Postmarks

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Clark-Madison Crosses the Line

Editor:

I have just read the "Naked City" section of the June 6 edition. I accept that The Austin Chronicle is a liberal rag, and I am OK with that. I come from Massachusetts and have only been in the Austin area for almost four months now. I consider myself socially and fiscally conservative, but I am probably more liberal than the majority of Texas conservatives.

I enjoy reading the "Naked City" section of The Austin Chronicle because it gives me an insight into the Austin political landscape. As I said, I understand the political views that you and your writers have, and your desire to express them while attempting to inform the public, but when I read Mike Clark-Madison's description of Grover Norquist, whom I am not familiar with, as a "Leading Republican gasbag and anti-tax crank," I feel that you fail on both accounts. I tend to give less weight to your point of view, and thereby your paper in whole, than I would otherwise have done. It leads me to think that you cannot challenge ideas on an intellectual level and therefore have to resort to inflammatory descriptions to cover for your lack of skill.

I am sure that you have many valid points to make on a wide range of issues, but if you cannot articulate them in an intelligent, respectful manner, you are doomed to be ignored as a liberal hack that has to resort to personal attacks to discredit his ideological opponents.

Semper Fidelis,

Chris Pritchard

Round Rock

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The Right to Choose!

Dear Editor,

Austinites Beware! Our fine city faces many challenges: a city budget with a $70 million deficit, a sales-tax revenue base that has declined 30% in the past few years, rising unemployment due to our current economy, rising insurance costs that affect the medical care of Austin citizens, extremely high property taxes, and AISD's performance rating that is less than stellar. With these important challenges, our current leaders find it most important to pass a smoking-ban ordinance.

While saying it is for "the betterment of public health," there are amendments to allow smoking in bingo halls, nonprofit organizations, and pool halls, which means once again, our government is appealing to the well-funded and better-lobbied special-interest groups while hiding under the mask of public health. Austinites: We deserve better ... we deserve the truth!

Don't let your City Council take away your right to choose.

David Tripoli

Director of Austin Warehouse District Association

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Step Outside, 'Page Two'

Dear Louis Black,

I love "Page Two." I usually agree with your politics more than I do with the Chronicle's official endorsements. In the past I have always respected your opinions, but I think your rantings on the smoking ordinance are a bit over the top. Bars and nightclubs will open and close regardless of the economy and regardless of the smoking ordinance. Threatening to "run a box in the Chronicle" blaming any council member in favor of the smoking ordinance for the future closure of music venues [May 30] is ridiculous. You need to take your cigarettes outside and smoke one to calm down. You should be thankful for the council members willing to modify the ordinance to allow smoking near doorways and on patios.

Donald Dodson

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Special Interests Represent the Other Guy, Not Me

Editor:

I'd like to comment on Louis Black's use of the term "special interests" ["Page Two," May 30].

"Special interests" has become a negative term meaning those who have a narrow focus that benefits few, but who have the money and power to preserve their position at the cost of many others.

He uses this term to describe the 15 advocacy and health organizations supporting the smoke-free ordinance and the thousands of people they represent, not to mention the bulk of Austin residents who are nonsmokers and support smoke-free public places. These are not special interests but the majority of the Austin population who wants to breathe clean air.

The real special interests are the 20% of the population whose habit is known to hurt others but are still being coddled and protected by certain council members and business owners when they can simply step outside for a cigarette like they do everywhere else.

The other special-interest group is the business owners themselves, who have a lot of influence over the council and who are being allowed to jeopardize the health of their workers and patrons when all other businesses are already complying with popular smoke-free laws.

And of course, there is the tobacco industry, the ultimate special-interest group, marketing addiction and death that manipulates public policy on every level to maintain their bottom line.

Chronicle readers, please reconsider who the real special-interest groups are and support the policy that protects everyone's right to breathe instead of the profit or addiction of others.

Vanessa Luna

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Why Do People Go to Bars?

Dear Editor,

Regarding the proposed smoking ban: Has the council considered that people go out to bars to go drinking? That's not exactly the healthiest activity, so why should the government be able to pick and choose the elements of an acceptable lifestyle? Save the no-smoking signs for the hike-and-bike trail.

Thank you,

Kelly Deanne Davis

P.S. If the council really wanted to save our lungs, why not come up with some decent public transportation? I would venture to guess that the emissions from cars are more harmful than that from a cigarette.

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Rawk On, Rock n Roll Rentals!

Editor:

I enjoyed your great section on SoCo [May 30] but was a little disappointed at your description of Rock n Roll Rentals as dark and smelling strange. Maybe the money the store saves on décor goes back into the community. Owners Nancy and Jim Norman give great prices and helpful advice to many nonprofits, and I could not imagine doing a special event without Jim in attendance making sure that things are running smoothly. To many of us this counts for a lot more than a slick-looking store!

Beverly Scarborough

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'Gringo' Demeans White People

Dear Sir:

I just read Lee Nichols' Oct. 11 article on Mingo Saldivar ["Texas Platters"]. In the article, he calls white people the pejorative term gringo. I for one hate that term, and I rank it along with those neighborly terms such as nigger, meskin, greaser, chink, slope, wop, dago, and kraut. Why do you let people demean white people? You would not let him use any of the words that I enumerated to describe other races. Why do you abet him in this offensive use of the language?

Joe Louis Coleman

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Bring Back the Coach!

Editor:

I used to love the Chronicle. I couldn't wait until Thursday and read the news that doesn't get printed in the Statesman, and I enjoyed the columns like "Coach's Corner." Alas, the Coach is gone, and now we have columns like "After a Fashion," where we can read all about Stephen Macmillan Moser's haircut [June 6]. He's Margaret's brother, so he gets space to write about his new hairdo? I'm going to puke. Good thing I have this Chronicle to clean up the mess ...

James W. Rohlich

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Bravo, 'Chronicle'

Just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed Bill Bentley's piece on Ernie Durawa ["Designated Drummer," May 23]. Guys like him are the backbone of any music scene, and, as you folks are no doubt aware, he's just one of a bunch of great musicians in Austin who've put in many years on their instruments. Bentley's piece covered a lot of ground and made it look easy, which is a trick, but then, there's been a lot of stories of this high quality in the Chronicle recently, including several by Margaret Moser.

No wonder a lot of the music fans I know here in Europe check in with the Chronicle's Web site every week! Where else would they find stuff like this?

Best,

Ed Ward

Berlin

[Ed. note: Ward is a former Music editor of the Chronicle.]

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Another Take on 'Israel/Palestine'

Editor:

Michael King's recommendation of Tanya Reinhart's Israel/Palestine ["Call and Answer," June 6] exposes how biased and ignorant they both are. His dismissal of the current "road map" as "public relations ... grudgingly accepted by the Sharon government on the condition that only the Palestinians have to abide by it" is contemptible, as is Reinhart's assessment of Israel's peace agreement implementations.

If King read the "road map," he'd find Palestinian obligations to confiscate weapons from and dismantle terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad and end anti-Israeli incitement stated right up front: www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2003/20062.htm .

So far, no terrorists have been arrested. No weapons have been confiscated. Abu Mazen himself urged more anti-Israeli violence three months ago (A-sharq Al Awsat, March 3).

Israel has released prisoners, given work visas to at least 25,000 Palestinians, and pledged settlement dismantling. Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad have pledged to attack and kill more Israelis. Sharon "grudgingly accepted" a peace plan the Palestinians haven't even begun carrying out.

As for Israel/Palestine ... any book regarding the Middle East praised by the anti-Israeli, Holocaust-denying Noam Chomsky is immediately suspect. Chomsky advocates abolishing Israel, replacing it with a "secular, binational state" like the oh-so-utopian Lebanon.

Under Oslo, Palestinians were again obligated to dismantle terrorist organizations and confiscate weapons. Yassir Arafat freed terrorists from prisons, appointed terrorist leaders to office, and continued weapons smuggling and terrorist funding. Oslo called for an end to anti-Israeli incitement. That likewise never happened (www.edume.org/reports/index.htm).

Meanwhile, under Oslo and the Wye Agreement of 1998-2000, Israel recognized the PLO as the official representative of the Palestinians, released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and ceded nearly half of the West Bank.

My own suggested reading about the Israel/Palestinian conflict:

Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Mitchell Bard

Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, by Samuel Katz (Bantam)

Aaron Kapner

[Michael King responds: I welcome Mr. Kapner's opinions and his book recommendations, but not his vicious and gratuitous libel of Noam Chomsky as a "holocaust denier." He's made that charge twice in these pages, and it is a scurrilous and entirely false accusation that should not go unanswered.]

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Alex Jones Defender Speaks Out

Editor:

I would like Michael King to know that this Austin reader is not the least "discomfited" by Greg Palast's "credulous fawning" over Alex Jones ["Call and Answer," June 6]. Mr. Jones is not the "conspiracy-frother" King ignorantly claims, but he is a courageous activist working hard to protect all of our freedoms and liberties (including Mr. King's). Perhaps Mr. Palast "fawns" because he's researched the same important issues and found Jones' facts to be credible and well documented, not the "conspiracy theories" that small-minded critics like King claim. I would recommend that Mr. King research the message before he attacks the messenger, but he's apparently too lazy and smug for that.

Sincerely,

Alan Random

P.S. I've read Palast's book and I recommend it to everyone. King should realize that when your enemies are as powerful as Palast's and have the full force of official propaganda at their disposal, maybe a little "self-promotion" and tooting of one's own horn is sometimes necessary.

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Build Parks, Not Apartments

Editor:

Here's what's happening on the hipper-than-thou strip of South Congress south of Ben White, beyond (so far) First Thursday. Enough infill to choke a Boom. The Battle Bend Park area has a landowner applying for a zoning change at 4801 S. Congress which would allow maximum apartment density in the midst of what is already daily gridlock. We'd like to see the city buy it, annex it to our overextended park (it's adjacent to the park), and give infill some green space. How hip is basketball and soccer?

Darrold Smith

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Good Job, Belinda

Editor:

It is wonderful when a columnist can relate her own experience to a story and then write about it with intelligence and sensitivity. Belinda Acosta's analysis of rural television programming and her description of the Headwaters series has depth and relevance.

The piece stands as an argument against CBS's proposed The Real Beverly Hillbillies. Apparently CBS finds rural Americans, especially of the Appalachian kind, acceptable to ridicule, quite funny, and totally irrelevant. "Up from CBS comes a bubbling crudity?" I do hope that Headwaters: Real Stories From Rural America on KLRU2 provides a very different look at the issues and culture of more than 52 million rural Americans.

My thanks and appreciation go to Belinda Acosta for being so perceptive.

Anne Lewis

Series Producer,

Headwaters: Real Stories From Rural America

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Traffic Dept. Strikes Again

Dear Austin,

It took me a week after reading last week's story on the Shoal Creek bike corridor ["Bikes on a Road to Nowhere?," May 23] to realize I'm to blame. The story said that after the neighborhood associations came to a consensual plan with the city, another part of the city government announced plans to, apparently mindlessly, mess things up by installing a traffic signal at 45th and Shoal Creek. Well, a year or two ago, I wrote the Traffic Department informing them, since they apparently don't know, of how their activities seem to do more harm than good. I cited 45th Street and how, though traffic volumes are similar on Bull Creek and Shoal Creek, traffic congests more at the Bull Creek signal and less at the Shoal Creek stop sign. Apparently they're acting to remedy this.

Sorry,

Duane Keith

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'Chronicle' Hard to Read

Editor:

I know I am getting older all the time, but reading the Chronicle lately has been a real eye chore. Did you change the size of the font or the brightness? I find your paper one of the harder ones to read and actually don't read it as much as peruse it and look at the ads or headlines. Just a thought.

Don Jellison

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Pedantic Nitpicking?

Editor:

In the May 30 issue Michael King misused the term "social contract" ["Capitol Chronicle"] in a way that is contrary to its original meaning in the political theory developed by John Locke, the author of Second Treatise on Government (www.constitution.org/jl/2ndtreat.htm), and others, which is the foundation theory of our constitutional system of government. The social contract creates the society out of a mass of individuals competing without restraint, by binding them by a mutual duty to defend one another's rights against being injured. But when redistributionists hijack it to mean a duty to provide a sufficiency of scarce resources to one another, or to redivide resources to achieve some vision of economic justice, that is a misuse of a term that has a specialized meaning that needs to be understood by everyone who cherishes liberty and the rule of law.

Consider what confusion would result if you used the term "due process" to mean something other than proper notice and a fair hearing. Or "probable cause" to mean mere suspicion. Or "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" to mean popular opinion. We may not hear the term "social contract" used often in courtrooms, but it is nevertheless critical to comprehension of fundamental principles. Journalists should avoid miseducating their readers by misusing terms in this way. There are many other terms that you could use instead which would avoid causing confusion.

Jon Roland

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A Man Who Knows Everything

Editor:

Louis Black has it wrong when he says the proposed smoking ordinance is an "experiment with social engineering" ["Page Two," May 30].

First, this is no experiment. California has been entirely smoke-free for five years. It is popular with business owners, patrons, and employees. It has also been successful in literally thousands of communities across the country including El Paso, Boston, and the entire states of New York, Delaware, and Connecticut.

Second, this is not social engineering. It is an example of the accepted practice in our society of protecting the public from significant health threats. Secondhand smoke contains high levels of carcinogens that present significant health risks to employees and patrons in indoor environments. Social engineering is what the tobacco industry does when it tries through marketing and lobbying to create a culture in which smoking seems to be essential to having a good time.

Finally, this is not an attack on local small business, but rather an initiative that will most likely improve business for Austin's music clubs. Eighty percent of our population is nonsmokers. I can't tell you how many people I have talked to who, like me, used to go out to see live music several nights a week but have cut back because we just can't take the smoke. And don't think the smokers will stop going out if the entire city goes smoke-free. Smokers go to bars to drink, listen to music, and have social interactions, just like the rest of us. They won't stop doing that just because they have to go outside to smoke. However, creating a smoke-free environment does open the doors to a huge untapped market of nonsmokers.

Thank you Mayor Garcia, council members Slusher, Thomas, and Dunkerley for your leadership on this issue.

Greg Carter

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Fewer Cops, More Law and Order

Editor:

My stars and garters, we spend 66% of the municipal budget on Emergency Responder Expenses and we can't touch that. Folks, this town has the most gold-plated police/fire/EMS departments there ever were! Perhaps we need a short lecture on risk ... real short ... as one tries to extinguish risk, every level of risk decreased comes at a substantially higher cost. I grew up in Houston in the Sixties, a town, I came to find out, that had four (count 'em) speed cops. We can back lots of money out of these budgets before the town is burning down or crime is rampant. Here are some suggestions: