THE SOUND OF MONEY

HELLO, STRANGER: I have a small but important clarification to make concerning a statement attributed to me in "Freaking the Frequencies" [Aug 24, Paul Pearson].

Pearson writes, "Then there are KEXP's money and corporate sponsors, which [Greg] Jaspan says made some KEXP employees jokingly tweak their station's slogan to 'Where the money matters.'"

First, it should be noted that these weren't just any employees saying this: They are all regular on-air DJs. Secondly, they/we did not say this jokingly at all. We mean it.

But the most important part I wanted to clarify is that it is not KEXP's use of corporate-sponsorship money that led us to say this (although that fact was certainly not lost on us). It is the station management's (executive director Tom Mara, program directors John "In the Morning" Richards and Kevin Cole, and music director Don "Slack" Yates) focus on their decided target-market demographic (21–35 years old, Caucasian, professionally employed, upwardly mobile, discretionary-income earning) and the resulting overly safe, watered-down, homogenized music programming that led us to say this. It is obvious to many, if not most, of the DJs that this focus exists for one reason and one reason only: to generate more money. By dumbing down the music programming and making it safer for mass consumption, and by focusing mostly on rock and rock-centric programming, management believes they will most successfully appeal to this target demographic. And judging by the station's ever-increasing pledge-drive totals and underwriting sales ("underwriting" is noncommercial radio jargon for commercials), it seems they are correct.

Greg Jaspan, AKA DJ Greg J

CANTWELL'S NEW RAP

DEAR STRANGER: I was happy to see that Josh Feit called the Cantwell campaign on its recent vacuous pandering to antiwar voters ["Base Hit," Aug 24]. However, Mr. Feit missed a key part of this whole issue. We will not understand exactly what is going on here, until we discuss the reason for Cantwell's sudden change of heart. That can be summarized in one phrase: "Ned Lamont and Aaron Dixon."

After Lamont's upset victory over Joe Lieberman (another pro-war centrist Democrat), the Cantwell campaign finally realized that for 2006, "It's the war, stupid." And with Dixon running a strong third-party campaign and not bowing to lesser-evil pressure, the Cantwell campaign realized that they can no longer take the progressive antiwar vote for granted, and—horror of all horrors—they have to earn it.

So the Cantwell campaign is trying to change its tune just enough to shore up her support on the left, while being careful not to make any substantive promises that she will then need to keep post-November.

Aram Falsafi

IT'S HER RECORD, STUPID

EDITOR: I'm sorry but Maria Cantwell's supposed "base hit" per Josh Feit, is a "strikeout." It's not what Cantwell says that counts, but what she does—and has done!

Is she now going to vote against Bush's next money request for the bloody suppression of Iraq and Afghanistan? Or will she vote once again to authorize money for endless war as she has done so many times? And what about her "no regrets" for initially supporting Bush?

Cantwell now changes her tune slightly not because of an illegal war, the bloodshed and brutal occupation of Iraq, but because she saw fellow Democratic warmonger Joe Lieberman lose the Connecticut primary.

No thanks. I support Hong Tran, whom Cantwell failed to buy out with the millions in her campaign chest, and the rubber stamp of the Democratic political machine.

Bob Miller

DISHONEST DISCOURSE

SENATOR CANTWELL: If you'd known then what you know today, you would have voted no. An awful lot of us knew then much of what we know now: that UNSCOM had found and destroyed the WMD in the 1990s and that the Bush people were lying. That's why we stood on street corners with No Iraq War signs. We knew we were being lied to, that there was no casus belli.

Not only that, a lot of us realized that Saddam = Tito. You remove the strongman in an artificially pieced-together country, pretty soon a civil war starts. At this point U.S. troops can "prevent" it like they can prevent a hurricane. The bombing of the al-Askari Mosque removed all doubt: The Iraqi civil war is raging.

It's not the "conduct of the war" that's wrong, it's the war itself. Your new message rings false.

Paul Schafer

DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS In her August 24 In the Hall column, Erica C. Barnett reported that City Council Member Sally Clark was "the first council member since" Tina Podlodowski to hold Neighborhoods Committee meetings in neighborhoods, not at City Hall. In fact, Richard Conlin held Neighborhoods Committee meetings throughout the city when he was chair of that committee. The Stranger regrets the error.