Comments by jajanatch

Another option is to increase taxes on those who can best afford to pay them while letting military and civilian government employment decrease by attrition. As well, start some entitlements ... Mediacare, for example, at 67 which is when social security will begin as soon as someone can figure out how to make it politically palatable.

Will one or more of you perceptive readers please give me a list of countries that have propsered through deficit reductions as the Economist says "history" show has happened.

Will somebody tell me the countries that "history" shows became prosperous through deficit reduction?

Clearly you do not understand that the more people spend the greater the demand for goods and services and this generally translates into more jobs. If everybody saved their theoretical maximum and did not spend the economy would go into a tailspin from which it would never recover. I suggest you take Econ 101 and find out what makes and economy work.

Sixty years ago at Stanford I remember reading John Stuart Mill's definition of the purpose of government: to do for the people collectively those things they cannot do for themselves individually. I still believe that to be accurate and I bet anybody who has ever had to apply for unemployment compensation (as I did once 50 years ago) would agree with it.

If the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, as Lenin reportedly said, then Assange is a terrorist plain and simple.

Robert Harper
Toronto, Canada

If you live in a building on the 24th floor 22 people will always get on with you in the lobby and stop at 22 floor. If you live on the third floor no one will every get on with you in the lobby except the cleaning person will will go to the fourth floor. Undsoweiter!

I am an 80-year-old retired PR man and I can't remember ever using any of these words in describing my clients, their activities or their products. Maybe I didn't have to because my clients were leaders in leading industries, etc. On the other hand, I never said any of my clients or their products were the smallest, least progressive, run of the mill, ordinary, unable to solve problems, etc.

Jeremy X does not take into consideration the difference between English usage and North American usage when he refers to rest is bought versus rest are bought. In North America rest is bought because rest is what is commonly considered a singular collective. In the US it is General Motors is but in the UK and likely some other parts of the world it is General Motors are. As for complete, technically there are no degrees of completeness but in usage it is quite common to say something is virtually complete or even nearly complete when something is so close to being complete that any other modifier or nuance would be misleading and cumbersome It is familiar usage to say something is clean when it is anything but clean in terms of the absolute meaning of the word. One last cavil, he uses the word precipitously in a very general sense of the word when the actual meaning refers to a rock wall or something similar. In fairness I would probably also have used precipitously but I would not have complained about the writing of the article.

In reading some of these comments I can better understand why newspapers have problems. Viz: Nirvana-Bound is positive that newspapers and therefore journalists only serve "cartels and conglomerates; Good-dog says he reads 10 papers daily but only on the Internet yet thinks he is a "news junky;" Tony Ryan does not like Rupert Murdoch's "sycophantic scribes." I suggest before they criticize try a stint as a reporter and learn something about it from the inside. They should remember: first you learn how to do it, then you learn how to criticize.

My idea of newspapers of the future (near) is that there will be about five or six national American newspapers that will have strong local bureaus for local news in various cities. These could easily be seen as the Los Angeles Edition of the New York Times, the St Louis Edition of the New York Times, etc., with the prominence being on the local name, not the national name. This would leave the great newspapers to concentrate on those things they do best for a huge number of localities and permit good local bureaus to cover local news. It is so inexpensive now to move news around the world that there is little need for individual papers to have reporters covering the same people and same topics in a majority of cases but local news is a different matter and requires local reporters. The major problem newspapers have today is not coverage but a mindset: the current generation now gets its news electronically and they are as comfortable with that as I, an 80 year old former journalist am with newspapers. Even so, I turn to my computer first thing when I get up and then go to my two local newspapers.

Bruce E: From the stanpoint of punctuation it is legitimate to use quotation marks to indicate the title of a book. I refer you to the Chicago Manual of Style which is considered the contemporary authority for such matters. Fowler, in his Modern English Usage, does not refer to the use of quotation marks and book titles.

Robert Harper

Jerry Brown was a bright young kid when I was covering his father's campaigns and years in office as a newspapaer reporter and I was impressed with his dad but not too much with him. However, I suspect he is far better qualilfied than any of the possible Republican candidates and with the way California is functioning these days it probably does not matter who is elected: the state has insurmountable problems, the major one being the majority required to pass a budget and the other involves real estate taxation. Until these two are reworked the State will continue to flounder.