I was in San Antonio a couple of weeks ago and as I was leaving town I decided to stop by and take one last picture of Lerma's. I was afraid that it would be torn down before I had a chance to come back to town, especially since it was now fenced off and looked like more than a bit forlorn as a result. Lerma's was shut down a couple of years ago because the building had code violations. I believe if you scroll down in this blog you can see an exterior shot of Lerma's without the fence from when I was out there a year or so ago. Lerma's is a legendary conjunto club in SA at which all of the conjunto greats have played at one time or another. It is apparently the longest running conjunto joint in all of Texas. Santiago Jimenez Sr. played there for many years (If I recall correctly, 10 years) every weekend, which in the conjunto world means Friday, Saturday, and Sunday dances. Tough schedule. Henry Zimmerle also had a longstanding gig there. I was fortunate e...
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Have the Republicans begun to demonstrate an awareness that denigrating women is not good politics? Not in the great state of Wisconsin . WASHINGTON -- Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D), Wisconsin's new senator-elect, is confident that she will be able to understand the federal budget without the assistance of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). In an Associated Press interview on Wednesday, Johnson said he hoped he would be able to work with Baldwin in the Senate -- as soon as he explained the "facts" of the budget to her. "Hopefully I can sit down and lay out for her my best understanding of the federal budget because they're simply the facts," he said. "Hopefully she'll agree with what the facts are and work toward common sense solutions." "I was a double major in college in mathematics and political science, and I served for six years on the House Budget Committee in my first six years in the House," Baldwin responded in an intervie...
You can't have a sexually explicit license plate in Virginia, but you can have an anti-Muslim one . If the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to let people praise certain religions or ethnicities on their license plates, it also must let people denigrate individuals of those faiths and nationalities. That's the opinion of a Circuit Court judge, who ruled last week that part of the DMV's guidelines governing vanity tags is unconstitutional. The ruling stemmed from an appeal from an Iraq War veteran who disagreed with the state's decision last year to revoke his personalized plates, which read "ICUHAJI." "Haji" is a common and often derogatory term for Arabs used by U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veteran's attorney, however, said his client did not intend to offend anyone. Judge John W. Brown wrote in his ruling that the DMV must either return the license plates - which can be read, "I see you, Ha...
I have never actually heard any harsh words at my school, believe it or not, though I have heard all manner of political opinions. We have a very diverse school and the student body I think tacks pretty much to the right. But there is no racial turmoil at all. The same welcoming attitude can't be said for Hampden Sydney, where some bozos rioted in response to the election (the same at Ole Miss is not a surprise to anyone, is it?) Story on both here
I have lots of thoughts on the election, of course, none of them particularly deep, and perhaps most of them simply marvelling at what it is like to vote in a mostly African-American neighborhood in the South, which is where I live. I never encountered lines or had any problems voting in Illinois and Wisconsin, where I voted in any number of elecitons at all levels. But here it is, inevitably, always something. I am tempting to see it as pure incompentence, given Occam's razor and all of that. But the consistency of it, time and again, and the universality of it across districts, and the obvious historical roots, they are just nagging, aren't they? I didn't actually have to wait that long. I had friends in other demographically similar districts in other parts of town who waited in line for 4 hours. At an hour-plus I got off relatively easy. I was not surprised that the poll was set up so that we all had to wait out in the cold (and it was cold on elect...
Have you noticed how large the flags on politicians' lapels have become? There is flag size creep, and it is real. Of course, all politicians these days have a little enameled flag pin on their lapel since 9-11. But both Romney's and Ryan's flag pins are just a wee bit bigger than their opponents. Take a look at the next debate, I am not making this up. The Republicans seem to be pushing a somewhat subtle claim that they are just that much more American. The darksuit and blue or red tie is a uniform. Adding in the flag enhances the uniformity of the whole. Increasing the size of the flag is a development that seems to warrant close attention. If the flag migrants from placement on the lapel to a band on the shoulder, we are in trouble. update: ok, I see now that others have noted the same . Here I thought I was a trendspotter or something. Apparently, if I read tweets I would have seen this. I prefer the slow accretion of my thoughts on ...