1. It’s Wednesday, March 18, 2015.

2. The first full day of spring is Saturday. However, it’s a cold, blustery day here in the New York area, and there’s a chance of measurable snow this weekend. I’m sure winter will end someday. Hopefully before next winter starts.

3. When people vote, whether it’s here in the United States or in a country such as Israel, they can do it one of two ways: they can vote their hopes or they can voted their fears.

“Hope” seems to be a word alien to Benjamin Netanyahu, except when he hopes for his own political survival. There was not a trace of hope in his speech to the U.S. Congress warning that any deal President Obama makes to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons will be a bad one.        

And in the election campaign just concluded, he offered no hope that Israel will find the peace it deserves. Instead, he reneged on his pledge to consider some form of self-government for Palestinians, and told his countrymen that Arab citizens of Israel were conspiring against him.

This might explain some of the animosity between Netanyahu and President Obama: The American president sees problems to be solved. The Israeli prime minister sees solutions to be feared.

A plurality of Israelis voted their fears and not their hopes on Tuesday, just as Americans voted their fears in November when they let meatballs such as Tom Cotton have a voice in the U.S. Senate. That’s sad, but it’s how these things work.

Those of us who hope can only hope for the best — that the United States and the group of five nations reach an acceptable agreement with Iran, and those who are afraid that such an agreement is a better alternative than a war.

1. It’s Tuesday, March 17, 2015. It’s St. Patrick’s Day. Spring is four days away. How can any of that be bad?

2. It can be bad if it’s raining and in the 40s. One of these days, the greater New York area is going to have a breakout spring day. The temperature will be in the 60s, the sun will be out and the wind will be manageable. I’m opening a bottle of Champagne when that happens.

3. Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all those who are Irish and celebrate. People of Irish ancestry have a heritage in which they should be proud. Today is a day to recognize it.

4. Israel is voting today. Would love to see Netanyahu lose. Love it. There are people in the world determined to foul it up — he seems like one of them. We’ll know more later in the day. 

5. A new CNN/ORC poll shows that two-thirds of Americans want direct negotiations to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Which is why “coward” is a better way to describe the 47 Republicans in the Senate who signed that ridiculous letter. They refuse to say that they’re willing to go to war, using your kids.

The American people are also very trusting — a plurality doesn’t think the Republican letter did any damage to the negotiations. Let’s hope they’re right.

6. People who use their brains to think are lamenting the latest stupidity they’ve seen on Fox News: a discussion about whether a Boston-area school district is using the snowiest winter in history as an excuse to get rid of religious holidays. 

So I have a question for people who use their brains to think: Why would you waste a second of a life that’s too short to begin with watching Fox News? Who do you think you’re saving, or informing, by flagging the flatulence?

You can’t help the people who watch Fox News, because if they were people who use their brains to think, they would watch something more enlightening —a test pattern or static, for instance. The show on which the discussion took place has as its premise the scariness that one man faces when on a set with several women.

Let’s face facts, folks. Fox News is a nether world of fear, conspiracy, anger, and bright flashing red and yellow warning graphics. Those who enter that world usually do so whole heartedly (actually, that’s a bad choice of words, because that’s assuming they have hearts) because they are as scared and angry as the people they see on TV.

You’re not going to change Fox News. And there’s no point in trying. It thrives on your indignation.

So don’t bother. Let people think that there are academic elites in Boston who saw 108 inches of snow as a dream come true to stifle religious liberty. Let people think Barack Obama was born in Kenya and became president to get back at America for whatever reason went through his Muslim-warped mind. Let people think that Christmas is in danger of being — I don’t know what, but someone’s at war with it.

It’s almost spring. Somehow, spring seems like the complete antithesis of Fox News.

1. It’s Monday, March 16, 2015. It’s five days until spring.

2. I’m a sad Mets fan this morning after the news that starting pitcher Zack Wheeler needs Tommy John surgery to repair a tear in his elbow. You would think there’s some way to prevent this injury and the surgery that takes more than a year of recovery. And you would also wonder why this happens so much to the Mets.

I do hope Wheeler, should he go through with the surgery, has a speedy recovery; I’m looking forward to seeing him pitch when the Mets defend their world championship in 2016.

3. The problem with doing NCAA brackets this year is that, if you use your head, there’s no way to pick against Kentucky. The Wildcats are unbeaten. One game went to overtime. Most of the rest were blowouts.

Here’s the problem: I don’t like Kentucky.

Maybe it’s that I’m old enough to remember the Adolph Rupp years, when he would have nothing to do with African-American athletes. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s a basketball factory. Maybe it’s because it wins and it’s not in the Big Ten (although I really don’t like Ohio State, either).

Anyway, every time I do one of the brackets for any of the umpteen contests out there, I keep having Maryland, my daughter’s alma mater and no angel itself, knock off Kentucky in the regional semifinals.

So do I want to throw my $5 away and pick against the team that is, far and away, the odds-on favorite to win? Or do I see casting my dollar vote against the juggernaut as somehow finding a way to stop it from ultimate victory?

Go Terps! And, overall, Go Wisconsin!

4.   Speaking of the NCAAs, John Oliver was back on target last night. As much as I love the basketball tournament, there’s something grossly unfair about the way these athletes are treated.

Oliver pointed out some of the silly restrictions the players face — how, for instance, one student was suspended because a coach bought him a meal prior to a flight for a bereavement trip home. Then, on the other hand, there’s the hypocrisy of a coach getting $3 million a year saying that paying athletes would feed into the entitlement society.

The “Last Week Tonight” piece makes the NCAA hoopla seem more like a guilty pleasure. But it also makes another point. There’s nothing wrong with the tournament itself; it’s the unfairness of the system around it that’s troublesome. Those things can, and should, be fixed. And they can be fixed without the sacrifice of anything, including the lucrativeness, of the tournament.

5.   I hadn’t really been interested in HBO’s “The Jinx.” But now that I know how it ends, I’m a little curious.

6.   Bob Schieffer seemed really ticked off when he asked the wizard who came up with the Senate Republican letter to Iran, Cotton, if he planned to send letters to North Korea or anybody else. Cotton tried to smile it off. He still managed to look like a doofus.

1. Today is Thursday, March 12, 2015. Winter is 90% over.

2. Two things about e-mail.

First, and this is no apology for Hillary Clinton, but e-mail doesn’t work right. When I worked at CNN, I considered myself on top of things when there were fewer than 1,000 items in my inbox. I know people who have tens of thousands of items in there.

E-mail has been abused, and not just by the spammers trying to sell you Wen and miracle fat blockers. It’s abused by merchants from whom you buy stuff, because not only do they send you e-mail, but they have affiliates who send it out as well. And going through the trouble of unsubscribing to everything is just a hassle, and sometimes leads to even more e-mail.

I don’t know what the solution is. Sometimes, there’s something in there you need. But the amount of time people lose killing e-mail from their inbox could be better used solving real problems.

3.   Second: I know that, as an adjunct professor teaching news editing, I have to abide by AP style. But it’s e-mail, not email. The latter looks like a relative of the snail family, or a title one might see in the Middle East.

1. It’s Wednesday, March 11, 2015. Sorry this is late.

2. If 47 Republican senators had any guts at all, here is the letter they would send to the leaders of Iran:            

Dear Ayatollah Khameini:                                                                                                         

We, the undersigned members of the United States Senate, don’t want to negotiate a deal that keeps you from getting nuclear weapons.

Instead, we’d rather send our military to war against your country than make an agreement with your ilk.

We don’t know what the black guy in the White House is thinking, but he doesn’t speak for us. We’re ready to rumble. Whatcha got?

Regards, Tom Cotton and 46 other morons who are ready to be the first ones, along with our sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters, to fight this holy crusade against you heathens.

Not one of these people who rail against a possible deal with Iran, including Benajmin Netanyahu, has the nerve to say out loud: Let’s use U.S. troops to stop them. It’s easy. Just march into Tehran. Or bomb it — John McCain can sing his little ditty again.

They’re afraid to do that because there’s no support whatsoever for an American military strike on Iran. The American people don’t want war with Iran, and especially if it’s believed there could be a better solution.

A better solution is what President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are seeking in their negotiations. It’s not going to be perfect. But it’s the best way to prevent a crisis in the region, and to keep Israel safe.

Which leads to the second way these Republicans display their gutlessness. It’s easier to try to block a deal before it’s made than to vote against one. If they did reject it, they would then face voters who would rather not see their sons and daughters die in a Persian desert.

For Americans, the Iranians are not lovable. But going to war isn’t what we do for sport or on impulse. The brazen nature of the Republican letter is a disgrace.

3.    I know I’m going to vote for Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, 2016. But days such as yesterday don’t help her cause.

And the reason is nailed by Frank Bruni in The New York Times: You just get the sense she’s annoyed by this controversy that she herself created. 

She seemed dismissive of the questions about why she used her personal e-mail account for official State Department business. And the idea that just saying she wanted to carry only one device doesn’t impress someone who used to carry four and didn’t have the entourage that follows the Secretary of State.

If Ms. Clinton wants to put this thing behind her, she would take the advice of my former colleague, Lisa DesJardins of the PBS Newshour, and go full Arnold Vinnick. For those who aren’t “The West Wing” fans, Vinick — played by Alan Alda — was the senator from California who, in one episode, answers every single question a reporter asks him in a news conference. He doesn’t dismiss anything. 

That’s what Chris Christie did, somewhat, when the George Washington Bridge scandal erupted. It put that controversy aside for at least a while.

Mrs. Clinton has been a key American political figure for almost a quarter century. She should know that no one — especially the Republicans — are giving her a free ride to 1600 Pennsylvania. If she wants — if she really wants it — she needs to tackle these things head on, and with gusto.

This is my 62nd sortie into Daylight Savings Time. And of the 62 — including the first one, which may have permanently thrown off my sleep pattern at three weeks of age — I can’t remember as much bellyaching as I’m hearing at SpringTimeChange 2015.

There’s this article on The Atlantic’s Web site that says Daylight Savings Time doesn’t really save energy and has other costs in productivity and safety. And then John Oliver — who WAS my new hero after he gave us Jeff the Diseased Lung — put a segment on his “Last Week Tonight” proclaiming the stupidity of the time change.

So it falls to me, someone who is fascinated — perhaps even obsessed — with time, to explain this to all of you.

It’s pretty simple.

If you got rid of the time change, you’d have to go with one time or the other — Daylight Time or Standard Time. So let’s start with all-year Daylight Time — which, for those not old enough to remember, we tried during the energy crisis of the 1970s.

The sun rose in my hometown Saturday at 6:20 a.m., before the time change, according to a Web site called sunrisesunset.com, which I don’t suspect has any skin in this game. That’s more than an hour earlier than the sun rose on the first working day of the year, Monday, Jan. 5, when sunrise was 7:21 a.m.

Of course, had we been on Daylight Savings on Jan. 5, the sun wouldn’t have risen at 7:21. It would have risen at 8:21, and just about every worker and school child in the area would have traipsed to where they were going in the dark.

I know parents in the New York area. It’s tough enough to stand on a street corner waiting for a bus on a 10-degree January morning. It’s got to be unbearable when it’s dark.

And New York is in the eastern part of the Eastern Time Zone. Let’s say I lived in Kalamazoo, Mich., about as far west as ET goes. (Reminder: The sun rises in the east). Sunrise on Jan. 5 was 8:11 a.m. Standard Time, which means it would be 9:11 a.m. Daylight Time.

That’s ridiculous. And I suspect in Kalamazoo, in a crappy winter like the one we just had, there aren’t going to be a lot of kids going out to play until sunset at 6:22 p.m.

When we went to full-time DST in the ‘70s, there was an increase in child fatalities during the darker-than-usual winter mornings, according to the Congressional Research Service. The service says it was impossible to determine if DST was the culprit. But added to the crazy sunrises, why would you even want to risk what could happen to find out if there’s a real impact?

Of course, we could also go the other way — full-year Standard Time. The sun rose at 7:20 on Sunday morning, the first day of Daylight Time. By the time summer rolls around, it will rise about two hours earlier, 5:23 a.m. and set at 8:32 p.m.

Except if we had full-year Standard Time. Then, get ready for the sun at 4:23 a.m., and it only stays light until 7:32 p.m.

I love dawn, especially in the summer. The light is amazing, almost religious. But I don’t love it that much. And there is something to be said for a sunset lingering into the 8 p.m. hour, and light in the sky past 9 p.m.

Then there’s the good folks of Maine. Because they are far enough north, and at the eastern end of the time zone, they would have sunrises in the 3 a.m. hour, and the sun would set before 7:30 p.m.

What is the freaking point? The system that we have now, as imperfect as it is, makes a lot more sense than crazy late sunrises in the dead of winter and crazy early sunrises in summer.

Now if you find a way to adjust the calendar so that each day is 20 seconds later than the day before from December to June, and 20 seconds earlier each day from June to December, you might get my attention. This way, you adjust the clock over 180 days instead of one, minimizing whatever disruption you seem to be experiencing. (I know, you’re confused and befuddled due to this traumatic time-change thing. I’ll bounce this idea some other time.)

Otherwise, stop whining. If you need another hour of sleep, go to bed early tonight. You’ll be fine in the morning.

1. It’s Monday, March 9, 2015. Spring is 12 days away. And there was melting yesterday!

2. When Rudy Giuliani mouthed his stupidity about President Obama’s love of country, the president didn’t respond right away.

But he sure as hell responded Saturday.

The president’s speech marking the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Ala., made clear — for anyone with enough of a brain to hear what he was saying — that this man articulates what love of country is better than anyone in my lifetime.

Loving this country does not mean flag-worshipping. It means understanding what an awesome opportunity those before us — from Benjamin Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt — gave the United States. And how it’s our responsibility to do what we can to form a more perfect union — even if it means getting tear-gassed and bitten by dogs on a bridge in Alabama.

In particular, I loved the way he tied Selma to other seminal moments in American history. And he put the marchers in perspective with this country’s other heroes, from the Minutemen at Lexington and Concord to the firefighters who died trying to save lives on 9/11.

One of the canards that his opponents throw at Obama is that he’s the most divisive president in our history. But he’s only divisive because his opponents can’t stand who, or what, he is. It’s not his language — certainly not in Selma, where he made no effort to demonize anyone, but instead sought to make the struggle into something that benefitted all of us.

Put it this way: Would you ever expect George W. Bush to be one of the heroes in an Obama speech? He was on Saturday.

How good was Obama in Selma? James Fallows in The Atlantic makes the ultimate American speech comparison: Lincoln at Gettysburg. That seems like sacrilege. But, in my lifetime, there’s JFK’s inaugural and Dr. King at the March on Washington. 

Does this speech compare? History will decide that. What we can say once and for all is that Barack Obama is the epitome of American patriotism, and anyone who thinks otherwise should be embarrassed. 

3.   I’ve never been a fan of fraternities — I damn sure wasn’t in one in college. But I can’t believe that all members of fraternities are as dense as these guys at Oklahoma appear to have been.

It’s not just the revolting behavior — that’s sickening enough. But the idea that, in this age of social media and iPhone videos, dumbasses would publicly go around singing of their ignorance. I guess that’s why they would be dumbasses.

4.   From the stupid to the pleasant: As a long-suffering New York Met fan, Matt Harvey’s return to the mound on Friday in an exhibition game has me excited. He looked great, with no sign of after-effect from his Tommy John surgery.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, on Saturday, we saw the Mets’ No. 1 draft pick last year, Michael Conforto, punish the baseball with his bat. If this kid is for real, he is a dream come true for a franchise with a spotty past of developing hitters.

Baseball is coming, and the developments at the Mets’ Spring Training camp make that seem more wonderful than usual.

1. It’s Friday, March 6, 2015. Spring is 15 days away.

2. I tell my news editing class that, by the end of the week, the news cycle gets filled with the sensational, the stuff that is generally unimportant to the fate of civilization. This week, it’s going to be the Harrison Ford plane crash story.

Bottom line: No one, including Mr. Ford, got hurt.

Next.

3. It’s the weekend during which Selma, Ala., will mark the 50th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday voting rights protests.

Gay Telese writes in The New York Times about his latest visit to the city of 28,000. It’s not a reminiscence of the protests — he was there on Bloody Sunday — but more like one of those postscripts you see on the screen after the movie. The Selma he finds seems defined by what happened on those momentous days in 1965.

Things have changed, but the quote that struck me came from current sheriff Harris Huffman. Huffman, who is 61 and white (both, I suppose, need to be noted), said “You’ve got some people in Selma who live in the 1960s, and you’ve got some that live in the 1860s.”

Our whole country is a little like that, I’m afraid. There are some people who are still not ready to accept racial equality — just take a look at the racist “jokes” made by Ferguson officials that are cited in the Justice Department report.

We should still be working to become better. Hopefully, that’s what the Selma weekend will remind us.

1. It’s Thursday, March 5, 2015. Today is mathematically correct (3×5=15)

2. Baseball teams are playing exhibition games in Florida and Arizona. That’s the only thing sustaining my heart on a day like this: 

3. I noticed my jaw dropping constantly as I was reading the Justice Department’s report on the Ferguson, Mo., police department. 

Actually, describing what Ferguson has as a “police department” seems like slander to police departments that actually police. Ferguson has a bunch of guys — mostly white — whose main job appears to be shaking down the city’s residents — most of whom are African-American.

Ferguson’s moneymakers did that by writing tickets and arresting people, often for no legitimate reason and in violation of their Constitutional rights.

And when those people found themselves in the maw of the Ferguson money-grubbing machine — calling it a justice system is unfair to judges who actually aspire to justice — it was like leeches attacking. Small tickets unfairly given because huge penalties because the people didn’t understand what was going on or couldn’t pay exactly what the vultures sought.

For people who saw President Obama as the punchline to a joke instead of the duly elected chief executive of this country, it was a sweet coincidence that the people they were victimizing were African-American. They needed the money anyway, so why not get it from people they didn’t particularly care for or about?

The other striking thing to me is the incredible lack of personal responsibility the people who control the system. While they scorn the people of the community for not being able to keep up with the escalating obligations they imposed, they were doing the old-boy thing for their own irresponsibility — getting officials in nearby towns to drop speeding tickets and complaints for running stop signs.

I’m fortunate to live in a place where the police do their jobs well. I know the police do their jobs well because our town consistently is among those with the lowest crime rates in the nation. Not being a person of color, I don’t know if that’s a universally held view.

But I’m willing to bet that all residents of my town appreciate the safety of the community. That’s the feeling the people of Ferguson are entitled to as well. They should not feel as though they are a cash crop to be harvested.

4. There’s a common thread running between the Justice Department’s report on Ferguson and a terrific series on government debt collection by my former CNNMoney colleagues Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken.

In that series, Ms. Ellis and Ms. Hicken describe how government agencies are using private debt collectors to get fees and penalties. The agencies are able to charge steep premiums and make threats, and can skirt around consumer protection laws to do so. (Here’s the latest story) 

The common thread in these stories is government’s need for money. By whatever means necessary. It doesn’t matter whether rights are trampled on or lives are ruined.

Now before you think this is going to be an anti-government rant, and that I’m going all Ron Paul on you, it’s not. It’s quite the opposite.

Governments need money to do the jobs that government is supposed to do. If you don’t believe that, take a look at the picture at the top of the page. That street needs in the background needs to be plowed (and, in fact, was a few minutes after the photo was taken). The road underneath it, battered by freeze-and-thaw cycles that have rendered it a moonscape, needs paving work.

Somebody, somehow, has got to pay for that. That somebody is us. That somehow is our taxes.

Americans grumble so much about taxes that the only way you can be elected to office is to say you’re cutting them. Saying you’ll raise taxes — or not saying you won’t — is the third rail of politics in this country. And hey, my accountant is about to tell me how much of my money I have to send to Washington, Albany and Trenton (!!!).

But when tax revenue falls short, governments have to find ways to get the money to plow those streets and pave them in the spring. They have to find ways to pay the cops who patrol towns and cities.

They resort to what they do in Ferguson, or what you’ll read in the CNNMoney stories. Unless the attitude changes, we might be hearing about this kind of crap for awhile.

1. It’s Wednesday, March 4, 2015. On this day in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as the nation’s 32nd President.

2. It snowed last night. It’s going to snow again tonight. Does it ever end?

3. Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington seemed a lot like when a big storm comes through. In both instances, you have to assess the damage.

In this case, the question is whether the world is more or less safe now that Netanyahu has told Congress and the American people that you can’t trust the waif who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. (That waif, for those with short memories, is the guy who put Osama bin-Laden out of business.)

Will the United States and Iran come to some sort of agreement to limit Tehran’s nuclear advancement that is better than no agreement at all? And if they do, after Netanyahu’s grandstanding for the professional Obama haters, can a deal get past the Republican eafs in Congress?

What Netanyahu says he wants is for us to negotiate a better deal with people he doesn’t trust to honor any deal. Which means he really doesn’t want any deal, which really doesn’t leave anybody anywhere.

Of course, what Netanyahu left unsaid was what the United States should do when it has walked away from making a deal with Iran. If he wants the American people to support a military adventure in that part of the world — as he did a decade ago in Iraq — he should say so clearly. Because that’s the option on the table, and I don’t know of too many Americans — other than Dick Cheney and those suffering from his affliction — who think that’s a good idea.