DISHONORABLE CONDUCT
EDITOR: Regardless of how you feel about military recruiting or the war, Emily White's article ["Help Wanted," July 21] revealed that there are people out there willing to lie and deceive to achieve their goals. In this instance, it was the author and her mall accomplice who contacted local recruiters under false pretenses. The author clung to insinuation when she was unable to discover anything in the recruiter's message as false, including an insulting suggestion that the "emotional" conversation with the female recruiter was part of a calculated pitch. The real story here was about two soldiers who were doing tough jobs that our country calls on them to do. They were the only persons in the story who demonstrated strength of character by treating others with honor and respect.

Mitja Ng-Baumhackl

SHOOTING WAR
EDITOR: The problem with a volunteer army during a shooting war is... a lot of people simply don't want to get shot at. In fact, we've never had a volunteer army attempt to fight a war on this scale and we're discovering that finding recruits is not easy. As far as the casualties are concerned, these are small when compared to any other significant war we've been in. In fact, they're miniscule compared to any number of death statistics in this country—we lose over 17,000 lives a year due to drunk drivers. This doesn't make them any less important, but it illustrates how such a hotly debated topic as Iraq can skew our perspective.

J. Cameron

NO FREE LUNCH, NO GAS TAX
EDITOR: Eli Sanders's strategy to defeat the gas-tax repeal is foundationally wrong and wrong-headed ["The Western Strategy," July 21]. The divide on transportation in this state is not East/West, but tripartite: Rural voters who don't want to pay any taxes at all, sprawl voters willing to pay for roads but not transit, and urban voters prioritizing transit over roads. The coming impasse Sanders describes would be good for Seattle, and Representative Ed Murray's solution of funding transportation work with local money is even better. It is disconcerting to hear one of my heroes (Sanders) credibly repeating chamber of commerce buzz phrases like "vital arteries" and "helping our cities remain functional." A new and bigger 520 and viaduct will not aid Seattle's mobility, vitality, affordability, ecology, or economy.

A gas-tax repeal would deprive our highway-loving state DOT of the means to feed sprawl, global warming, and oil wars, and further delay the horror that waits somewhere in the coming decades, an I-605 skirting the Cascades. Paying for transportation at the state level means highways every time. The willingness of urbanites to tax drivers for transit will improve our quality of life, and stranding the rest of the state gas tax-less will teach Republicans in the hinterlands a necessary lesson: There really IS no free lunch. Repeal the gas tax! Yes on 912!

Grant Cogswell

MATH REMAINS HARD
EDITOR: "The Western Strategy" was the most brain dead thing I've read in a while. Does Sanders honestly believe that the gas-tax repeal (I-912) is an East/West thing or an urban/rural one? He seems to think that everyone in the Puget Sound cities is going to be for it. Boy, is he in for a surprise. People see this as an add-on to gas prices that are already way too high, and probably climbing higher. It doesn't matter where they live, so long as they drive. I-912 is going to win by a landslide. 80/20 or so.

I also believe that few people do the math. I fill up my gas tank about once every two weeks (a lot less often than some people). When the tax is fully installed (three years from now), that's about $1.50 per fill-up, out of close to $40 for a full tank (and maybe more in three years). That's less than the price of a single gallon of gas, or even of a drip coffee at Starbucks. It totals about $75 per year for me, the same as my license tab tax for Sound Transit. Realizing the pretty small impact on my wallet, I'll vote against I-912, but most people won't do that. "Math is hard," as Barbie said.

Jim Drew

THOSE POOR RIGHT-WINGERS
EDITOR: Left-wingers in Seattle have tried for years to stop citizens groups from using the initiative process to put reasonable caps on some of this state's most regressive taxes. It begs the question, à la Dr. Phil, "how's that working out for you?"

Two simple facts are working against the pro-tax-increase crowd in Seattle. First, it's an off-year election in which voter turnout will undoubtedly drop. Those who do vote will do so because they are motivated to for some reason or another. It's likely that few will vote out of an intense desire to protect an $8.5 billion tax increase.

Second, the normally tax-happy citizens of Seattle have just been stung, and stung badly, by their most recent foray into the realm of massive government transportation projects. Some of them might be wise to ask, if the monorail originally started at $1.75 billion and ended up at $11 billion, how much is $8.5 billion in transportation projects going to end up costing?

Aaron Schwitters
Campaign Coordinator, I-912

POWER (PLAY)
EDITOR: I am sick of being part of the spineless majority. We (Democrats) won control of things, we get to make the decisions. I am sick of liberal guilt. Somehow I think the liberal mind equates wielding power with oppression of the minority (Eastern Washington Republicans in this case). When they (Republicans) win office they are going to push their agenda without shame or guilt. Hell, they're the minority party in this state and trying to have it their way. To the politicians I helped elect: Grow a fucking backbone. Do your job!

Dan Knoepfler

KEEPIN' IT REAL (SARCASTIC)
CHARLES: Thanks for the insightful article into the fascinating life and mind of Framework ["Hard Knock Hiphop," Charles Mudede, July 21]. Hopefully, many young and impoverished African-American children will read it and see that they, too, can live a life of crime, spend years in prison, and offer nothing of value to society and still be looked at as a good person and positive role model.

Maybe when Framework gets out of jail he can shoot someone to further increase his street credentials and have some new lyrics for you to write about.

RS

DEAD OR ALIVE
EDITOR: It is common knowledge that when an artist dies, his or her work increases in value and interest. Steven Humphrey's article pointing this out was unnecessary [I ♥ Television, July 21]. On the other hand, his opinions were laughable. He mentions "John Lennon (who was AWFUL)" and "Jerry Garcia (almost as bad as John Lennon)" and then says, "Being alive did next to nothing for these people's careers, but once they chose to be dead? Ka-ZING!"

I can value his opinion and even though I (and many others) think Mr. Lennon and Mr. Garcia were great musicians, he is welcome to think they were "awful." But to think "being alive did next to nothing for these people's careers" is just downright silly or ignorant. Hasn't he ever heard of Beatlemania or Deadheads? Whether or not Mr. Humphrey approves of their musicianship, there is no doubt that these two individuals were incredibly successful during their lives.

By the way, who is Steven Humphrey anyway???

Eric

SCREW ABSTINENCE, REALLY
EDITOR: [Re: "NARAL Screws Up," Josh Feit, July 21.] I personally believe promoting abstinence-only programs in schools is not only ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand stupid, but reprehensible and dangerous. Having grown up as sheltered as a 1950s preacher's daughter with an equal amount of rebel-without-a-cause teenage angst, my struggles in my late teens and early adulthood (not throwing out personal responsibility, of course) are a testament to the negative effects of parents refusing to believe that kids need to hear the truth about sex. However, I'm glad that someone is pointing out the futility of a "screw abstinence" motto in actually making a difference where it counts.

Holly

STALKING 101
HI: I'm fascinated by Annie Wagner, and want to know all about her (biographical info)—is this information available to the general reading public?

Brandon Simmons

YES, FAT CHICKS!
EDITOR: I wish to point out a very important point missed by Cienna Madrid ["Adventures in Tassel Twirling," July 14]. That is the awesome erotic attractiveness of women with "stretch marks, stubble, lots of cellulite, and every other real or imagined body flaw, all exposed, undulating, and coated in glitter." The notion that "some lucky women... have slightly more perfect [bodies], which give them a leg up in the world of erotic dance" is a rather puerile though popular one in commercial media. In reality, males with a "mature" sense of erotic sexuality find those "flaws" described at length by Ms. Madrid to be far more exciting sexually than those "perfect" but perfectly insipid bodies promoted commercially as the model of female sexuality. There is in fact a whole dimension of erotic and pornographic art that is described as "mature kink" and covers this subject beautifully. It includes all the "flawed" female nudity that Ms. Madrid tries to support somewhat apologetically as "second best." (This should also include, by the way, the whole subject of the sexual attractiveness of older women, which she does not even mention.)

Name Withheld

FROM THE FORUMS AT WWW.THESTRANGER.COM

The following was posted by Levide in the Movies Forum at 1:17 pm Monday July 25, in response to the question "Has anyone seen Gus Van Sant's Last Days?"

I'm not kidding, man, except for one egregious (and dumbass) shot that I have huge problems with (SPOILER: Apichatpong Weerasethakul had the right idea when he had the dead-cow spirit wander off from its body into the jungle in Tropical Malady, but here a naked Michael Pitt climbing up a ladder just doesn't wash), Last Days is just about perfect. Having seen it a few times the stuff that initially bothered me (the Ricky Jay monologues, the Harmony Korine cameo, the complete disregard of someone as photogenic as Asia Argento, the fact that Pitt's music wouldn't motivate anyone to get up off the couch, let alone achieve Cobain-like popularity) makes perfect sense. It's all about Van Sant continuing to find himself on a formal level, and the movie is really about the odd dichotomy between stasis and dislocation. In that sense (temporally, formally, and metaphorically) it succeeds mightily (this isn't about Cobain at all in the same way Elephant wasn't at all about Columbine). The Gerry/Elephant/Last Days triptych has made me completely look at Van Sant's previous stuff in a new light. I can even go so far as to think of Finding Forrester as a different kind of experimental film (can one make a film without any sense of identity whatsoever? I think he failed there, were that what he was going for, his always impeccable sense of location is intact, but I'm willing to forgive him for it based on this last batch... my thumb is even up for Psycho as far as his middle finger was to his audience when he made it). It's clearly part of a whole with the previous two films, so if you liked those at all you know what you're getting into. If you didn't like them you know as much, but I think they're fucking brilliant.

Do you have strong feelings about Gus Van Sant's late-middle-period formal experimentalism? Log on to forums.thestranger.com and make them known. Everybody's doing it...