Air travelers have an abundance of reasons to complain about their plight these days.

But walking through a body scanner isn’t even close to the most onerous.

We’re more offended by luggage fees that make it cheaper to mail your suitcases ahead.

Anyway, the tighter security gantlet that awaits passengers at American airports is unfortunate but necessary.

The list of excuses for not keeping tabs on the Baker City Council will get shorter soon.

And as an operation that depends absolutely on the free flow of information, we’re pretty pleased about that.

The city’s decision last week to subscribe to an online service that streams Council meetings live over the Internet was a good one.

It’s tough out there in these recessionary (or, allegedly, post-recessionary) days.

Tough to find a job.

Tough to keep the one you have, if you’re among the fortunate ranks of the employed.

And yet, in these trying times there is persuasive evidence that in one respect it’s getting easier, not more difficult, to, as the saying goes, get ahead.

Earning a degree from one of Oregon’s public universities, to be specific.

Almost 97,000 students enrolled in the state’s higher education system this fall, an increase of 5.9 percent from last year.

Thursday is Veterans Day, and this year’s version is particularly poignant.

We will honor not only those who have served, but also those who are preparing to serve.

And that latter list includes about three dozen Baker area members of the National Guard. They are training now in Mississippi for a deployment later this year to Iraq.

Aside from the occasional anomaly of a Ross Perot, third-party candidates garner scanty attention from the media or the electorate.

But you needn’t be a billionaire to have a big effect on an election.

Do you know who Greg Kord is?

How about Wes Wagner?

We’d wager that John Kitzhaber, Oregon’s governor-elect, knows those names.

Kitzhaber ought to send each man a thank-you card, in fact.

Kord was the Constitution Party’s candidate for governor in last week’s election.

Wagner headed the Libertarian Party ticket.

The idea that one of Baker County’s industrial eyesores could be transformed into a showplace for “green” technology seems a bit farfetched.

Perhaps more than a bit.

The place is Lime.

We don’t, at this writing, know whether John Kitzhaber or Chris Dudley will make a triumphant trip to Salem to become Oregon’s next governor.

But we do know that the winner won’t have long to savor his victory in Tuesday’s election.

The chief task awaiting the governor and the Legislature when they convene at the state Capitol in January is daunting: filling a $3.2 billion chasm in the state’s budget.

This looks as though it would be an especially onerous job for Kitzhaber, and here’s why:

It’s no secret that Oregon’s retirement system for public employees has an insatiable appetite for tax dollars.

Yet PERS officials still possess dark closets in which they shelter certain information.

And PERS defends those sanctuaries with the dogged determination of a machine gun crew in a World War I pillbox.

The Oregonian wants to give state residents a peek into those bunkers.

Oregon’s Attorney General, John Kroger, in effect handed the key to the state’s largest newspaper.

PERS, predictably, lawyered up.

For 32 years now Baker City’s rules for Mount Hope Cemetery have said one thing about what sorts of headstones are allowed and where, and the city officials who oversee the cemetery have said something else altogether.

Three decades plus seems like plenty of time to have corrected this discrepancy.

Fortunately the City Council is on its way to doing so.

And the solution that Public Works Director Michelle Owen suggested, and that councilors have endorsed, makes sense.

Charter Communications apparently defines the word “shall” differently than we do.

The company, which supplies cable TV to Baker City, seems to think “shall” means “we’ll do it until we decide we don’t want to any more.”

We believe shall means precisely what the dictionary says it means: “must.”