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. 

1. It’s Tuesday, March 3, 2015.

2. It’s going to snow again today. That stinks.

3. Remember how John McCain held Gen. David Petraeus up as the citadel of integrity and honor. How he is a “genuine American hero.”

That hero just copped a plea. He pleaded guilty to a charge of mishandling classified material, which he gave to impress a woman who wasn’t his wife.

That eliminates the “hero” thing on two counts. Petraeus faces a possible year-long prison term, although I’m betting that doesn’t happen.

4. My guess is that, when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton knew she might run for President. And given what happened when her husband had the job, she must have known that people opposed to her — and she knew there were a lot of them — would find any way they could to get at her.

So what the hell was she thinking if, as the New York Times reports, she violated government rules by using private e-mail as Secretary of State? That no one would come looking for her correspondence about whatever stupid thing?

You just have to shake your head sometimes.

I’m not sure Clinton and her people have a quick antidote. But they sure should get it out there. Fast. 

1. It’s Thursday, February 26, 2015. It is 23 days until spring.

2. I’m not used to the winning ways of the Northwestern men’s basketball team. It’s won four straight Big Ten games for the first time since 1967, before I even realized I wanted to go there. What’s amazing is that the ‘Cats had lost 10 straight before that. It’s probably too late for a first-ever NCAA tournament trip. Unless they sweep their way through the Big 10 Tournament. (What’s the emoji for fingers crossed?)

3. If you’re wondering “Who are these guys?,” a Washington Post story identifies “Jihadi John,” the masked British-sounding guy who is seen beheading Western hostages in ISIS videos. He apparently is a Kuwaiti-born Brit from an affluent family, a computer programmer in his 30s.

How does somebody go from a comfortable life to murderer? Like many of the rest of us, Mohammed Emwazi has faced roadblocks to finding his way in life. Unlike the rest of us, he added all these obstacles together and decided to become subhuman. 

4.  You paid less for stuff last month than you did a year earlier. The nation’s Consumer Price Index was down 0.1% year-over-year in January. 

OK, that doesn’t seem like much – if you paid $10 in January 2014, you paid $9.99 in January 2015. But it means that we’re nowhere near the 2% rate of inflation that’s normal for a healthy economy.

It also means this, now, right this second, is the time to double down on rebuilding our nation. There won’t be many better times — with interest rates low, or almost nonexistent, it’s a great time for the nation and the states to borrow money to rebuild. We’ve got crappy roads and bridges, and a half-assed public transportation system that hasn’t really innovated since the beginning of the last century. We have a chance to vastly expand the alternative energy programs that will get us through whatever hard times come again.

By taking advantage of the situation, we can create jobs and ensure jobs of the future. And all at a cost that we might not see again soon.

That kind of action requires vision. I believe President Obama has it. Alas, the Republicans who run Congress are more interested in dopey pipelines that help so few and contribute to environmental chaos.

History will frown on this lost opportunity. That’s a shame.

1. It’s Wednesday, February 25, 2015. Spring is 24 days away.

2. You get the sense that if the Obama administration was into rigging elections, it would be working hard to make sure that Benjamin Netanyahu comes up short in Israel next month.

Although it seems as though Netanyahu is determined to shoot himself in the foot. Picking a fight with an incumbent U.S. president who has 23 months left in office isn’t going to make the next two years so great for him.

And if he thinks he’s going to get a better shake from the American right, he’s been listening to Sheldon Adelson too long. The red states aren’t going to be quite as committed to defending Israel as the blue states have been since the country was established in 1948.

3.  I’m a fan of Keith Olbermann. He understands the current media age and communicates well with it. And I share a lot of his views of the world.

But ESPN was absolutely right to suspend him for a week.

I saw his tweets on Penn State in real time and wondered if he was OK. Olbermann loves to lash back at online trolls who complain about him and his views — “batting practice,” he calls it.     But he’s been obsessed with Penn State since the Jerry Sandusky scandal, and it’s time for him to let it go.

Penn State is a Big Ten rival of my alma mater, Northwestern, and I loved how we beat them soundly in men’s basketball last week. But it also produces students such as CNN’s Sara Ganim, who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Sandusky scandal. And what Olbermann belittled to get into trouble, the fact that students raised $13 million to fight pediatric cancer, is something everyone should admire.

Penn State has paid a heavy price for what happened, and it and we should never forget the horror of what Sandusky is convicted of doing. But tarring everything about the university because of Sandusky is not right either. Olbermann, who’s a really smart guy, should leave it alone.

1. It’s Tuesday, February 24, 2015. It’s 25 days until spring. It’s a goddamn 1 degree above zero outside.

2. Here’s more proof that Fox News is like ISIS, courtesy of The New York Times and, apparently, Fox cell leader Bill O’Reilly:

“Mr. O’Reilly’s efforts to refute the claims by Mother Jones and some former CBS News colleagues occurred both on the air and off on Monday. During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. ‘I am coming after you with everything I have,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “‘You can take it as a threat.’”

Like ISIS, Bill O’Reilly and Fox feel compelled to threaten and intimidate those who call out their violations of standards, as both conduct campaigns of excess in the name of righteousness.

 I’ve said that I understand President Obama’s strategy of not using terms “Islamic extremists” or “Islamists.” Using that terminology would give ISIS the mantle of Muslim legitimacy — and given how they’ve slaughtered and tortured other Muslims, much less innocent non-Muslims, they’re not entitled to it.

The same applies to Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. Calling them “journalists” gives them a level of credibility they’re not entitled to have. Not if they’re threatening real reporters trying to do their job with “everything I have.”

That’s what ISIS does, too.

3.   Giving a child peanut butter at an early age seems, to a nervous new parent, like a strange and risky way to help prevent peanut allergies.

But, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, that’s what works.

My concern when I saw this was whether the study was funded by the peanut industry. If it was, it was hidden in the material I saw on the NEJM site.

I would imagine, though, that if this research bears out, Mr. Peanut is going to find his way to pediatricians’ offices, next to the baby formula teddy bears and the spare Pampers.

P.S. I would have linked to the CNN.com story about this, rather than the L.A. Times. But, alas, the autostart video ad and the display ad in the top left corner of the CNN story are for Planters. Sigh.

1. It’s Monday, February 23, 2015. Next week at this time, it will be March.

2. If, say, last week, someone bounced the idea of Lady Gaga singing a medley from “The Sound of Music” at the Oscars, you would have chuckled at the idea. No one’s chuckling today — she was pretty good.

3. Here’s my problem with the Bill O’Reilly controversy: Fox News doesn’t give a damn what CBS, CNN or other media, or the people who read or watch those outlets, think about the integrity of one of its star performers. He could have said he covered D-Day, and as long as it resonates with the Fox audience, he’s golden.

Fox News is a lot like ISIS that way.  — They’re going to do what they want, and to hell with people who are outraged. In fact, I think there’s a better chance ISIS will repent for the evil it has committed than Fox News and Roger Ailes will.

4. Good stuff by people I know:

     Western Muslims Swipe Right to Find Their Match on Minder, by Shaheen Pasha on The Daily Beast

     Above The Law, by Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken on CNNMoney, edited by Nicole Ridgway. This published last week, but it’s still worth your time.

FIVE THINGS I’M THINKING ABOUT TODAY

1. It’s Friday, February 20, 2015. Spring Training is underway for the Mets. It’s the new lunar year. Things have to get better, right?

2. Well, for starters, it’s 10 degrees. At noon. On a sunny day. And we expect more snow tomorrow night. So maybe not.

3. I had written a lengthy screed about Rudolph Giuliani is a miserable cetriolo. But then I thought about it.

In my family, calling someone a cetriolo is as low as it gets. In our minds, asshole and shithead are let-him-off-easy words next to cetriolo.

But here’s the thing: First, it’s hard for a cetriolo to be miserable. It is, literally, a cucumber.

And then there’s this: It’s not nice to pick on the mentally ill.

So I hope Giuliani will take this opportunity to get the help he needs.

He obviously has anger issues.

And, in particular, he seems hung up on President Obama. I think he probably figures (although, being somewhat unbalanced, “figure” might not be the appropriate word) that saying President Obama doesn’t love America is a way to get the love he’s never quite gotten from the Republican Party.

But it’s a little like the kid who drops his drawers or licks a light post on a cold day when dared by the other kids. He thinks that’ll make them like him, but it won’t really, and he just looks like a fool. Or a madman.

Craving that kind of attention — who cared what Giuliani thought about anything three days ago? — is a sign of mental imbalance.

It wasn’t always the case. Giuliani was more than happy to bask in the light when the president came to New York on May 5, 2011 — four days after the raid Obama ordered that led to the demise of Osama bin Laden. He was all over Obama like a frisky puppy that day — a chance to tap the 9/11 kudos he received (and, at the time, deserved).

But now, Obama — who got bin Laden — doesn’t love America, according to Giuliani. (BTW: If Obama doesn’t love America after getting bin Laden, what does that say about his predecessor, who decided not to? Does Giuliani think George W. Bush doesn’t love America — an equally insane notion?)

Giuliani’s friends — if he has any — should point him toward a mental health professional. Because people with his kinds of problems can become dangerous if untreated.

4.   Incidentally, while Giuliani might be mentally unbalanced, Scott Walker — who attended the dinner where the Obama comments were made — is a coward.

The Wisconsin governor refuses to say whether he agrees or disagrees with Giuliani on the question of whether the Commander in Chief of our armed forces actually loves his country.

Walker, of course, does, because that’s an easy thing to say. But to do the right thing and say that while he disagrees with Obama on everything, it’s ridiculous to question his devotion to the nation — that idea makes Walker shiver.

It’s the second time in a week that Walker has taken the chicken-out route. He was asked in London if he believes in evolution — unlike a chunk of the Republican electorate that sees science as anathema. Walker ducked the question, saying he was there to talk about trade, not other things.

This guy wants to be president. He isn’t fit to be within 10 blocks of the White House.

5.  The cold again. The last time it was this cold in February in New York was 36 years ago, according to the National Weather Service. So tonight, we’ll party like it’s 1979.

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.