Weekend Tids and Bits

Gracious to the End: The Newark Star-Ledger is winning praise for the way it is handling salary cuts, kind of like cheering the headsman for a sharp axe and good follow-through.

For the record, the cuts go on a progressive scale --  five percent of the first $40,000, ten percent of the next $40,000 and 15 percent beyond that. This comes after bigtime buyouts, mandatory ten-day unpaid leave, and no more pension plan contributions. Plus, employees will be picking up a quarter of their health plan costs, taking another $80.11 a week from employees on the family plan.

My hometown paper for more than three decades, the Ledger has that thin, wasting look you usually see not long before the end.

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TANJ! (There Ain’t No Justice):  The United States Department of Justice say’s it will save $6.7 million over the next five years by moving legal notices about property forfeiture from newspapers to http://forfeiture.gov. That’s probably only the beginning across, federal, state and local governments and is just one more nail in a newspapering coffin already having more nails than wood.

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You Can Flu Some of the People All of The Time. . . Media outlets and authorities fond of seeing themselves mentioned completed the Swine Flu (Sorry Mr. President, H1N1 virus) cycle last week, moving from Prepare For The End to a much milder Prepare For The End (but it’s not coming for the forseeable future). The good: countries got to practice the drill they’ll need for a major threat. The bad: over-reaction, especially in Mexico, that caused far more economic damage than it prevented disease. The silly: Afghanistan taking the sole pig in the Muslim Country’s zoo off exhibition and into quarantine, lest it infect the faithful who have more to worry about with their bullet epidemic than a possible virus.

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JP Morgan Chase was one of the financial institutions that passed the government stress test. That’s probably because of the conservative financial policies found at the branch, where I tried to pay for a Mothers Day Visa gift card with a Chase Visa debit card. Sorry, the kind teller said, only checks or cash are accepted.

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