APOLOGY UNACCEPTED

EDITOR: Andrew Sullivan is a chump. Please don't waste my time with his trite apologia ["The War You've Got," July 7]. Sullivan calls himself a "pro-warrior," but in the final analysis he's just a fucking chicken hawk with a flash degree and a soapbox, sitting on his ass in front of a computer somewhere pushing a pro-war agenda in exchange for a fat paycheck while other people fight the war he's been advocating—a poorly constructed agenda advanced on false pretenses and executed by a lying incompetent. His assertion that he doesn't "believe we were deliberately misled," about the presence of WMDs in Iraq is completely delusional. Fuck's sake, Andy. Do try to keep up.

Joshua Norton

CLOSE BUT NO APOLOGY

EDITOR: Andrew Sullivan could stand to grovel much, much more. I don't know if continuing the war is better than pulling out—Iraq seems fucked either way—but nothing in the Bush administration's current rhetoric suggests that they plan to change their current approach, which is half-assed arrogance. In the abstract, following through and firmly establishing democracy sounds like a good idea; in concrete reality, this idea has to be carried out with intelligence and genuine commitment. Doing it badly will be worse than not doing it at all.

Bret Fetzer

THE APOLOGY YOU'VE GOT

EDITOR: Nice try, Sullivan. You're halfway there. Go the distance. Say it with me: "Iraq was a tragic, horrible mistake and the best we can do is get the hell out NOW." Then apologize to the 1,800 American families who've lost brave, young, healthy kids FOR A LIE and the 100,000 Iraqi families who've experienced the same. You believed the lie, you promoted it through your writing, you're culpable. Apologize, asshole. I knew you could!

Bobbi Dykema Katsanis

ARBITRARY SMOKING BAN

EDITOR: Eli Sanders's "Up in Smoke?" [July 7] really brings home for me how arbitrary so many laws we are forced to abide by are. I design HVAC (air conditioning) systems for a living and I can state as a fact that the 25-feet rule is pointless. The governing body in my industry (who actually tests these things instead of just making them up) says 10 feet is sufficient clearance to building openings and air intakes. Any properly designed commercial space is designed to be under positive pressure (with the door open the breeze blows out, not in).

To Mr. McCollum ("It would have been good to have had this conversation before we'd written the law"): Why on earth would you write a law governing things you don't understand without consulting someone first?

Steve Howard

COMMUNISM RETURNS

EDITOR: Thank you for your piece on the horrible new smoking ban. And kudos to the bar owner on Lower Queen Anne for choosing to make his bar smoke free. Why are we seriously considering this law? Who are we to say what a bar owner can and cannot do (within reason) in his/her own establishment? And now you'll get a ticket for smoking just by walking in front of the bar. Stupid laws like these are why communism can't work and is stupid.

Adam Johnson

FRIED FOOD UPDATE

EDITOR: Thanks to your Bar Exam column [Bethany Jean Clement, June 30], I know where to eat fried pickles. It's been awhile. If you're ever passing through Castle Rock, try the gas station mart at the intersection across from the St. Helen's Center. Their chicken strips are out of this world. Clean, not greasy, with an amazing texture. Not your typical Tyson product. I can't believe I still remember them so fondly. The best I've eaten, and I don't even like chicken strips.

Wendy Gallacci

FROM THE FORUMS AT WWW.THESTRANGER.COM

The following was posted in the Restaurants Forum, responding to a query about finding salt cod in Seattle. Levide recommended Ballard Market and Whole Foods, then claimed to make "a mean cod gratin." It wasn't long before someone wanted to know how.

Posted by Levide, July 7 at 6:13 pm: Well, first you gotta rinse the cod, then soak it overnight. Change the water and let it sit for six more hours or so, changing the water every so often, then rinse it again (should plump up and taste mildly sweet). Put it in a skillet and cover with water and cook until it starts to flake if you put a fork in it. Let it cool and separate it into flakes, squeezing all the water out of them. Then you wanna heat some oil and butter and sauté a cup of minced leeks about five minutes. Next you make a roux with butter, flour, and a little salt, pepper, and cayenne. When it's good and pasty put it over medium and whisk in some milk and heat it over low stirring out the lumps.

Let it heat until it's thick enough to coat a spoon and stir in some grated Gruyère. Let that heat only until the cheese is melted. Then you mix up the cod, leeks, cheese sauce, and a little chopped parsley and put it all into a buttered baking dish just large enough to hold everything. Top it with some salt-cured olives and scatter some little bits of butter all over it and bake it for a half-hour, 40 minutes or so until it's, you know, brownish. I don't think I forgot anything.

Do you have strong feelings about salt cod, or any other fish for that matter? Log on to forums.the-stranger.com and let a brother know!

[Editor’s Note: In an effort to be more thorough, The Stranger now prints all the correspondence that comes to our letters editor. Because of the sheer volume of mail, we can’t always be bothered to edit, or even read it all. So blame the writers for mistakes of spelling, grammar, punctuation, or logic, because they’re there, if you’re looking.]

SULLIVAN: FALSE

EDITOR: The most galling aspect of Andrew Sullivan’s recent parody of thoughtfulness was how completely it reduced me to anger and disgust. We have unilaterally attacked a sovereign country on false pretenses that continue to be peddled by our leaders, and Andrew Sullivan’s first priority is to cast an aura of thoughtful resolve over his blind support for the crime. Why does anyone look to Andrew Sullivan for his opinion on this tragedy? “Sorry to have applauded the gang rape of your daughter, everyone said she was a whore; anyhow, here are my latest thoughts about the safety of your children…”

Sullivan makes a show of admitting he was wrong about Saddam’s stockpiles of WMD (when he endorsed unilateral attack on Iraq), but adds that “almost no one was denying it, and I bought the almost universally assumed truth.” This is either a bald lie, or else Sullivan never reads past page one so he never knew that Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Weapons Inspection team, countered Colin Powell’s (and Bush’s and Cheney’s and Blair’s) lies about Iraqi WMD at the time. In reply to Powell, for example — whose Security Council accusations in February, 2003, were given page one headlines of alarm, plus utterly corrupt and complicit mantels of editorial endorsement by idiots like Sullivan — Blix replied on February 14, 2003 “no weapons of mass destruction were found in the country.” His rebuttals ran deep inside the news sections, if at all.

The road forward is not through the faux-reasonableness of apologists trying to prop up their collapsing value in the pundit market; it is by recognizing the complicity of every one of us — pro-War and anti-War — when we facilitate the clear conscience of a duped generation of war criminals that has sadly grown to include thousands of Americans now acting on our government’s directives in Iraq.

We are not fighting a war against terrorism in Iraq. We are occupying and pillaging a sovereign country. The same week The Stranger gave us Sullivan’s somber enactment of self-reflection, the London Review of Books ran Edward Harriman’s detailed account of systemic fraud in Iraq. Of the $3 billion in Iraqi oil assets handed out by the Coalition Provisional Authority in its last weeks, two-thirds went without documentation and over half were paid with no evidence of services or goods being provided. The $8.8 billion of Iraqi oil assets spent by Iraqi ministries since then “has not been properly accounted for,” the Iraqi government’s Inspector General of Iraqi Reconstruction reports.” The numbers on unaccounted American funds are even more staggering. (www.lrb.co.uk)

The London Review of Books! How did Harriman find out? By reading the U.S. Government Accounting Office website and five other publicly released reports by auditors from the Pentagon, the Coalition Provisional Authority, and others. If we care at all about the reality of America’s operations in Iraq, we need information, not the dramas of self-justifying apologists. Apparently that means reading the weekly book review organs to find out the news.

Matthew Stadler

SULLIVAN: HYPOCRITE

EDITOR: Beside lame scene gossip, suburban horror stories, frivilous hollywood scandal, and creative writing from cops, you now give voice to dissolutioned war-hawks ["The War You've Got," Andrew Sullivan]. I would guess that Andrew is white, obviously male, and most definately doesn't know what it feels like to be shelled, gassed, shot at, or to do so to others in a land far from his padded carpet office though he is a self defined "warrior."

"What do you do? In my view you fight back, remove thier base of operations, and kill as many of them as you can." Hey Andy, fuck you and your antique false bravado on paper. Are you ready to grab a gun and a gas mask and hit the streets of a foriegn country in the morning to protect us Andy? I didn't think so Andy so shut the fuck up Andy. You and our cowardly leaders dropping bombs from behind thier desks and sending our youth to kill and be killed are fucking worms. Your logic is flawed and twisted by greed. Not only are you too cowardly to fight in what you have convinced yourself you believe in but your too shortsighted to see that the root of our problems lie in our own predation of others freedoms and resources, our enslavery of other peoples.

Stranger, haven't you seen this guy’s shitty website coated in Cheney quotes?. I guess you know you'de get a back-lash for this piece and that's great and I'm sure you're laughng at all the pissed off mail you're getting but how 'bout saving a little space in your rag for some philanthropy. Your contributing writers represent you like it or not so take some responsibility. FUCK!

Birdy

SULLIVAN: WARMONGER

EDITOR: I should have stopped reading your neo-liberal garbage after Savage's warmongering a couple of years ago. You guys have really outdone yourselves by giving another pulpit for Andrew Sullivan. "The way ahead is undoubtedly brutal and unsure," huh, Andy? Why don't you sign up to have your balls blown off by an IED? I'm sure some unethical recruiter will be perfectly willing to hide your sexuality and HIV status to meet those quotas. And just like all those kids in Juarez that we are signing up, it might just get you on a fast track to United States citizenship. In closing, fuck you, asshole.

Kevin Leahy

SULLIVAN: EMBARRASSMENT

EDITOR: I can't believe you had the audacity to run "The War You've Got" piece. You must think people are idiots. Maybe you were on another planet during the run up to the war. On this planet we had major protests. As an American I'm embarrassed to say the majority of people who turned out for these protests were Europeans. On the other hand, the lower turnouts in American cities may be a result of the poor performance of the American press. A good deal of our citizens didn't know what the citizens of Europe knew and our press did nothing about it. They just read from the statements issued by the White House and the Pentagon as they beat the war drum. The drum you continue to beat. Everyone knows the military can't meet its recruiting quotas. Andrew, why don't you get in uniform and go stand up for what you believe in?

Patrick Griffin

SULLIVAN: BLIND

EDITOR: Hawks are always pointing to the “rights” they have delivered to the people—like voting and free speech. When it’s 123 degrees Fahrenheit in Baghdad and the garbage is piled everywhere and the water isn’t drinkable without boiling, your free speech rights aren’t what you’re thinking about. You want electricity to run your air conditioner. Yes, you’re glad Saddam is gone, but you want to treat your kids’ diarrhea.

Some omissions:

1) Sullivan forgot to mention the fake Gulf of Tonkin Incident that got us into the war in Vietnam, and to observe how it closely parallels the whole fake justification for the Iraq war. Fool me once – shame on you. Fool me twice – shame on me! Wake up, Andrew!

2) He forgot to mention that the 1967 election in Vietnam pulled 83% turnout. In 1968 we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam, and we lost. Wake up, Andrew! Some errors:

1) If our efforts in Iraq are succeeding in slowing Islamic terrorism, how come the number of terror strikes is increasing?

2) Osama and friends are mad at the U.S. because we support the corrupt Saudi state. Why doesn’t Andrew feel voting and free speech is important in Saudi Arabia?

I say follow the money. Since 2003 about $8 billion is missing from Iraq – money that’s just disappeared. Truckloads of it. Whole freighters of oil. Money and oil – those are the reasons for this war – not stopping Islamic terrorism. Wake up, Andrew!

Howard Gutknecht

SULLIVAN: BLOGGER

EDITOR: Well Well. I eagerly flipped to the column by Andrew Sullivan, but soon was dissapointed. As Time magazine subscriber, I had read Andrew's columns with mixed feelings and HEDGING respect. But I read them (I have recently canceled my subscription in favor of a true news magazine, The Economist). I have watched Bill Maher's HBO show, where Andrew was a frequent guest; there too, I was NEUTRAL, yet open to different VIEWS. The Stranger's invitation to Andrew was squandered, with The Stranger HOLDING full blame for proceeding to publish what has become PURE tabloid. The article was not about subject matter, it was about Andrew. Personal, subjective opinion about personal subjective views on a VERY IMPORTANT MATTER is pure garbage. Keep FILTH out of your publication, and opinion towards news events and other RELEVANT content. Bloggers' opinions on personal misjudgment can be viewed at the appropriate BLOG.

Armin Stuedlei

SULLIVAN: BLOODY CUNT

EDITOR: Since when did The Stranger become yet another cog in the ultra-right-wing propaganda machine? Andrew Sullivan is a bloody cunt, and I can't believe that you're publishing his mindless drivel. The Stranger's own political commentary is usually tolerable, so go back to your own keyboard and stop fraternizing with the enemy.

Bjarne

SULLIVAN: ME NO LIKE

EDITOR: Wow! Good for you at the Stranger for taking a running leap at balanced perspectives in print journalism. Andrew Sullivan’s piece, The War You’ve Got, certainly offers up a perspective from one end of a spectrum. The spectrum that runs between uninformed biased opinion (see Mr. Sullivan), all the way to thoughtful, investigative, critical thought and perspective based upon fact and broad-based analysis.

Andrew’s sad nods to being “wrong”, (not to mention blind, deaf and fucking stupid!) were degrading to anything that followed in each of the paragraphs of that article. While George “the Freedom fighter” Bush has not conceded one bit that the of pile manure he spews daily as the reason to slaughter thousands of foreign innocents, a couple thousand of our daughters and sons and destroying our country’s ability to forge alliances in the world, Mr. Sullivan is big enough to admit he may not have “listened hard enough”. (Yes, that quote is taken out of the context it was written, but it accurately illustrates my point.)

While Andrew vehemently states that “civilization” is at stake in the war going on in Iraq and against “terrorism” in the world, he fails, miserably, to note some realities. The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and we believe the White House, were very specific targets that although horrific in the outcome were related directly to U.S. Government and corporate foreign policy that are actively destroying lives, environments and economies around the world. If these people really wanted to attack the common folk like you and I they would have gone after hospitals, schools, sports stadiums and the like, as our military and domestic terrorists do! Our government, our military, our tax dollars and our inaction as a society is harming many people on the planet. Now, men like Osama Bin Laden have as much right to proclaim to be oppressed as George and company have the right to say they are looking out for the interests of the American people. Yet, people in power are the ones with guns, bombs and ability to coerce others to lay down their lives for fucked up reasons. So, Osama did. Now he’s the face of evil.

Don’t cover up your hypocrisy Mr. Sullivan; “killing of innocents”? give me a break! 350,000 or more, dead in Iraq due to sanctions and leaving Saddam in power after Gulf War 1; Cluster bombs in residential neighborhoods outside Bagdad during this latest atrocity. The U.S. is most guilty of waging war against innocents. Use your blog to educate yourself and others. To paraphrase Arundahti Roy, terrorism is the belief that wealthy governments don’t hold the monopoly on violence. When you use a cowardly word like terrorist to describe individuals who fight and attack to maintain their way of life and their very lives you degrade your intellect.

In the last few days we have seen violence in London that is getting tons of press. 50 people dead, 800 or so injured. In Faluga, Iraq the numbers dead wounded and homeless not to mention a city leveled was only covered for the death and injury of U.S. and British troops and their allies. The fact that this piece is called a “feature” in the Stranger only serves to support the fact that U.S. media even cool rags like the Stranger are extremely biased in what they provide to their readers.

Give Savage Love a full two pages each week, that we know is opinion with a whole lot of facts thrown in!

Do a little more research Andrew, listen, learn and think. You obviously have some brains, or did somebody write that article for you? And you, you editors at the Stranger, Call an op-ed what it is. Don’t call it “a Story” when it’s really a fairy tale.

Jon Whalen

SULLIVAN: IDIOT/PATRIOT

EDITOR: Do you want to follow the advice of proactive, prescient thinkers who have accurately (if morbidly) predicted current events? Or do you want to follow reactive, toe the line thinkers, who are always making excuses after the fact and cleaning up messes made worse by them than the situation they entered into? Bitter, uncouth, and angry, but with foresight: Ted Rall’s “Victory is Ours” [June 30]. Patriotic, idiotic, wet noodle (as in noggin): Andrew Sullivan’s “The War You’ve Got” [July 7].

Contrary to Sullivan's claims that "almost no one was denying" that "Saddam [had] stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," and "insisting that the intelligence services of every Western nation (and several others) were out to lunch on this question"... progressives like Rall, not to mention MILLIONS of protestors world wide were demanding EXACTLY that... the fucker wants to stick his head in the sand and pretend like he's got all the answers now, after the fact, in hindsight? We can not continue to place our faith in Sullivan and the backwards thinkers that he apologizes for (Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al).

It's time to take drastic, proactive steps like withdrawl from Iraq), because the people with foresight can better predict the outcome (less violence, not more) than the Andrew Sullivans whose ideological self interest ensures their reactive point of view will continue to mislead us. Choose wisely, history will judge us.

Brian Shrader

SULLIVAN: OLD NEWS

EDITOR: Next time you run an Iraq commentary with a conservative viewpoint (Thank you, by the way), could you feature a guest with new points, or plan. His reasoning for staying the course (if you can call the tired 9/11 card "reasoning") could have been cut-and-pasted from a Bushie stump script.

Here's news for Mr Sullivan and his ilk: We can't win. Guerrilla tactics win every time (stalemate IS victory, Andrew). Vietnam? Korea? Obviously not on his historical radar. And we'll run out of soldiers long before they run out of insurgents...it's the cruelty of math, 'Drew. Sooner or later, Iraq will be carved up once again...Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds with their own provinces, oil, and borders. (It's a helluva lot easier to train border guards than full-fledged soldiers.) Iraq was artificially created anyway (read up, Mr Sullivan). We'll withdraw with tail-between-legs, subsequently shoring up borders, ports and intelligence...you know, that boring old defensive stuff. But no, the White House will spend the remainder of the Bushie years (and then some) adolescently sticking to their guns (read: lots more blood) before reaching that inevitable , and only, conclusion. And 30 years later when Iraq is forgotten about, we'll find some new country to get our asses kicked in.

anonymous

SULLIVAN: WEAK

EDITOR: Is Andrew Sullivan the best The Stranger can come up with as an antidote to your fabulous left wing bias. If so then just skip it. All Sullivan offers us as part of his “chastening” is more fear mongering. The “almost universally assumed truth” of the WMD’s was not “assumed” by the people whose job it was to look for them for a decade or so. All of Sullivan’s offerings are so weak that they really speak to the real cause of this war and the cause of most violence for that matter. Fear. Many (most?) Americans were scared shitless by 9/11 and as a country we’ve yet to pull our heads out of our warm cozy asses. In the same way the Russians getting the bomb and the subsequent Cuban missile crisis scared us into a ridiculous war in Vietnam, where according to Robert Macnamara, we killed 3 million Vietnamese people.Three million. I’ll say it one more time in case this is the moment the head comes out of the ass. We killed 3 million people, in their own country, in a failed effort.

Throughout history hasn’t it been the greed of the leadership and the cowardice of the populace that has allowed humans to commit the terrible crime of war? As long as there are people like Sullivan, willing to deny their fear, defend their support of “mistakes” and compromise what intellectual integrity they may ever have had, we’ll continue to have leaders who in their greed, cowardice and stupidity give us what we have here. Which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it.

Allen Grissom

SULLIVAN: SENSIBLE?

MR. SULLIVAN: I just read your piece published in the Stranger and I have to say I agree that we cannot back out of a war that means so much. The attacks on Thursday in London prove again that the terrorists are fucking scumbags. A couple points to make, however.

You claim that if the terrorists had the means to wipe out 300,000 people, then they would have. What makes you so sure of that? What makes you so sure that they don't have the means to commit more serious atrocities? Lest you think I am being coy, I am just making the argument here that perhaps the terrorists make small-scale attacks for any number of reasons.

Let's say that the terrorists wipe out 300K instead of 3K. At that point, they are universally condemned, and not with mere lip service, from all sides. No government in the world would support people who perform such a massacre. Three thousand deaths is high, but is a basically acceptable loss in the eyes of, say, Palestinians, where tens to hundreds die every day of shitty living conditions and Israeli actions. And frankly, the U.S. has a lot to do with Israel's success in Palestine; awful, backwards, greedy leadership in Palestine definitely deserving the larger part of the blame, but the U.S. has given aid to Israel like it's going out of style. But. Even the most hardened of Palestinian dirt-bags (freedom fighters?) would have trouble lauding a quarter-million death toll. And the result would be that it would be much more difficult for the terrorists to operate, because things would be real serious all over the world, not just in the big countries that terrorists are more likely to strike.

Another possible reason for smaller-scale attacks, one that no one in the U.S. government or media seems to give any merit, is that the terrorists are not actually about killing people, but about making a point. Granted, their point sucks. Hard. And their means of argument is completely indefensible. Killing innocent people is always wrong, period. Even when the U.S. government does it in, say, Iraq. Or Vietnam Or any other country with which the U.S. has ever been involved in full-scale war. I digress. The point is that the terrorists have a point - hitting the major centers of trade, commerce, defense, and transportation in major countries is not only about a high death-toll, but is symbolic of the terrorists' targets in Western ideology. The terrorists are not stupid people, they are insane, and the difference is that insane people are more dangerous.

I would like to point out that we have underestimated the terrorists before - government officials knew about al-Qaeda long before 9/11. And evidently didn't put enough effort into doing anything about it to stop them. I would also like to point out that the U.S. government ought to perhaps take an honest look at its foreign policies everywhere. I am no fan of Islamist theocracy: fuck those guys and their bullshit - they have every right to believe whatever they want to believe, but they better damn well keep their hands to themselves. But mistakes have been made - we helped Saddam into power, for Christ's sake.

I don't think that "winning" the war in Iraq will crush the terrorists' spirits. I think that whatever the U.S. does, they will have more rhetoric for their arguments - you can't argue with someone who uses the will of god as their source of inspiration to action. It's a circular argument, "If I'm doing it, it must be the will of god." We certainly must keep on guard, and actively pursue the terrorists wherever they are. About that, Bush is right. But I'm saying that taking a look at our own actions as a country and holding ourselves to the same standards we hold the terrorists is a good idea. Several countries don't want to help define "terrorism" in the U.N. Security Council. Is the U.S. among them? I don't know, but seems to me like a good definition would be, "intentional killing of non-combatants." I've heard Fallujah referred to as the "outdoor genocide museum." Where do we draw the line, and how do we draw the line if we are standing on the other side of it?

Andrew Kottwitz

CLOSE BUT NO APOLOGY (DIRECTOR’S CUT)

EDITOR: Andrew Sullivan could stand to grovel much, much more. He admits his assumptions were off-base, but downplays just how off-base they were. Regarding assumed stockpiles of WMDs: "If someone on the other side had been insisting that the intelligence services of every Western nation (and several others) were out to lunch on this questions, I could be chided for not listening hard enough. But almost no one was denying it, and I bought the almost universally assumed untruth."

Actually, Western intelligence services were almost all saying there was no substantial evidence of WMDs. The CIA -- against its own political interests -- contradicted the Bush administration claims repeatedly; this was reported in the NY Times and the Washington Post, among other forums. In fact, the only source claiming that Saddam Hussein had WMDs was the Bush administration, which refused to provide any evidence to prove it, claiming doing so would jeopardize national security. When Colin Powell did finally present clumsy and inconclusive evidence to the UN, his arguments were heavily criticized by Western intelligence agencies.

"The notion of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection in the past was tenuous, although it certainly could not have been ruled out in the future." As a secular dictator in the heart of the Muslim world, Saddam was as much a target for al Qaeda as the U.S. The notion of Saddam offering support to a terrorist organization likely to attack him was implausible. "I had no idea that we would invade with too few troops to keep the peace. I assumed that elementary post-war planning had taken place."

At the time the Bush administration was calling for an invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan was already crumbling into chaos: Opium production had resumed and increased, tribal warlords had returned to the kind of devestating infighting that led to the Taliban's rise in the first place. There was no reason to believe that the invasion of Iraq would be conducted with any greater thought or follow-through. Sullivan goes on to argue that 9/11 somehow made invading Iraq necessary, despite there being no connection between the two--that, somehow, invading a foreign nation to set a democratic example for the Middle East was a sensible response to 9/11. He argues that Saddam's own despotism made his removal justifiable; there are just as despicable and dangerous dictatorships in Africa and Asia that we're not pursuing because it doesn't benefit us to do so--we invaded Iraq for political reasons, and to argue that morality played any factor in this decision (other than in marketing it) is specious. I don't know if continuing the war is better than pulling out -- Iraq seems fucked either way, which doesn't bode well for us or anyone else -- but nothing in the Bush administrations current rhetoric suggests that they plan to change their current approach, which is half-assed arrogance. In the abstract, following through and firmly establishing democracy sounds like a good idea; in concrete reality, this idea has to be carried out with intelligence and genuine commitment. Doing it badly will be worse than not doing it at all; this will only justify the widely held image of the U.S. as a predatory bully that cares little for the lives of people outside its own borders.

Bret Fetzer

WHOOPSY DAISY

EDITOR: As I flipped through last weeks edition of The Stranger I noticed that "On Screen: This Week's New Releases," appeared on page 85 and then again on page 92. What gives? In an effor to understand I re-read all the reviews (Tell Them Who You Are, Apres Vous, Undead, Rize, and Year of The Yao) but they were word for word reprints. Are your editors asleep at the printing wheel? Were you short copy? Perhaps this some sort of bizarre Stranger IQ test? Or were you making a subtle comment that there are too many movie repeats from the Hollywood bland movie factory machine?

Nadja Dee Tanaka

[Editor’s Note: It was a printing error, not an I.Q. test. If it had been an I.Q. test, you would have been the only one smart enough to write it, so congratulations on behalf of everyone here at The Stranger: you, Nadja, are the smartest person in all of Seattle!]

SMOKING BAN PRO AND CON

EDITOR: Your article concerning the proposed referendum to ban smoking in public places ["Up In Smoke," Eli Sanders, July 7] unintentionally brings up a good point (and misses a few very important ones as well) - why, if club owners like Mr. Meinert are voluntarily banning smoking in their establishments, do we need this law? I live in Fremont, I can name three bars within walking distance that do not allow smoking, Ballard has quite a few, Belltown, you name it. Bar owners are already making decisions themselves to limit people's exposure to second-hand-smoke, offering patrons smoke-free places to eat, drink, and be merry. If work is already being done by citizens and businesses, do we really need a referendum? It would be better to pass a law requiring establishments to post at their entrances their policy on cigarette smoke so each person can make a decision for themselves. If, as Mr. Meinert suggests, it increases revenue, more and more places will switch over to smoke-free environments, and we won't have had yet another moral choice made for us by politicians, interest groups, and trade organizations.

Secondly, the whole notion of banning cigarettes from public spaces makes little sense. In order to protect people from the often cited deadly affects of second-hand-smoke, we are putting into effect numerous laws and regulations. However, second-hand-smoke is an issue of Clean Air. Blaming cigarettes for our lack of safe breathable air is like blaming cow farts for the hole in the ozone. If the average automobile burps out 650 pounds of noxious chemicals a year (as the EPA indicates) and industry is pumping out 265,000 metric tons of dangerous chemicals each year in Washington Sate alone (as WASHPRIG estimates), does anyone really take second-hand-smoke as a threat seriously? Think about it, a car can kill you within a half-hour in a closed garage - how many smokers would it take to cause that same effect? That thick blanket of smog wafting over Los Angeles isn't because they've forced all the smokers outside (smog gets so bad in places like Delhi and Mexico City, the governments warn people not to go outside). The fact that 25% of all children in Harlem have asthma and other serious respiratory problems isn't because there are so many people puffing away. And yet, if I'm standing outside of a store with a cigarette, I'm barraged by ugly looks, snide comments, and angry soccer moms jerking their children quick, quick to their minivans to burn rubber and get their darling children away from that horrible cloud of death. The fact is, we're killing ourselves with our fossil fuels and our need to continuously produce more shit for more people to buy and use. No one disagrees cigarettes are bad for you, smoking is rather stupid. But, its legal and efforts to reduce its prevalence are making headway. Our initiative system is great, its far more democratic than most states allow, but it seems to be replacing our citizens ability to make their own decisions. Maybe its time we stopped letting others make decisions for us and starting making them ourselves. If you don't want to be surrounded by smoke, frequent the variety of places that don't allow it. As citizens, we can change things, we don't always need referendums and politicians. And, next time you see someone smoking on the way to your car, before you throw out a snide comment or give them a dirty look, think about who is killing who.

Chris Greene

SMOKING BAN CONS ONLY

EDITOR: It's too bad Mr. Meinert didn't talk to folks in Pierce County who would have told him first hand what an ill conceived smoking ban will do because the same people who supported the Pierce County ban are involved in I-901. Businesses saw revenue declines of 25% or more while nearby tribal facilities saw increased revenue.

It's ridiculous when sponsors of I-901 lead people to believe the 25 foot rule wasn't well thought out. According to public disclosure documents I-901 spent almost $70,000 on consultants from January to June of this year and they spent over $336,000 to pay a firm to gather signatures for I-901. This well a orchestrated plan by I-901 supporters.

Initiative 901 will still allow all tribal businesses the freedom to cater to their smoking customers, while all other business owners will be considered criminals if they allow their smoking customers to light up. We also have about 35 reservations around our state and everyone will be exempt from enforcing a smoking ban. Businesses in Tacoma, Fife, Auburn, Kent, Everett and Marysville to name a few will be devastated.

Something no one speaks to is what's gong to happen to this states tax revenues when smokers, who will only be welcome at tribal businesses start buying their cigarettes at tribal businesses. Including the new 60 cents a pack tax smokers pay over 465 million a year. When smokers buy their cigarettes at tribal businesses the state gets zero. At $20 a carton the state is set to loose millions while giving tribes an economic windfall.

In today's climate almost 80% of all businesses are smoke free including many restaurants. What's left is predominantly bars and taverns who's clientele is entirely those over 21. Do we really need a law to tell adults whether they should smoke or not and with 80% of the businesses already smoke free don't non smokers actually have many more places to go than smokers do?

If a business/ private property owner decides to ban smoking that's his or her right but to have government mandate it? What's next, ban smoking in cars or in private homes? If I-901 is forced to disclose the actual source of the almost seven hundred thousand dollars it spent to get I-901 on the ballot then it becomes clear.

Dave Wilkinson

Renton, WA

SMOKING BAN PRO

EDITOR: I am a business owner and I strongly support I-901, the healthy indoor air initiative. I am extremely concerned with your article last week, because I believe it misrepresents what the initiative seeks to achieve. There is no question that secondhand smoke is harmful to all of us.

At Element, we would like to go smoke-free and are looking forward to this law passing. Although we have other businesses near us, I anticipate no difficulty working with the local health department to find a good place for our customers to smoke without exposing our non-smoking customers to secondhand smoke.

I-901 is a creative, unique approach that allows us all to work in smoke-free environments. There are more than 300 communities across the nation with the same law; and more than 1,000 communities that include a provision to ensure secondhand smoke does not unnecessarily re-enter buildings and workplaces. Sending smoking outside is not only the right thing to do – now is the time to do it!

Jason Brotman

Element

READ THE BOLD PRINT

MR. SANDERS: Fine print this! Your most recent piece, though it makes an attempt to be fair to Anti-smoking advocates, makes one glaring, flat-out wrong exaggeration. You claim the “25 foot clause” is worded in fine print. Do you even know what fine print is? Hint: Its usually in really small print and located at the bottom or end of a document.

Did you actually look at an I-901 petition Mr. Sanders? Right there on the top third of the document, in large, bold face, white lettering on a black background (to make it stand out from the rest of the petition), was the following statement: Concise Description: This measure would prohibit smoking in buildings and vehicles open to the public and places of employment, including areas within 25 feet of doorways and ventilation openings unless a lesser distance is approved.

And yet in your article, you refer to the “...within 25 feet of doorways...” clause to be existing in fine print three times, including the subtitle. This insinuates that the writers of the petition tried to pull a fast one on the voters who signed the petition. Well, I guess we assumed that if they could read large, bold print in a conspicuous area, they would be able to digest the “25 foot clause” as well.

So did you simply not read the petition, or is the tobacco industry paying you to spread more disinformation? As a signature gatherer for this petition, I was frustrated to hear people‚s misinformed reasoning about how the ban would hurt business. There have been numerous studies that conclude a ban has no effect on business and oftentimes will increase business (i.e. New York City, California) sales by as much as 12% compared to the year before the ban. And now you are adding more smoke to the fire of misinformation.

Quite an embarrassing word choice from whom I thought to be a factually fair investigative journalist. Oh yeah, I am emailing this in bold lettering so you don‚t miss any fine print.

Ronald Sorrell

BARNETT: SMART

DEAR ERICA C. BARNETT: Your Robert's Choice analysis [In The Hall, July 7] was insightful and entertaining. Enjoying your writing on the quirks and foibles of local politojunkies.

Charlie Ragen

A BOONDOGGLE WRAPPED IN AN ENIGMA

EDITOR: [Re: “Uphill Battle,” Erica C. Barnett, July 7] Nice article, but where did you get this idea of a lawsuit as a consequence of opting for rebid? it is unimagineable that a bidder would sue SMP or City and get anywhere.

SMP is WPPSS on Stumps. ice try, now it time to shut it down, let a few years pass, see what technological innovations occur. RTA and Light Rail is still a boondoggle, we need to focus civic attention on getting reasonable return on those huge investments.

C.Ragen

BROTHER VS. BROTHER IN THE NERD CIVIL WAR

TO CHARLES MUDEDE AND HIS COLLEAGUES: I have always thought you were a pretentious, irresponsible blowhard of a writer, but I've finally fucking had it. In your latest Stranger Suggests section [July 7], you wrote a short capsule praising Batman Begins. Fine. I liked it too. There are dozens of more deserving movies currently running that could really use the support, made by non-millionaires that actually care about telling a story—Possibly even films that HAVEN'T ALREADY BEEN PLAYING FOR FOUR WEEKS. That isn't the issue. And it's not that you try to inflate the movie (and yourself) by repeatedly referring to it as "a work of cinema.” No, that doesn't affect me considering everyone who reads your paper is already used to your fruity faux-intellectual grandstanding. The problem is in your last sentence, where you state that the director "has transformed a silly comic book into an event that is at once beautiful and heavy with importance.”

You've magically managed to cram volumes of naivete and pure, plain wrongness into one line of text. The film you lick the ass of is just the condensed music video version of a very NON-silly comic book that has been running for over 65 years; a comic book that tells the same story that dazzled you, only with much greater character development and background. Not to mention a lack of DAWSON'S CREEK alumni, for Christ's sake. I can't think of a single example of where there's been anything original or artful, much less superior, about a shortened adaptation of ANYTHING. I can only assume that you really must just drool over Cliff Notes of classic novels, too. You clearly just don't like or even know anything about comic books. I don't either, and that includes BATMAN. But the little I've been exposed to over the years makes it very clear that Nolan and company performed a very faithful retelling of an established story, using the material at hand. And the people that deserve your masturbatory back-patting are probably the writers and artists who've spent the last 66 years creating the characters and "event" that impressed you so goddamn much. That level of dedication to a craft dismissed as childish by 99% of the world (including you AND me) doesn't strike me as "silly.” Rather, it shows true devotion to what they've chosen as their art.

YOUR movie, on the other hand...definitely silly.

So, to sum up, I've been reading your work for six years and in that time you've proven yourself ignorant and inept in every regard. Please apologize to those you've wronged, retire from writing, and go to sleep forever.

Jacob Chadwick

PS: Just to nip your standard assumption in the bud: No, none of my criticisms are based on the fact that you're black.

PPS: I am too. Peace, brothaaahhhhh.

GOOD TO KNOW

BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT: That extremely muscular rooster who appeared to be glowering directly at you while feeling his immense bicep with a weird, feathered hand was actually the mascot for Virginia Tech not a German soccer team.

Bill Kelliher

LET’S HOPE HE’S READING!

EDITOR: This is in response to Amy Jenniges’s “In Other Neighborhoods [July 7]. Dear Ron Sims: On June 18, 2004 you declared, “I, Ron Sims, King County Executive, do hereby recognize the month of June, 2004 as Homeownership Month.” Your affirmation that for “working individuals and families, owning a home has come to symbolize the American Dream,” was inspirational. Your recognition that “the cost of buying a home in King County has increased markedly and owning a home is beyond the financial reach of many families, yet it is still ranked as the highest priority for most families,” was realistic and hopeful. Your observation that “expanding homeownership opportunities strengthens families, stabilizes communities, encourages savings and investment and improves our region’s economy,” was wise and full of foresight. So with all of that said, how is it that you can support Southwest Airline’s proposal to move from Seatac to Boeing Field?

Seattle’s oldest neighborhood, Georgetown, will be destroyed by this move. This history-laden part of town is just now beginning to wake up and shake off its urban blight reputation. Georgetown has become one of Seattle’s last truly affordable neighborhoods. It is attracting young first time homebuyers as well as a thriving artist community. Young, creative people are the lifeblood of any city. It is very important that Seattle continues to provide a place for these individuals to call home. Georgetown is fast becoming that place.

As King County Executive you should be very proud that under your watch an historic part of our city is on the brink of a renaissance. If the deal with Southwest Airlines is approved, Georgetown will die, just as it is being reborn. Please reconsider your support of this proposal. Thank you for your time and good work.

Joel Ancowitz

GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: A FORM LETTER

EDITOR: The leaders of the richest countries in the world have just completed three days of discussion. A large part of their conversation centered on fighting poverty in the developing world. But the elephant in the room, which President Bush and other leaders barely acknowledged, and the press failed to challenge them on, is the ongoing genocide that is occurring in Darfur, Sudan.

Up to 400,000 people have lost their lives in Darfur since the government-sponsored genocide began in 2003. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced; their livelihoods and villages destroyed by government forces and their proxy militias, and many thousands of women and girls have been raped by these forces. Recent reports confirm that the violence continues in Darfur, and that the security situation is still intolerable. The government of Sudan continues to obstruct humanitarian operations, creating famine conditions for millions of vulnerable innocents.

As the death toll in Darfur continues to mount at a rate of 1,500 per month, it is clear that nothing short of a strong international intervention can protect the people of Darfur. The African Union (AU) is doing what it can on the ground in the face of growing insecurity, but desperately needs greater help. According to a May 2005 Zogby poll, more than 80% of Americans support strong American action to stop the killing. President Bush must assert American leadership to galvanize an international intervention to stop the genocide. A first step would be to call on Congress to pass the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, which calls for increased support of the AU, stopping the Sudanese government from using aircraft to attack civilians, bringing the killers and rapists to justice, and dispatching high-level US diplomats to foster the peace process. As Americans and as human beings, we have a moral obligation to stop the inhumanity of genocide. After previous genocides, politicians thumped their chests and said “never again.” If we really mean it, now is the time to act to stop the slaughter.

Michael Fenton