Online readers are able to respond immediately to Star-Bulletin stories through our Web forum, which can be accessed at the end of stories, editorials and columns at starbulletin.com. Below is a selection of forum comments that appeared last week. Most forum contributors use pseudonyms; their “;names”; have been omitted here.

  ”;Market Place to be revamped,”; Star-Bulletin, Sept. 24: While we can never go back to the heyday of the Market Place we can certainly do much better than what it is now. I'm looking forward to the possibilities.

  If they we're going to do something, now is as good a time as any, given the downturn in tourism. I have a hunch it will end up looking like the Aloha Tower Marketplace. But if the developers maximize the open space, that's OK. If visitors still want to shop at street/cart vendors, they can just visit Chinatown.

  Getting rid of what attracts tourists does not sound like a smart business decision.

  ”;Isle Democrats weigh in on crisis,”; Star-Bulletin, Sept. 25: Doom and gloom. Hawaii needs to get back to the basics. Agriculture, farming, being more self-sufficient. If managed right we can be the only state in the union that can sustain itself on its own. Use each island to create our own ecosystem: produce grown on Molokai, pigs and fruits on Maui, cattle from the Big Island, poultry and coffee from Kauai, Oahu “;whatever we can manufacture.”; Quit depending on the outside money. When times are tough, get your hands dirty and work, like the old days.

  If Neil Abercrombie is so concerned about our economy, maybe he should scrap his “;dream plan”; of modernizing the U.S. House's gymnasium and use those tax dollars for something more important. Maybe he, Mazie Hirono, and the two uncle Dan's could stop giving themselves yearly congressional pay raises and perks. Maybe they should stop overtaxing the already overtaxed people of Hawaii and start abiding by their constitutional duties of limiting government tax-and-spend habits. All I hear is election year rhetoric from our U.S. delegation. They still don't have a damn clue to the plight of our nation. They're more concerned with winning an election.

  These four clowns are the very people who got us into this mess with their idiotic, common sense-lacking social engineering experiment which forced Freddie and Fannie to finance loans to people who economically had no business getting such loans. We can expect more of the same if Obama gets elected.

  ”;Proposed DOE cuts unnerve officials,”; Star-Bulletin, Sept. 25: How interesting that charter schools are going to take a hit! Probably because they are actually showing student improvement, which makes them a threat to the DOE schools!

  With more or less money the end result of education is the same. Hawaii has some of the worst test scores in the nation. Whose fault is it? It's the fault of the education system that has failed us. With poor quality teachers, what do you expect? I say lay off and cut the budget. If the teacher does well, then give them a raise. Half the teachers in this state are not qualified and are only there to get a paycheck. Test teachers regularly and don't give them tenure.

  Let the teachers repay their last raises because of breach of contract. Presto, plenty money!