1. It’s Wednesday, February 18, 2015. Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. It’s 46 days until Easter, when Lent ends.

2. State and local governments have farmed out the collection of unpaid bills and penalties to collection agencies. And some of the abuses uncovered in a tremendous CNNMoney report are shocking — for example, an Oklahoma businessman received a $112,000 bill for taxes he already paid. The story, written by my former colleagues Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken, is well worth your time and attention.

3. The first part of “The Italian-Americans” on PBS was excellent. Good interviews, good perspective on the history of my ethnic group. 

4. Because of a Texas federal judge’s ruling, President Obama has been forced to delay implementation of his executive action on immigration. So, instead of working toward solving this problem, we go another day into this intransigence that gives nothing to anyone. The stupidity of the judge and the people who brought this case boggles the mind. 

5. Jeb Bush is laying out a foreign policy that he says differs from his father’s and, more importantly, his brother’s. Of course, he consulted some of the same meatballs who led the U.S. into the Iraq debacle. But it’ll be different. Really.

Right.

1. It’s Tuesday, February 17, 2015. I used to think February went quickly. The lousy weather this month is making me think otherwise.

2. A federal district court judge in Texas has blocked implementation of President Obama’s executive action on immigration. The governor of Texas and other coconuts who can’t see the idiocy of not solving the nation’s immigration issues are crowing about how the rule of law has been upheld. Hopefully, federal judges who actually give a hoot about justice and compassion will throw this ruling in the trash can where it belongs. 

3. It’s hard to believe that any reasonable person of the faith would buy into Benjamin Netanyahu’s idea that European Jews should leave their homelands for Israel. That seems like giving the Nazis a compromise victory.

The people committing atrocities in Paris and Copenhagen were losers who hid behind the cloak of Islam. Like other losers before them, they found a convenient scapegoat. It is the responsibility of non-Jews everywhere to make sure anti-Semitism is flushed into the toilet. If Jews aren’t safe in any country, no one else is either. And a society without the contribution of its Jewish members is a poor one.  

4.   Egypt’s response to ISIS’ beheading of its citizens who were Coptic Christians is a reminder that civilization isn’t merely divided by religion. There are nations, whose citizens have a right to travel the world freely and in peace. And there are standards of decent behavior that run across all lines of faith.

      What’s happening in Libya should also remind those who want Muslims to “speak out.” ISIS is a perversion, and does not represent Islam in any way. Giving it the mantle of “Islamist” is far more respect than it deserves. 

5.   I hope the folks south of here are coping with the latest blast of this rotten winter. I’m sympathetic to a point, because right now, I’m going to clear my driveway of the latest inch of snow. 

1. It’s Monday, February 16, 2015. It’s 33 days until spring, 46 days until Opening Night at Wrigley Field, and who knows when until it’s warm again.

2. It’s Presidents Day. That, by the way, is the AP style for the holiday, which makes no sense to me — it’s either President’s Day in honor of each individual president or Presidents’ Day in honor of all of them.

3. I just finished a terrific biography of Woodrow Wilson by A. Scott Berg. There are some interesting parallels between Wilson and President Obama, who might be the two brightest guys who ever inhabited the Oval Office. 

4. Just to be clear, here’s the foreign policy of the Speaker of the House: We will meddle in Israel’s election process. We don’t care if we fund the people who keep America safe. It’s really just that simple. 

5. I’m definitely on board with John Oliver’s campaign to get tobacco pusher Philip Morris International to adopt Jeff the Diseased Lung in a Cowboy Hat as its mascot. If you think legal bullying of small countries by a multinational tobacco merchant is obscene, the hashtag Oliver promoted on his HBO show last night is #JeffWeCan. 

1. The National Weather Service need not apologize for the fact that the New York area did not get several inches of snow last night. For one thing, I was able to get home from a family gathering without incident. For another, it’s weather – stuff happens.

So far this winter, when NWS has erred about big storms, it has erred on the side of caution. It might disappoint idiots when the snow doesn’t materialize. But if it saves lives by making people more careful, it’s noble work.

2. I first saw selfie sticks in Seoul last fall, and knew they’d be a worldwide phenomenon. Now, major art museums are banning them for fear that careless photographers might damage the works. I think the museums are missing an opportunity — they’re smart people, they should create selfie-stick zones and rent the things out so that you can take your picture with a masterpiece.

3. There’s another thoughtful Frank Bruni opinion piece in today’s New York Times. This one is on the dubious link between religion and politics. Mr. Bruni is becoming a must-read for people looking for intelligent, enlightened commentary, agreeing with him or otherwise.

1. It’s Friday, February 13, 2015. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Monday is Presidents Day. Thursday is Chinese New Year.

2.   David Carr’s recounting his intersection of addiction and parenting caught my attention when The New York Times published it in 2008. It was honest and unflinching, evoking not pity or scorn but relief and even a little joy that this thoughtful man had made it to this point in life.

His media column has been one of the Times’ biggest and best attractions, and he has been adored by his peers and his competitors.

I didn’t know him, but I’m saddened by his sudden death and I feel for his family and colleagues.

3.   Just like the biblical battle of Jericho, Alabama’s walls against same-sex marriage keep tumbling down. After a federal court ruling yesterday, more counties are issuing licenses to couples willing to make a legal commitment to each other based on love, trust and respect.

I’m sure Alabama’s chief justice, a big believer in the Bible from what we understand, appreciates what’s going on. He should also keep in mind that nobody remembers the name of Joshua’s counterpart, except that he got slaughtered with the rest of them.

4.   I don’t know what to make of President Obama’s kinda weird BuzzFeed video. The leader of the free world makes funny faces in a mirror, plays air basketball and takes a picture of himself with a selfie stick. He also is unable to dunk a cookie in a glass of milk and, like his critics who blame him for everything, exclaims “Thanks, Obama.”

There’s supposed to be method in the madness — the president is trying to get young people to sign up for health care. It worked last year with the wacky “Between Two Ferns” interview with Zach Galifianakis. Last year, his, um, acting was better.

But if it works, I guess he might as well have a good time doing it.

5.   It’s going to snow Saturday night into Sunday.

Thanks, Obama.

FIVE THINGS I’M THINKING ABOUT TODAY

1. It’s Thursday, February 12, 2015. It’s 37 days until spring, 129 days until summer. Hurry up, both of you!

2.   Believe it or not, I’m rethinking evolution. Because the following two examples could be seen as proof that it does not exist:

3.   There’s Alabama’s so-called chief justice, who clearly hasn’t evolved much beyond Neanderthal. Instead of respecting the law, which one would think is a prerequisite for a state chief justice, he seems intent on imposing his grunting hatred. Clearly, Darwin never met this cetriolo. 

4.  And then there’s the governor of Wisconsin. Asked in London if he believes in evolution, he ducked the question. He couldn’t say “Yes, of course, I’m not an idiot” or “No, I stand with all the other dumbasses who think science is a plot against God.”

Scott Walker wants to be President of the United States. First, however, I think maybe he should aspire to the ability to think and breathe at the same time. 

5.   CBS News correspondent Bob Simon was tortured in an Iraqi prison and was on one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon. He faced danger all over the world. So the fact that he died in a car accident in New York City seems strange, ironic and sad. Sympathies to his colleagues and family trying to make sense of this. 

FIVE THINGS I’M THINKING ABOUT TODAY

1. It’s Wednesday, February 11, 2015. Valentine’s Day is 4 days away. Easter is 53 days away. Mother’s Day is 88 days away. Father’s Day is 123 days away.

2. Yesterday’s big media shocks raise a lot of questions.

Let me start with Jon Stewart.

Having just left a job after 16 years, I understand how one can get a little weary. And, when you reach a certain age, you realize there are things you haven’t done that you might like to do.

I suspect that Stewart has reached that point. After a while, I imagine it’s gets harder to find a new and cleverer way to rip on Fox News (although Fox News does its darnedest to give Stewart new material).

But I just wonder why he’s getting out now. The 2016 election seems as though it could be a great source of fresh material, and I’d bet a lot of money that the Republican debate will provide a lot of fodder. Stewart couldn’t wait another two years?

And why on a Tuesday night? His show is Monday to Thursday; it seems as though he would do it one of those nights.

I’m just wondering if there’s more to this than just the idea that he doesn’t think he can devote his full attention to the show. 

3.  Just throwing this out there to the powers-that-be at Comedy Central: How about picking a woman to host “The Daily Show”? 

Samantha Bee, Kristina Schaal and Jessica Williams have all done funny stuff for the show, and understand the format. And I’m sure there are other women working the club circuit or on one of the late-night circuit that old fogies like me don’t watch.

There’s been a lot of criticism that late-night television is a white male playground. And, to be fair, the white males who inhabit it are pretty talented: Jimmy Fallon, Conan O’Brien and soon Stephen Colbert. Comedy Central appears to have done well in giving an African-American, Larry Wilmore, his shot on “The Nightly Show.” Going with a woman might help give late night another cool twist.

4.  NBC’s six-month suspension of Brian Williams also had me scratching my head.

That seems like a long time for your marquee player to be sitting on the bench — again, noting that the 2016 election is just starting to formulate.

If Williams’ offense is embellishing tales of what happened to him in Iraq, then any suspension shouldn’t have been for as long as six months.

But six months also tells me there might be more to this than the false RPG matter. Perhaps the other exaggerations and outright falsehoods speculated about in recent days, such as Williams’ reporting from New Orleans after Katrina, are true, and Williams has a serial tendency to create his own truth.

In that case, should Williams ever again be the face of NBC News?

The six months just seems weird to me. 

5.  General Motors is still in the process of rebuilding its trust with the American public following the 2009 bailout. And that public has been extraordinarily patient, despite the loud critics on the right, even through last year’s debacle involving the recall of millions of older vehicles with ignition problems.

I think the patience is due to the fact that, deep down, Americans want GM to succeed. It’s the home team, or at least one of them, and even if we own Toyotas and Hondas the idea of GM is one we all support.

So the effort of one of the bailout architects to increase share buybacks in order to bolster the stock price is troublesome. GM, at this point, does not need to worry about shareholder value. It needs to worry about regaining the trust of car buyers. The model should be Apple — no company has ever been worth more, and it did so by building products that people love.

If every company focused on that, instead of short-term shareholder gain, life would be a whole lot better. For everyone. 

1. It’s Tuesday, February 10, 2015. It’s 39 days until spring. What else matters?

2. Kayla Mueller’s death has been confirmed, according to her family. Mueller is the American aid worker whose ideals led her to the cesspool of conflict that is Syria. She was kidnapped in 2013 by the pillbugs who go by the name ISIS.

I’m not sure how a family copes with something like this, but my thoughts are with the Muellers and all the families whose loved ones have been ruthlessly snuffed out by or because of these thugs.

3. If Barack Obama said the sun rises in the east, his critics would accuse him of bias against other parts of the country.

The latest nonsense involving the president concerns his comments at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast, when he said that religious extremism and turning a blind eye to injustice are wrong no matter who commits them. And then, after chiding the evil being committed by people claiming the mantle of Islam, he talked about how people claiming the mantle of Christianity committed the evils of slavery and the Crusades.

The critics went crazy. Equating Christianity with ISIS. OMG (so to speak)!

Which, of course, he didn’t do.

This goes to the whole idea of why the president won’t say that ISIS and al-Qaeda are radical Islamists. He’s right not to — calling them that keeps them wrapped in the mantle of Islam. And given what they do to Muslims, killing them by the score, they shouldn’t have that privilege.

The people the U.S. is helping to fight in the Middle East aren’t Islamists. They’re scum, and letting them use Islam as a smoke screen doesn’t get rid of them any faster. 

4.  The next time someone from Optimum rings my doorbell or calls me to explain why I need to switch to their service, this is the link I will send them: http://www.northjersey.com/news/sullivan-angry-knicks-owner-goes-from-bad-to-worse-1.1267897

Bergen Record columnist Tara Sullivan recounts this week’s tale of stupidity involving James Dolan, who runs Optimum as well as the New York Knicks. Dolan responded to an e-mail from a longtime fan angry about how lousy the Knicks are by insinuating the fan is an alcoholic and telling him to go root for the Brooklyn Nets, the other pro basketball team in New York.

When Optimum, formerly Cablevision, was the only TV service in town, it stunk. It had that monopoly for 17 of the years I’ve lived in Rockland County, and I missed lots of big TV moments because of the crappy quality. So I fled to DirecTV when I had the chance, and then to Verizon FiOS when it was to my cost benefit. Both services were so much better than Cablevision that it was laughable to think I would go back.

The side benefit of switching is that I do not directly give one penny of my money to anything involving James Dolan. Which is why I already switched to the Nets. I hope the fan who wrote the e-mail joins me.

5. Same-sex marriages continue in Alabama. Efforts to stop it by the moronic chief justice of the state aren’t working. Something to think about if you think there’s no good news anywhere. 

1. It’s Monday, February 9, 2015. It’s 40 days until spring and 55 days until Opening Night at Wrigley Field.

2. The live-action version of “Frozen” is going on in parts of New England. 

Before the storm that dumped several more inches of snow overnight, parts of Maine and Massachusetts already look like they’ve been overtaken by glaciers. In Kennebunkport, Maine, where I spent the weekend, they didn’t shovel or used a snowblower on the sidewalks – they plowed them, creating hard-packed snow walls on either side.

Some day, the snow will melt – I just hope the good people up there don’t have to wait for Elsa to see the light before that happens. 

3.   It’s amazing that the Brian Williams debacle hasn’t faded yet. David Carr’s take in The New York Times is a pretty good explanation as to why.

To Carr, Williams just hasn’t done the one thing that would finally put this mess behind him: apologize. Instead, Williams has taken himself off the air and NBC has started a probe, both moves Carr finds counter-productive.  

4. When I was a kid, I had a coin collection and a stamp collection. Those were the kinds of hobbies youngsters and teens had back in the day. I didn’t build models, but that was another one kids had.

And then there were the tinkerers, who built electronic gadgets out of gizmos and whatnots. The tinkerers had two things: a lot of free time to build that stuff, and RadioShack to supply them with the components. As a good story in The Wall Street Journal points out, once people lost that free time, RadioShack was in trouble.

5. Alabama is a pretty state with some ugly-spirited people.

The latest character who seems to welcome being on the wrong side of history and morality is the state’s chief justice. He has told courts to defy a federal ruling overturning the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court has refused the state attorney general’s attempt to block the federal ruling.

Fortunately, Alabama also has people who believe in justice and don’t want to be the bad guys in some 2065 movie. The New York Times reports that probate judges in Birmingham and Montgomery are defying the crackpot chief justice and issuing licenses. 

FIVE THINGS I’M THINKING ABOUT TODAY

1) It’s Thursday, February 5, 2015. It’s still too freaking cold in this part of America.

2) I’ve always a lot of respect for Brian Williams. But how do you let something like a false claim of being on a downed helicopter fester for over a decade?

Everybody wants to be a hero, I suppose. The trouble is, there are real heroes, and often what they did to become heroes was scary, painful and emotionally scarring. I suspect those heroes don’t mind sharing their status with people in the same position — and do mind when people who haven’t suffered to revel in some glory that isn’t theirs.

Brian Williams is about to find out how forgiving people are.

3)  The immunization rate needs to be 92% or more for health officials to feel confident that a disease is under control.

According to a terrific story in The Los Angeles Times, more than 1,500 California schools have rates below 92%. The story leads with a Santa Monica preschool whose vaccination rate is 51%.

The people who aren’t vaccinating their kids aren’t lacking in resources. The areas with the greatest concentration of anti-immunization idiots are affluent communities in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. 

By contrast, Mississippi, which instantly conjures the word “unhealthy” for just about everything else that transpires, has a rate of measles-mumps-rubella vaccination of 99.7%. An effort by nutty parents to change a strict vaccination policy mercifully failed in the state legislature. 

It just needs to be stressed at every opportunity. Vaccination isn’t an option, it’s mandatory. Any other position is lunacy.

4) The Moslem world is pretty ticked off about what the ISIS pillbugs did to that captured Jordanian pilot. 

It just underscores one of the things I thought about yesterday: Refusing to call the terrorists by some derivative of Islam isn’t mealy mouthed or weak. It’s the recognition that they are even bigger enemies of Islam than of other faiths, as evidenced by the indiscriminate way they kill Moslems.

So, again, responsible American leaders should not be saying that Moslems need to denounce ISIS. They should be asking Moslems what we can do to support their battle against this disease.

5) It’s a point of pride among students and alumni of the University of Wisconsin. It’s called the Wisconsin Idea — the notion that the university’s goal is to solve problems and improve people’s lives. 

One would think the governor of the state would be proud of such a goal.

Alas, not Scott Walker. This clown, who actually wants to be President of the United States, tried to slip a mission change for the university into his budget proposal. Instead of public service, he wanted the university’s primary goal to be meeting the state’s workforce needs. 

This didn’t sit well with true Badgers. The screams of protest from administrators, faculty, students, alumni and people who understand that universities are supposed to advance civilization forced Walker to back down quickly.

Being from a rival Big Ten school, I usually don’t say this. But way to go, Badgers! Keep up the fight.