one that this has happened to over the last month. Five friends have had similar altercations. I know stuff happens … but this is crazy. What is happening?

Dear Editor,
    What is happening to the children of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sect in Eldorado, Texas, is horrible [“Hundreds of Children Removed From FLDS Compound,” News, April 11]. While we must search for truth, we must do so in a way that does not create trauma. We live in the USA, not Nazi Germany. We must seek out only those who break the law. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to leave the mothers and children at home and sequester the men against whom the allegations are made? Is there an investigation into the accuracy of the allegation? What if someone just wanted to cause trouble for this group? I realize that as a citizen I do not have the same information the government authorities have, but there is common sense that should be used in handling this matter. Come on; taking more than 400 people from their home?! If there is anyone that is unhappy or abused in the group, the investigators would find that out without having to remove the children from their mothers.

Dear Editor,
    I just want to thank the guy riding his bike down Guadalupe the other day at rush hour. He was doing his part, saving a lot of gas. It was great the way the rest of us continuously missed all of the well-synchronized lights – I assume timed that way to save fuel – and had to stop and idle for 45 seconds while he ignored traffic laws and rode on through all. To make those lights work, you need to do only the posted speed limit, but because of the bottleneck this guy created that day, that was not the case. So all those cars sat at idle time and time again, burning many times the fuel that guy saved. I drive a very fuel-efficient car (30-plus miles per gallon) and a scooter (75-plus mpg). The city offers many options of bike routes, and I applaud the folks who utilize them and wish I had the ambition. But to block traffic like that is very inconsiderate to other drivers – and the environment. You are not part of the solution, so that makes you part of the problem! Wake up!

Dear Editor,
    It's good that a car-free reporter (Wells Dunbar) covered the proposed Park Place Village for homeless people [“Beside the Point,” News, April 11]. Most people with cars would never notice the difficulty of getting to the site on bus and or foot.
    In the upcoming City Council elections, there are actually two candidates who think the city needs to spend more on sidewalks. These are Robin Cravey for Place 4 and Allen Demling for Place 1. The other candidates are vague about sidewalks, crosswalks, bicycle parking, and so on. Cid Galindo announced that he would make Austin walkable by building town centers. That means, I guess, that developments like the Domain will somehow help people walk across Slaughter, Lamar, the Capital of Texas Highway, and so on.
    A recent Austin American-Statesman article mentioned that the city now spends $5 million to $7 million per year on sidewalks. (The total budget exceeds $2 billion.) Right now, all the sidewalk money goes to wheelchair curb cuts. That is, sidewalks are not being built.
    Sidewalks are basic. You can't build a glorious new city without pedestrian space. Yet that's precisely current policy. We can't afford sidewalks, but we've got to move more cars around faster – on borrowed money, if necessary.
    Connecting Austin's streets for people on foot, on bicycles, and in wheelchairs would be the cheapest and most effective way to get people out of cars, unclog the streets, and clean the air. But this point tends to be lost on politicians.
    We have two sane council candidates this time. That's two more than usual. If you want to be able to walk around 30 years from now, vote for Cravey and Demling.

Dear Editor,
    In your mention of the recent $2 million endowment from BB&T Corp. to the UT Department of Philosophy to study objectivism, your reporter said "[Ayn Rand], who died in 1982, has become a leading light for Libertarians and neoconservatives, attracted by her support of laissez-faire economics" [“Naked City,” News, April 4]. He could just as well have said that she was anathema to neoconservatives (and many Libertarians) due to her atheism or that she was a leading light to liberals for her opposition to laws interfering with relationships between consenting adults and for favoring the right to abortion. Or he might have said that both conservatives and liberals reject objectivism for arguing that each man should live for his own sake, sacrificing himself neither to (a nonexistent) God nor other individuals nor the nation nor the environment. The general lack of knowledge of objectivism, and its disjunctions with all mainstream schools of thought, is precisely why the BB&T award is so desperately needed.

Dear Editor,
    Re: “Point Austin,” April 11 [News]: Your subhead last week – “You can tell a lot about newspapers by what they don’t cover” – is right on. I remember an Austin weekly that, if it were true, would tell its readers that all seven City Council members, including the mayor, owe their seats to bundles of developer cash. A guy named Al Ears would remind us of the fact, at least every other week, until someone who cared about our city got off his or her butt and tried to do something about it.
    The paper would tell us this fact made a difference, that well more than 90% of the time, in contested land-use cases, the council voted for the developer and against neighborhood and environment interests. It would note that in most issues that mattered, the vote was unanimous, or perhaps with a weak protest vote.
    The paper would report that wearing a green tie every time a camera pointed your way didn’t make you green. If the City Council trotted out a Climate Protection Plan and declared it the “best in the nation,” the paper would explain that the plan was 20% green and 80% greenwash. It would tell us how many tons of our daily trash fail to get recycled. Its readers would know how much water we waste and how many hundreds of millions more dollars our city wants to bet on decades more of water waste.
    If the city manager went from being “best in the world” to smelly goat in the course of six weeks, its readers would know why.
    It would do all of that – and more – on a shoestring reporter budget.
    You can tell a lot about a paper from what doesn't get covered.

   [Michael King replies: Save Our Springs Alliance is both financially and intellectually bankrupt, can't organize its way out of a disposable paper bag, and its executive director, Bill Bunch, blames the Chronicle. Well, why not – a politics wholly based on denouncing your neighbors and community has its limitations; arrogant self-righteousness is only the most obvious.]

Dear Editor,
    With Ronnie Earle retiring at the end of the year, innocent little black girls who happen to be "big for their age" may think they can finally rest easy. Sorry, kids. Earle's personally chosen heir, Rosemary Lehmberg, has a clear stance on letting abusive murderers get away with beating a baby nearly to death at home and then dumping her at a day-care center so another innocent girl there can have her life destroyed by vicious prosecutorial persecution – she is all in favor of it. Where does Ms. Lehmberg stand on intimidating and threatening a false confession out of an 11-year-old child without having a lawyer or guardian present? Again, decidedly in favor, since she and Gary Cobb appear to have helped Austin Police Department detectives knowingly circumvent the law in order to do so. I wonder, how many of the Travis County voters who rubber-stamped her into office have overly large daughters?

   [Editor's note: Please see “Advocates Still Fighting for Lacresha Murray's Freedom,” News, Aug. 7, 1998, for more.]

Dear Editor,
    Re: Katherine Gregor's April 11 "Where's the Streetcar?" [News]: She did a terrible disservice to those who spoke at the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization Transit Working Group on April 7 by saying "a sizable audience endured overlong citizen presentations unconnected to the critical-path work at hand.” When the CAMPO and city leaders want to follow Cap Metro and Chairman Lee Walker's race to insolvency, citizens deserve to be heard. What I heard was an innovative, homegrown idea on how to use our existing bus system to improve service, cover the entire community, cost less per rider, and pollute less within the existing revenue stream. Citizen Richard Shultz developed this idea all on his own, and it is so compelling that it deserves to be tried. See more at www.cmt4austin.org. Why go off on another Titanic voyage with another rail project before the commuter rail has a chance to prove it's a taxpayer nightmare, costing enough to buy each rider a new hybrid each year, nitrogen oxide (ozone polluting) way more per rider than single occupant vehicles, not doing one whit to reduce congestion, while causing reduced service to those who depend on public transit just to try to keep the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority afloat?

Dear Editor,
    Re: “Pet Sterilization Dogs City and Retailer” [News, April 11]: When interviewed for this article, one of the things I said and firmly believe is that the Austin City Council will spend any amount of money it takes to save bugs and birds. But it was unwilling to save puppies and kittens who needed them when it counted. The council let itself be intimidated by out-of-town and out-of-state dog breeders who didn't want their pocketbooks hurt. Now, instead of being a leader, Austin is falling far behind as all the large cities in Texas either have or are working on a mandatory spay/neuter ordinance. Austin is sitting back, doing nothing but killing more and more animals because the Animal Advisory Commission, led by its president and vice president, wants it that way. Those two individuals need to be removed from the commission; the City Council needs to grow a backbone and pass the spay/neuter ordinance we sent them. It was well-written. Do the right thing for the puppies and kittens at Town Lake that have already been born and should not have been. Slow down the numbers pouring in every day. It isn't too late to pass the Austin Save a Pet ordinance.

Dear Editor,
    Neo-leftism is an insidious ideological trap. Louis Black’s recent “Page Two” piece is a clear example [April 11]. It is obvious that he is struggling against being identified as a leftist. However, notwithstanding his claims that he is less “through ideology and more by way of history and contemporary events,” his obfuscations and ad hominem musings cannot hide his confused ideology.
    Postmodern groupthink created by decades of cynical propaganda condemning American exceptionalism and favoring fashionable global collectivist populism is the core of contemporary leftism. It legitimizes moral relativism and historical revisionism. The results are credulous pernicious toleration of malevolent ideologies ranging from Marxist socialist servitude and lowest-denominator equality, suicidal pacifism, anarchic multiculturalism, and Islamist revolutionary chic.
    It requires no objective moral or intellectual honesty, advocating denial of actual evil while supporting delusional dogmatic utopianism. And frighteningly, it now drives the Democratic Party as a factionalized subsidiary of the extreme left-wing establishments, e.g., academia, unions, mainstream news and entertainment organizations, legal industry, and gender- and race-based special interests.
    For the free world to survive, moral and historical clarity is required. And in practical terms, that means acknowledging that stoic individual accountability, free association, limited Republican federalist constitutional government, and robust resistance to tyranny are required to perpetuate liberty – the exact opposite of leftism. It is obvious that Mr. Black has limited understanding of these precepts or is in denial. His positions on Iraq, illegal immigration, and the social safety net reveal this.
    Just as world communism and Nazism lethally threatened humanity, so does contemporary Islamist and Marxist fascism. And make no mistake; if our guard is let down, the devotees of those tyrannies will prevail. Neo-leftism is their ideological enabler. Mr. Black, Democrats, and all so-called progressives own that.

Dear Editor,
    Tell me something. When Barack Obama was here in Austin, I remember plain as day all his supporters and himself attacking opponents for receiving lobbyist funding for their campaigns. They spoke about working together for a better country instead of running negative campaign ads. And that all funding for the campaigns would be public. They also spoke about Obama being for clean energy. Fine and dandy, but do you remember his closed-door deal with the nuclear plant in his home state? I thought uranium was dirty?! Isn't that what the term "dirty bomb" was relaying? Furthermore, Mr. Obama leads all candidates in donations from various sources, from the pharmaceutical industry to commercial banks. The Center for Responsive Politics stated Mr. Obama has received more than $528,000 from the pharmaceutical companies and more than $1.38 million from banks. Now he waffles and wants to change the system he agreed to midgame. He also beats his opponent's campaign in media spending by double. Tell me something else! I also remember Geraldine Ferraro getting let go from the Hillary Clinton support team for saying the word "race," since people got offended. Yet days later the man makes a national speech about what else? Attending a church with an allegedly racist reverend. Mr. Barack Hussein Obama, are you a racist? Are you a wolf in sheep's clothing sent from Mecca to destroy us from within? You are a civil rights lawyer; your platform seems to be civil rights liar! Are you a patriotic American?

Dear Editor,
    District Attorney Ronnie Earle was quoted [“District Eternity,” News, April 11]: "I've got some hopes that I can spend some time and energy advocating for public financing of campaigns and against corporate corruption and for universal health care,” he said. "Those are three things that I think are the very most important things that we could do to restore democracy, because if democracy depends on money, it isn't democracy – because then the public is frozen out of the process."
    I agree and believe that Mr. Earle could be an inspiring leader for a nonpartisan movement with the credibility to attract the donors, activists, and voters to make this happen. Perhaps we can start with public financing of judicial elections by coordinating with existing reform groups like the League of Women Voters, Public Citizen, Common Cause, Texans for Public Justice, etc. Even including all the supporters of Kinky Friedman and Carole Strayhorn.
    He is the right man at the right time for an idea whose time has come.

Dear Editor,
    A 16-year-old girl calls a shelter to report an alleged abuse, and an entire village is rounded up and the children placed in foster care [“Hundreds of Children Removed From FLDS Compound,” News, April 11]? Another example of misdirected overkill? What next? Entire neighborhoods swarming with SWAT teams searching for an alleged criminal? Shock and awe and invade a country mistakenly suspected of involvement with 9/11? Round up and soften up (torture) suspected insurgents? The mass killings of "suspected terrorists"? The surrender of constitutional rights to protect us from the enemy? Who is the enemy? Difficult timesl, yes, but where is our sanity and reason?
    John Ashcroft recently misspoke and substituted the name Osama for Obama. He was summarily booed by the crowd. It is said that while involved in a White House meeting to authorize torture, the same gentleman said something akin to, "History will not look kindly upon this.”
    At the risk of being labeled a suspected whatever, falling prey to the PATRIOT Act, and having water poured up my nose, I submit this as a heartfelt and sincere call to reason.

Dear Editor,
    Re: “Pet Sterilization Dogs City and Retailer” [News, April 11]: It is so hard to cover a situation this complicated in such a limited space, but Patty J. Ruland did just that. The cartoon at the top depicting Petland's business model is right on target except it neglects the horrible situations many of these animals come from before making it to the Hunte Corp.'s dog brokerage, Petland's primary supplier. As usual, the quote from Carol Adams just goes to show she lives in her own little completely-closed-off-from-reality world. The Austin Save a Pet ordinance was right on track until Adams stabbed the rest of the commission in the back (and if anyone wants to find the minutes to that Animal Advisory Commission meeting, you will find that is an exact quote from the meeting) and took Dr. Harold Blatt on her own to go and visit Betty Dunkerley, where the both of them shot down the ASAP ordinance.
    Although Ruland did a great job with this article, for some reason no one, not even the Chronicle, wants to point out the 380,000 pounds of euthanized cats and dogs that went to the landfill last year at a cost of about $340,000 to the taxpayers, just for corpse disposal. That doesn't count the other $5.1 million (poor taxpayers footing the bill again) that was given to Town Lake Animal Center to operate in 2008. Quite an increase from the $4.2 million they spent last year. And of course, none of this takes into account the millions of dollars and countless hours of labor contributed by the hundreds if not thousands of volunteers and rescue groups in the Travis County area. An awful lot of money to protect someone's right to "do as they please with their property.” What about my right to not have to pay to clean up someone else's mess?
    Hey, City Council members! Welcome to the 21st century! Now step up to the plate, grow some huevos, and pass a working spay/neuter ordinance.

Dear Editor,
    I was completely appalled to learn that Petland was opening its doors in our city [“Pet Sterilization Dogs City and Retailer,” News, April 11]. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been a pet store selling puppies and kittens in Austin for many years. This is a huge step backward for our city, and once the truth is known, I find it hard to believe the people of Austin will tolerate such a store here.
    There are groups of concerned citizens all over the country working to educate the public about the problems associated with selling puppies and kittens in stores. This issue does not just concern individuals active in the animal-rights community. People everywhere are speaking out and taking a stand. You may have seen the recently aired Oprah Winfrey Show about puppy mills, which has gotten a very positive response from the public. And, at one of the recent Petland protests in Austin, a group of people on their way to the store stopped to hear what the protesters had to say and came back to join the protest.
    While that cute puppy from the pet store may go to a loving home, the breeding dogs at the puppy mills endure lives of misery, cramped in small cages their entire lives and receiving only enough care to keep them alive so they can make more puppies. If they don't die in the puppy mill, when they are worn out, they are killed or sold at auction, where a lucky few may have the good fortune to be rescued. Despite the best efforts of their rescuers, however, many of these dogs are never able to overcome the physical and emotional trauma of their pasts. Before you purchase a puppy or kitten from a pet store, please do the research and decide for yourself. Shelters and rescue groups always have plenty of loving and well-behaved dogs and cats available for adoption. There is a wealth of information available online about puppy mills and also pet adoptions.
    The many thousands of adoptable dogs being euthanized in shelters every year and the untold numbers suffering in puppy mills all over the country don't have a choice. We do.

Dear Editor,
    Let's cut to the chase here rather than chase our own tail (pardon the pun) [“Pet Sterilization Dogs City and Retailer,” News, April 11]. Petland is bad business for Austin. How fair is it to allow a store to sell puppies when we have more than 30 homeless dogs killed every day at our shelter? Reputable animal advocates stated on Oprah Winfrey's puppy-mill show that "99 percent of pet stores get their puppies from puppy mills." Am I really supposed to believe that Petland represents the 1% that doesn't? Shutting down pet stores and requiring mandatory sterilization are the keys to ending pet overpopulation. Groups like Responsible Pet Owners Alliance that think otherwise are downright irresponsible and have no alliance with saving animals' lives.