While The Examiner ran an editorial Dec. 26 that the Newsom administration’s reduction of planned cuts of unfilled jobs had magically dropped by 1,036 vacant positions (from 1,679 to only 643) in a short five-day period, The Examiner wrongly lamented, “imagine how much more significant [salary] savings would be if the original 1,679 job [cuts] were true.”

The Examiner may not have bothered to obtain the initial list of 1,679 vacant positions Newsom initially indicated would be cut, including, for example, 73 police officers, 299 transit operators in job classification No. 9163 who drive buses and Muni trains, 22 Muni transit fare inspectors, eight health care billing clerks in the Department of Public Health whose job it is to increase revenue collections, and 69 positions in the Juvenile Probation Department, including a total of 26 of juvenile counselors and juvenile probation officers, among other positions.

Does The Examiner’s editorial board prefer that we have fewer police officers, juvenile probation officers and bus drivers, simply to save additional salaries, while Newsom’s “audacious” and now “combative” leadership stance for his second term continues to erode the quality of life for San Franciscans by idle threats of reductions in basic city services?

Patrick Monette-Shaw

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The City

High-speed rail necessary

High-speed rail is the answer to more and more airport congestion and delays.

It’s the best, cheapest and only way to cope with California’s coming population explosion, reduce air pollution and happily carry travelers in comfort from downtown San Francisco to downtown Los Angeles — for a lower fare and in less time than it takes to travel early to the airport, stand in the check-in line, fly and reach your on-ground destination.

Jane Morrison

The City

U.S. haters’ empty promises

Along with air and spacecraft, we export to China oil seeds, slag, ores, ash, base metals, wood pulp, cotton, soybeans, hides and skins, tobacco, wadding, and animal and vegetable fats. We offer raw materials in the manner of our trade as a colony.

Those who condemn America for inequality turn power and treasure over to like thinkers who trade in promises. “It takes a village” — a village indeed.

The empty supermarket shelves in Venezuela, the looted museums in Iraq, the barren farms in South Africa, the destroyed greenhouses in Gaza, the burning cars in Marseilles, the Third World schools and streets of San Francisco — what it takes is culture, values, duty, commitment and sacrifice.

Paul Burton

The City

Give Israel a break

The Israeli “peace and justice” organizations listed by Mike Caggiano (letters, Dec. 29-30) dealing with the Arab-Israel conflict have one thing in common: they all criticize Israel and expect nothing of the Arabs. It would be much harder for him to find Arab organizations that are calling for peace with Israel, let alone criticizing Arab policies and giving Israel a break — probably because they would be labeled collaborators and jailed, shot or hanged by the Arabs. Instead, the Arab organizations are busy spreading hatred so that another generation will suffer trying to push Jews into the sea: www.pmw.org.il/.

Israel is a sovereign, legal Jewish country, blessed by the United Nations in 1947: http://tinyurl.com/2d2aw2. Who questions the policies of all the Arab countries that were born out of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, or their right to exist as Muslim nations?

Sheree Roth

Palo Alto

Problem of psychiatrists, drugs

So now the governor of Virginia wants to fix the state’s “broken” mental health system by giving it more money, and more authority to psychiatrists? This won’t solve the problem.

What psychiatrists don’t want us to know is that they are the problem — they are the one’s who come up with ways to label ordinary behavior “mental disorders” and then prescribe drugs, which make people want to kill both themselves and others.

The solution is not to pour more money at the same broken system. The solution is to eliminate the cause — psychiatrists and their mind-destroying drugs.

Bob Johnson

Los Gatos

Pakistan needs new blood

I don’t think it is wise after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to name her 19-year-old son, Bilawal, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as co-leaders of the Pakistan People’s Party.

The son is too young and inexperienced, while the father has been suspected of corruption and other wrongdoings.

It is time for the Pakistan People’s Party to look for new blood, and get away from the Bhutto family domination. It needs to be a political party for all of the Pakistani people, not just a family dynasty.

Kenneth L. Zimmerman

Huntington Beach