Daily News - The Austin Chronicle (2024)

Delegates, schmelegates: everybody knows the real race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is going on at Quacks on 43rd. The bakery is selling Hillary and Obama cookies, shaped like 'H's and 'O's, and keeping track of which is selling better. Much like the delegate process, Obama had a lead already (239-134 at 8am Saturday) but was quickly pulling ahead (261-144 by 2pm, three times as many sold per hour.) Final figures will be posted by Quacks on Monday.

Less reported is the burger-on-burger bust-up at the Cypress Bend Cafe, with the Clinton Classic Patty Melt going up against the Obama Burger (a BBQ bacon cheddar burger.) The winner of the combo-meal caucus will be reported here as soon as we get figures.

There is still no word on sales figures for John McCain emergency rations, Mike Huckabee-brand wafers, or Ron Paul silver (standard) dollar pancakes.

In memory of Raúl Roy “Tapon” Salinas (1934-2008), we continue to offer these words from those who knew him and worked with him.

Erika Gonzalez, poet and co-director of PODER (People Organized in Defense of the Earth and her Resources), Austin, Texas

This is a poem I wrote for Raúl for his tribute at the Mexican American Cultural Center [summer 2007].

About Your Presence and Survival
– for Xicanindio poetry and raúlsalinas

Who will be left to tell of what happened to us Grandfather?
Who will be left to tell of what happened to us Grandmother?

Among those who survive, there will be poets to recount that which happened to us. Among those survivors, a co*ckroach poet was born – en el Pinto – del maiz that grew among cemented floors and walls – that died each day only to be reborn – turtle coming out of the shell – touch outer skin protecting revolutionary insides – surviving to tell the stories of a prisoner who broke penitentiary walls with words – shone sunlight through keyholes and opened doors for la pura verdad – to heal barrio cries and broken spirits.

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul's rally Saturday on UT Austin's south mall was supposed to look like the Barack Obama rally on Friday night. His is, after all, the Revolution. But there was a much smaller audience and a divided response to many of his policy pronouncements. This makes the South Texas congressman's pledge to keep going until the money and the volunteers run out sound like the soothsaying section of a self-fulfilling prophecy (and a dangerous one, considering he's facing a serious challenge for his congressional seat from self-described Christian conservative Chris Peden.)

One should never judge a political candidate by the unaffiliated hangers-on that appear around the edges of a campaign event. But this rally was supposed to be a great hurrah for the cross-party appeal of his liberty message, the paradigm-shift that was supposed to sweep him to the presidency, and then let him disassemble every government agency and program from the IRS to the "entitlement program" that is SCHIP. But the Scientologists handing out pamphlets on the steps and the Lyndon LaRouche-ites leafleting the crowd were a sign of where the problems lay.

TODAY'S EVENTS

Bike Month at Multiple locations

Caroline Rose, Ian Sweet at The Scoot Inn

MUSIC | MOVIES | ARTS | COMMUNITY

There are still Democrats outside the big city, you know. I just had an activist out there send me this:

The Bastrop County Democratic Party and Elgin Area Democrats Invite you to a Good Old-Fashioned Democratic Rally for the upcoming March 4 Texas Primary! Sunday, Feb 24, 4-7pm Veterans Park on Main St. in Historic Downtown Elgin

Meet the Democratic candidates and/or campaign staff for:
President
U.S. Senate
Congressional District 10
State Representative District 17
Railroad Commissioner
State Supreme Court Justice
Court of Appeals Judge
423rd District Judge
Bastrop County Sheriff

Get involved!! Get informed!! Volunteer !!
Food and drink available at reasonable prices - Democracy for Free! (Independents and wayward Republicans Welcome)
CHANGE IS IN THE AIR !
BE A PART OF IT RIGHT IN YOUR COMMUNITY !
Need more information? Wanna volunteer or donate for this event? Call Rob at 512-470-2402 or email rcryland@hotmail.com
Questions about when and where to vote? Go to www.bastropcountydemocraticparty.com

Note: In case of inclement weather, Rally will move to Kingfisher Art and Music Gallery across Depot St. from the park

In memory of Raúl Roy “Tapon” Salinas (1934-2008), we continue to offer these words from those who knew him and worked with him.

Liliana Valenzuela, poet and translator, Austin, Texas:

I remember Raúl Salinas coming up to me at a Resistencia Bookstore reading I was doing with Claire Joysmith to present the anthology, One Wound for Another/Herida por otra: Testimonios de Latin@s in the U.S. Through Cyberspace (11 de Septiembre de 2001 - 11 de Marzo de 2002). At first my fists were closed, feeling nervous in anticipation of our reading. He smudged sage over me, then he motioned for me to open my hands, so he could bless them. I exposed my palms and received his blessing, in the process opening myself and my heart up to the experience of sharing our work with the community, and that has made all the difference.

Raúl really understood ritual, and the need to create sacred space for our poetry and for telling each other the truth about our lives, a truth that could heal us all.

Francisco Aragón, director, Letras Latinas, University of Notre Dame

It's only been in the last few years that I've come to understand, appreciate, and deeply value the place raúlsalinas occupies in Chicano letters — thanks, in part, to a trip to El Paso, Texas a few years ago.

From Brazos to Guadalupe, from the Capitol gates to the GoVision screen at the corner of 10th. The cue for the cue for the cue stretched around the State Highway Building and looped back around to Congress. The crowd for the Barack Obama rally last night had started forming early afternoon.

Starbucks must have thought that Christmas had come early, while the diners at Restaurant Jezebel and Cibo tried hard to concentrate in their candlelit meals. Tax assessor candidate Glen Maxey worked the crowd hard as Black Joe Lewis kept the audience pumped ("I've handed out 4,000 of these," said Maxey, flicking through a stack of his fliers, "and a thousand Obama stickers.") There were volunteer sign-up sheets and campaign burnt-orange "Yes We Can" shirts, anti-Chinese Olympics protesters and bootleg button vendors.

Flash-forward an hour. Now wavering and even solid Clinton supporters were saying to strangers, yup, they were sold, they were behind Obama. They were inspired, the message of change and of being better, of re-aligning social justice, of shifting tax breaks from the super-corporations and back to investors in American infrastructure, of overturning the Bush tax cuts and subsidizing health care, of negotiating from a position of strength rather than extorting treaties.

In memory of Raúl Roy “Tapon” Salinas (1934-2008), we offer these words from those who knew him and worked with him.

Emmet Campos, Austin, Texas:

He was my mentor, friend, compa. As an undergraduate at the U of W, Madison in the late '70, his poetry educated and inspired me and continues to do so, his community activism was a model I emulated, his bookstore was a space to heal, a respite from academic life. I will miss you, carnal!

Amparo Garcia is a writer, actress, and the inaugural director of the Mexican American Cultural Center:

I had the rare experience as a young woman in the 1980s to stumble onto a reading that Raúl was doing at the old Ritz Theater on 6th Street. I had never heard of him and I had never heard someone speak poetry quite like him either. In those days, many of us UT undergrads were still "Hispanics" and/or hopelessly coconut all the way through. And even with that kind of unconsciousness, his words penetrated all the way through to the very bone of me. He was waking me up to something familiar in myself that was yet unknown. It was like he was a time traveler who had come all the way back to pick me up so that I wouldn't miss my future Chicana self when I finally tripped over her ten years later!

In the 2004 Primary, 12 days of early voting plus mail-in ballots produced a tally of 32,361 voters in Travis County, 6.12% of that year's registered voters.

In this year's primary, Travis is only a handful of votes away from topping those totals after only four days: 31,483 citizens have voted, or 5.66%!

The heaviest day of early voting in 2004 was the last, with 7,169 ballots counted, and the next busiest was only 3,472. This year, 7,477 votes has been the slowest day (Day 2).

By the way, our number of registered voters is up as well – no surprise given our population growth here. Four years ago, 528,781 were registered; now we're up to 555,865.

Who says democracy is dead?

PHOTO GALLERIES