What’s up with Muni’s plan to literally maroon people living on one of San Francisco’s highest hills (“Muni fine-tunes transformation,” Aug. 7)?

The idea is to abandon service to many residents of Telegraph Hill by changing their only public transportation, the 39-Coit line, into a tourist shuttle between Fisherman’s Wharf and Coit Tower.

Muni planners need to look up “municipal” in the dictionary, and compare it with “tourists,” people who live elsewhere, and would likely take this bus exactly once. Meanwhile, the carless, aging and disabled folks who actually depend on the 39 to get to appointments and bring necessities into the house are supposed to — what? Sprout wings?

Patricia Cady

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San Francisco

Executives should feel pain

While home repossessions and foreclosures reach an all-time high, the darling government mortgage McLenders received a sweet bailout.

Holding a staggering $5.2 trillion of mortgages (two-fifths of the total), Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae moved aggressively to purchase worthless subprime mortgage securities, hoping to make a killing and reward their less-than-astute executives with fat bonuses.

Congress’ response to the crisis makes little sense. The mortgage ceiling, targeted to low-income borrowers, has been raised from $417,000 to $625,000. The Federal Housing Administration insures mortgage loans for low-income families that only require as little as 3 percent down payment. None of the Freddie-Fannie executives have been held accountable for gross mismanagement, and no checks and balances have been imposed to dissuade future speculation and outright fraud.

Last year, the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made a combined total of close to $60 million in salaries. At the very least, the government should demand that none of the top executives should receive bonuses and take an obligatory salary reduction of 20 percent for playing fast and loose with the people’s money — for the duration of the bailout.

Finally, taxpayers should be compensated for the risk they have undertaken by receiving a portion, say 5 percent, of the total valuation as shares of stock.

Jagjit Singh

Los Altos

McCain and Iraq

Will someone please tell John McCain there is no winning in Iraq? I was an Iraq war protester before we went in. I was also a supporter of the surge. The surge has been successful, allowing us to avoid total and complete disaster.

But to refer to the success of the surge as “winning” in Iraq? There can be no winning in Iraq.

Iraq was an unjustified invasion of another country that posed no threat. The decision to invade was based not on misinformation, as we are finding out, but on out-and-out lies. A forged document that has been described as an “obvious” forgery?

Please. We (the citizenry, the media, even Congress) have been strong-armed by a bullying administration into invading another country for no other reason than that certain people in our administration didn’t like that country’s leader. The invasion of Iraq is a travesty. A travesty of justice and a travesty of lives lost, both American and Iraqi.

Thank God the surge has been successful, and we have avoided total and complete disaster. But Iraq is a loss — a loss of lives, a loss of standing in the international community, a loss of trust of their government by the American people.

There can be no winning in Iraq.

Renee Nutcher

Lakeport

Pay cuts hurt families

The governor of the state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has ordered that all state employees will have their pay and salaries reduced and cut to $6.55 per hour, which is the official minimum wage of the United States.

I do not like what Gov. Schwarzenegger did because there are fine men and women who work for this great state and have spouses, children and families that they have to care for and support. They also have to pay rent and mortgages so that they and theirs can have a place to live. Not only are gas prices rising and the cost of living is rising, but now that they are about to get a cut in their pay, it is really going to hurt.

Gov. Schwarzenegger says that the reason he had to take this action is because there is currently no budget and he is not getting any cooperation from the state Assembly or the state Senate. In my opinion, politics is a great thing to have, but sometimes politics is just a grown-up game of immature kindergartners and nursery schoolers who cannot get along and share data and information with one another that might help better the state.

I hope this major financial problem with the state budget is resolved quickly or else there are going to be many families without the financial stability and security that they once had.

Frank Lopez

Redwood City

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