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,
    The March 23 issue of the Chronicle included an article entitled "IDEA Still Hunting Enrollment" [News]. In the article, Vince Tovar from the group PRIDE of the Eastside was quoted on several points that indicate opposition to the IDEA charter school at Allan Elementary.
    Mr. Tovar is an employee of Austin Voices for Education and Youth and made these remarks in a setting that he thought was off the record. However, as an employee of Austin Voices, he should not have made these remarks, and they are not representative of Austin Voices.
    Currently, Austin Voices is working with communities around Eastside Memorial and three other vertical team campuses on strengthening their campus plans. Our goal is to be a neutral facilitator of community and school voice. We believe that there is tremendous strength in these communities and that, working together with the district, these four campuses can do great things for kids.
    Austin Voices apologizes for any confusion these remarks may have caused.

Dear Editor,
    Shame on the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for voting against humane standards of care for puppies at breeding facilities. As it stands right now, breeding facilities house these puppies in cages where they are unable to comfortably move around, the cages are stacked one on top of the other so that feces and urine filter through the cages on to other dogs below, and the puppies are forced to walk on cage wire as there is no flooring in their cages. These are dreadful standards of "care", if it can even be called that. Recently, at the March 27 public meeting, many caring people were in attendance, asking the commission to provide comfortable cage enclosures with flooring and to disallow cage stacking. Instead the commission ignored these recommendations, and now these puppies have to continue living in inhumane conditions at breeding facilities. Was it too much to ask these moneymaking breeding facilities to spend just a little time and money to set up humane standards of care for their animals? I think not. I'm embarrassed to be a resident of Texas today!

Dear Editor,
    Thank you for the great music history article by Michael Corcoran, “The Town Was Hoppin’” [Music, March 30]. Ray Campi’s stories refreshed my memories of growing up in Austin in the Fifties and Sixties. Though underage, I was able to sneak into the Jade Room and the New Orleans Club by standing tall but behind my older sister and her boyfriend who paid the cover charge for the three of us. Those really were the good old days.

Dear Editor,
    Rick Perry, ex-presidential GOP candidate and still-governor of Texas decrees, “Let them eat slime!”
    We the people should willingly ingest pink slime composed of cow parts (including rectums) and bathed in chemicals. “It’s healthy,” he says. Further, we should be thrilled our kids are eating this in their school lunches and that there is no required labeling of the inclusion of these rectal-chemical-pink-slime combos on anything in which it is placed.
    I’ll stick with being a vegetarian, thank you!
    Does this mean Rick Perry has earned another title? King of Slime, perhaps?

Dear Editor,
    I took off from work to attend the second presentation at the University of Texas by Seymour Hersh (Glickman Lecture) [“'There To Tell the Truth,'” News, March 30]. Mr. Hersh said, “Let me explain why we are screwed, hated, and in real trouble all over the world.” No, let me explain it Mr. Hersh. You wrote in your article for The New Yorker about Abu Ghraib, that 1) (among the worst of the atrocities) children were raped, 2) video and audio of the orgy and screaming (their parents were present) are archived in the Pentagon, 3) a federal judge ordered the material released and was ignored. One cannot grasp the institutionalized corruption, the pure satanic evil, which this fact exposes. My theory is that it was one tool used to breed generational, non-rectifiable hatred for the West by the Middle East, to engender the hatred which Mr. Hersh laments in order to facilitate a perpetual war (prophesied in 1984). By tolerating the above atrocity, Americans are complicit.
    Mr. Hersh stated that Obama betrayed us (see Michael Ventura’s excellent column explaining the details) [“Letters at 3AM: NDAA: Obama's Betrayal,” Jan. 27], but that he is voting for him because the alternative is worse. Hersh also stated that Ron Paul has never deviated from his positions; think about the integrity this bespeaks.
    Mr. Hersh stated that the First Amendment is a wall that cannot fall. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, demanded by Obama and enacted into law, is an ominous demonstration to the contrary.

Dear Editor,
    Thanks for the much-needed article in last week's Chronicle "Then There's This: Through the Roof" [News, March 23]. I doubt that most Austinites are aware of the plan to remove the apartments in the East Riverside area and replace them with high-dollar condominiums and shops. This means that the workers and their families, who currently live there and provide services to all of us, and senior citizens on fixed incomes will no longer have an affordable place to live in Austin. We need to value our senior citizens and those who provide services from which all of us benefit. Austin needs a lot more affordable housing. What about building more affordable housing in the Mueller development area and in the East Riverside area? I hate to see Austin go the way of Boulder, Colo.; Portland, Ore.; and Palo Alto, Calif. where I hear that even city employees can't afford to live.

Dear Editor,
    Thank you guys and especially Margaret Moser for her article "We Are Most Amused" [Screens, March 30]. Having heard my Mom's recollection of her first movie in Austin, in the late '30s at the Ritz (a Western), I have been in awe of old-timey Austin movie houses. As a kid, we had the Longhorn Drive-In across the street and the Burnet Drive-In down the road. It was an adventure even in the '60s going to Austin movies. Sundays were for the State/Paramount films, up until my teens. My co-worker is a former manager of the Varsity; I love hearing his stories. Many of us saw our first indie films there. That is the only movie theatre I ever smelled pot in. Those days are long gone. Can't wait to see the opening April 3 at the History Center.