I can see circumstances where someone needs to remain anonymous in order to be candid. If you want to preserve that option, you could ask anonymous posters to explain to you why. You would need to allot staff time to reading these and approving or rejecting them - but I'll bet you would find very few would be submitted....

I support eliminating the anonymous option in either case. Screen names are basically the same as anonymous - but you can at least see the pattern of abuse when people use screen names and respond if needed.

One fun solution to car alarms --

I lived for awhile in a group house (called "Bob" here in Seattle). There was a car in our neighborhood that would alarm whenever it rained, and after shutting off every three minutes it would alarm again when the next raindrop fell.

We called the police to complain after several nights of poor sleep, and we were told that there is no law in Seattle against car alarm noise. The dispatcher said they would not be able to respond "unless the car was in the middle of the street or something." This was instructive. With many neighbors already clustered around the car at 2:30 AM, it was not difficult to find a way to put the car in the middle of the street (or something).

The best reminder of this episode many years ago is of the towtruck driver dragging the still-alarming car away and signing a big thumbs-up to the assembled neighbors. A good time was had by all.

Happy birthday! I can't overstate how comforting it's been to turn to your column over the last couple of months of insanity to be reminded there actually *is* sense to be made of what's been happening around us. I'm compelled to add one more "Congrats," but more importantly, "Thanks!" for your commitment and determination to follow the debates others of us don't have time to follow or just don't understand, and to put it all in plain English.

The article suggests that the benefit of an infrastructure bank is to allow the feds to purchase loans for individual projects -- that's just crazy!

Bonds are needed sometimes for huge projects, but when you finance something with bonds you spend end up spending from a half to two-thirds of your money on financing, so you only build 1/3 to 1/2 of what you would build if you paid for the same project without the loan. If a state DOT routinely paid for its billions of dollars of annual expenses with bonds, it would get less than 1/2 as much built. Obviously you only want to use bonds for the hugest of huge projects.

Over the past few years state D's of T have used bonds more frequently, partly because of declining federal funds. In my town of Seattle, we have even used bonds to pay for routine street preservation (!!). At the same time, construction costs for roads and transit have gone through the roof. Take dramatic cost escalation and then double it to add financing costs and you have the beginnings of an infrastructure funding hole with no bottom.

Stimulus is a great idea, but in only a few years hopefully the economy will come back and we will start turning out attention to reducing what will be a staggering deficit. We will not want a ton of money committed to paying back bond financing at that point. We will need to put real tax money into investment when we stop wanting to just print more money. The best role for federal funding will be to fill the revenue gaps that state and local governments now turn to bond agencies to fill. Using a national tax base, it would be possible to even the funding peaks for large projects -- and that would allow projects to be paid for without bond financing, and stop us from sending more than half our transportation revenues up the chimney in the form of bond financing costs.

At a national scale bonding is silly, especially when the revenues that back them will be borrowed in the first place. Future generations will take advantage of things we build today, but they will have their own needs as well, and those needs will only increase as our 20th century infrastructure gets depleted further. The direction we're headed today will leave our children paying the credit card fees for our current infrastructure investment, with little left over for the bigger problems we're leaving them. The better approach is to use the scale of federal taxation to replace the need for state and local bond financing as much as possible.

There are really two questions here. One is whether there will be people reporting the news who have not been airbrushed and focus-grouped to project a lowest-common-denominator happy medium view of the world. I think are and will continue to be real people in the news business with real concern for ethics and professionalism, despite what the mainstream news has come to be.

But the other question is whether there will ever again be one place where all of America watches to learn what's happened in a day. Cronkite was the definitive last word, because he was such a compelling personality, but also because so much of America watched what he had to say that his opinion (conveyed often only through his expression) was a common and unifying experience for Americans.

That's what I don't expect to experience again. We are unlikely ever again to have a single place or person we all turn to each day to learn about and interpret what happened. There are too many places to turn to, and too many seek out the news they agree with, not the reporters they trust. I have to admit I think it's a loss not to have a few touchstones that most Americans witness in common, or opinion leaders we trust because we know their ethics and professionalism is untarnished.