Friday Fish Wrap: February 18. 2010

Did you see the fanfare on today’s Reno Gazette-Journal Business page about the all new non-stop flight from Reno to Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport - with Airport CEO, Krys Bart all aglow alongside former Olympic skier, Jonny Mosley? Not stopping to think about what Olympic skiing has to do with an air route to Texas, I went on to wonder about why this is news.

Here is an object lesson about short collective memory. I don’t blame folks who don’t fly to Houston, Texas often for not knowing that there already was a non-stop flight from Reno to Houston on Continental Airlines.

Now, the route may have been suspended for a while during the recent United/Continental merger for reasons of federal route authorization on United’s part, but it was my ‘Plan B’ back-up in case flying as a non-revenue pass rider on Brand X Airlines didn’t work out. I was traveling to Houston, monthly, for more than a year during my cancer treatments at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center.

See, this is what the daily newspaper might want to mention in the cause of thorough coverage of a news event … just in case the airport folks forgot. It’s not a particularly important oversight in this case, but when it comes to other really critical events, you hope the news folks are more on top of things.

Here’s an idea for a bumper sticker:

Sheesh, the public employees in Wisconsin are really getting the full effect of the current cheesy  GOP strategy of  scapegoating public employees and their commie unions as the cause of’everything that’s wrong in America’. Of course, the same thing is going on in many states, including right here in Nevada. But when you have Wisconsin’s governor talking about calling out the National Guard, I suddenly have mental images of federal troops used to crush the American Railway Union in 1894 and use of the National Guard in Colorado in 1903.

The level of violence got everybody’s attention. And not in a good way.

Union busting got more sophisticated in the later half of the 20th century, with the use of industrial psychologists, consultants and management/labor law specialists that have made a fine and subtle art of sidestepping the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act,  and reframing the basic human/worker right to organize and collectively bargain as some sort of nefarious commie plot.

The facts that most people could earn a lot more, salary-wise, in the private sector than they do in the public sector seems to be lost in the rush to assign blame. Cherry-picking instances of supposed abuse of taxpayer generosity by various public professions is another tactic. Firefighters make themselves a wonderful target - unfortunately.

It’s so very facile to heap all the blame on public employees. It more politically correct this days, than blaming a particular religion or race or gender.

Yet! Yet, the facts claim something else entirely. According to the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, public sector jobs require a higher level of education, salaries for public sector positions are typically 11 percent less than comparable private sector jobs - with the pay gap between the two rising over the last decade or so, with compensation levels - after all benefits are factored in - being about seven percent less than comparable positions in the private sector.

The bottom line: you’ve really gotta wanna be a public employee, because the pay package isn’t going to make you rich. Firefighters excluded. You’ve really got to be an idiot to blame teachers, while Wall Street has been allowed to walk away scot free - with billions.

The National Institute on Retirement Security offers a nifty cheat sheet on this. Send it to your legislators and neighbors on the GOP side.

I’m probably going to catch hell from firefighters, but I’ve gotta tell you I know two - one in my neighborhood - that left before age 60 and they’re doing very, very well indeed. We should be doing so well. Nice people … well John is a right wing, full-metal, TeaParty, bumper-sticker jackass, but Randy, the Waco pilot,  is sweet - but you’ve gotta wonder.

Oh, I recommend the Matt Taibbi article on Wall Street in Rolling Stone.

Mr. Maven has been having trouble with his vision again. He went back to the eye doctor, to no avail. They told him that his prescription was just flawed. Deal with it. Hmmmm. Then he went back to Adlington Eye Center and spent the better part of an afternoon with Travis Adlington. The bottomline: Mr. Maven has some of the worst dry eye that Travis has ever seen, and that is what has been causing his vision disturbances.

Again, the wonderful staff at Adlington on Plumb and Arlington, Reno, have stepped up and done what the eye surgeon is too busy to do. Spend time with a patient and truly get to the bottom of a problem, and then go above and beyond to write out a course of home-based self-treatment, and contact the eye surgeon to get prescriptions etc. At almost no charge beyond the fancy eye drops. Mr. Maven went back again today, and they’re going to ‘adapt’ his computer glasses - not a new, expensive prescription lens - to work better for him with a nifty clip-on lens.

Try and get that from the likes of EyeMasters, where the help is different every time you walk in. I’m not kidding. Adlington is amazing. You get what you pay for.

This afternoon was frustrating. Poor old Mom. She got canceled out of her echo cardiogram yesterday, and it was rescheduled to late this afternoon. An hour after we got there - in plenty of time for the appointment - we finally got in for the echo. And out too late for her to make it back to the ‘home’ for dinner.

We went out, but she’s got another cracked tooth, and hasn’t got many sound teeth left. At 93, she’s essentially outlived her teeth. We’ve got to be careful about where we go to eat, since she really can’t chew much. Back to the dentist next week.

Getting old isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Well, I’ve been cranking up sourdough starters, and will be baking a bit more dough over the weekend. Baking bread isn’t exactly easy, but it’s very satisfying. The above loaf took more than 24 hours to accomplish. Yes, bread is a work of love. Love of the loaf.

Stay tuned and I’ll let you know how it went.

Well, don’t hurt your back out there shoveling the snow. Stay warm with copious amounts of hot cocoa. Relax. I’ll let myself out.

Cheers.

LATE BREAKING NEWS: House Republicans hate women and their damned inconvenient reproductive rights.

Reporting from Washington — The Republican-led House on Friday approved an amendment to a massive spending bill that would prohibit federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

The measure offered by Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) was approved 240-185, with several Democrats joining Republicans in support. The organization would be prohibited from receiving federal funds for any of its activities. It is already banned from using federal funds to perform most abortions. Click here for more ….

Send Rep. Mike Pence some of your kind words.

And, do you really think they won’t do same for NPR and PBS?

-maven