Adele Ferguson 10/6/11

ITEM - Tacoma teachers ended their strike of a couple weeks by winning most of their demands. Despite being among the highest paid teachers in the state, they will be protected from the 1.9 percent pay cut imposed statewide by the Legislature by being paid out of reserves. They had to give back a training day for which they were paid extra but will get it later on in the new contract.

COMMENT - Too bad for the taxpayers that a chicken judge was involved in this case. When striking teachers were ordered back and they refused to obey, fines should have been assessed immediately instead of threatened. The strike was illegal and the refusal to go back to work was illegal. Pierce County Superior Court Judge Bryan Chushkoff apparently didn’t want the teacher unions after his scalp in his next election. But if he’s chicken, the striking teachers were vultures.

ITEM - The two American hikers who were held for more than two years in an Iranian prison are back home, thanks to the Sultan of Oman paying their $1 million bail, and claim they were arrested just for being Americans when they took a wrong turn along the Iraq-Iran border and were nabbed by the Iranis.

COMMENT - If they’re smart enough to know that, why weren’t they smart enough to hike someplace else? Strolling the Iraq-Iran border is akin to taking a swim where the sign on the beach reads Danger: Sharks.

ITEM - Cities around the U.S. are beginning to ban or consider banning plastic bags shoppers use because of their environmental impact. The greenies say their manufacture depletes fossil fuels which go into the making while plastic bag makers say they are recycled about 40 percent of the time.

COMMENT - Like many people I recycle mine in waste containers with a paper sack inside of each one. Surplus bags I give to St. Vincent’s secondhand stores for bagging customer purchases. Actually, I get more plastic bags in the delivery of daily newspapers which are delivered these days by a toss of the bagful out the delivery driver’s car window. I recycle those full of the myriad of cards that come inside magazines. Why can’t some manufacturer come up with an acceptable plastic bag the way the pop can makers made tabs that stay in the can when complaints were made about them?

ITEM - The executions of two convicts has set off another national debate over the death penalty. Derrick Mason shot an Alabama store clerk in 1994 during a robbery and Troy Davis shot and killed a Georgia police officer who interrupted him while he was pistol whipping a homeless man in 1989.

COMMENT - The most injustice in the death penalty isn’t the remote possibility of executing an honest man but the fact that it takes so long to achieve justice for the families of the victims due to anti death penalty proponents and lawyers who make a fortune stringing it out, 22 years in the case of Davis and 17 years for Mason.

ITEM - Floyd Trepus of Bremerton recently celebrated his 100th birthday with over 60 close friends and relatives. He worked in Puget Sound Naval Shipyard from 1941 until retiring in 1973 and then cleared five acres of land and built and occupied a new home.

COMMENT - What makes this an item is that it is standard belief that shipyard workers live only a short time after retirement, and Mr. Trepus is still going strong after 38 years, meaning he has been retired longer than the 32 years he worked. I can’t say about him what was said about a retiree whose widow I called in writing his obituary asking what he did in the ten years he survived his retirement. She said, “He didn’t do a damn thing.”

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Bix 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)