Saturday Wish List

I don't think I'm a compulsive wisher, but sometimes I do get a yen for stuff.

--Like being the first guy at the garage sale to spot the old wood box containing a couple of disassembled GI Colt 1911s and most of an artillery Luger for about five bucks.

--Like having three or four fools linger at my loophole table this weekend -- guys who think that my stratospheric asking prices are really quite fair. And who, of course, are packing enough high-quality trading material to back their judgement. 

-- Like having the damned Super Bowl over. Also the post-game analyses and the extended video of the winner's homie thugs getting drunk, puking, and tipping over cars when the teevee lights go on.

Murder math in Chicago

Let me impose on your kindness. I know I'm know I'm giggling in public, a breach of taste and good manners.

Please forgive me. You see, I was just reading about Chicago, the political womb of one Barack Obama, sometimes known as His Ineptness, the lawyer-cum-neighborhood organizer. He is the politician who is, at the moment, busily explaining to us what the Constitution of the United States actually means.

As you have read, Chicago -- actually Cook County which is about the same thing --  lost a murderer the other day. The perp had been serving 60 years in an Indiana pen. Chicago borrowed him so he could be tried on an old "drug and armed violence case." Never mind that the case was closed, dismissed, six years ago. Never mind that Cook County prosecutors told Sherf Tom Dart that no prosecutor or  judge had a yen to talk with the Hoosier convict. But Sherf Tom Insisted, so the killer got a nice ride to Chicago, accompanied by a polite note from Indiana, "Y'all wanna please make sure and send this fella back when you're done with him?"

The sherf lost the paper. Somebody in uniform opened the jailhouse door and wished him  good luck. Hilarity ensued. Somebody caught the crook. Game over?

Not quite. That gradual warming trend for upper Illinois can be attributed to the hot breath of Chicago pols, screaming blame at one another. The sheriff finally admitted he and his troops were guilty of misfeasance, but not too guilty. Budget cuts, don't you know. An outdated computer. A Homeric load of work piled on his poor shoulders.

"It's our fault but we move 100,000 people a day and it's all done with paper," Dart said.

(Gratuitous full-frontal arithmetic follows. Reader discretion is advised.)

So, Sherf, you are telling us that you and your acolytes move the equivalent of the entire population of Cook County every 52 days? (5.2 million divided by 100k). Or that you can move every man, woman, and kid in Illinois  between Spring Training and the All-Star Break?  If you have enough paper, of course.

All that may be unfair to Officer Tom as a person. After all, he works in a mysterious numerical environment where a ward of 200,000 human beings can easily deliver 200,001 votes for Rahm, Daly, & Obama, Inc.

Besides, how could this Indiana killer have been part of "armed violence" in Chicago? Guns were (and generally still are) illegal there prior to McDonald, so he couldn't possibly have been armed. This principle has been carried to the White House whose occupant these days is offering it as a paradigm for America.

I think I'm jealous

The Atlantic reports with slightly amused horror that the government of  Zimbabwe is down to its last $217.

Okay, but if that's a real $217, in some sort of hardish money, aren't they  at least $217 better off than Uncle Sam?

A handful of heresy

When I was in the church this morning, saying so long to a long-time acquaintance, I wasn't attending to the official eulogy too closely. I quietly picked up a pew Bible and refreshed my memory of some notable political leaders. David was said to be brave, and Solomon was  deemed wise.

They made me think of modern leaders who were either valiant or wise or both. The man currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue never crossed my mind.

Until later, that is. Then I heard the instant analysis of His Ineptness's Latino vote-purchase plan. (He calls it immigration reform, a dream pact for hustling politicians as U.S. demographics become  swarthier.)

The consensus opinion is that the inept White House plan differs from the inept senate plan in one major way:  His Ineptness doesn't plan to "secure the borders,"
essentially because, he says, we can't.

Now I'm confused. The full might of our Republic is too flaccid to to keep some ragtag crossers in their own country and out of ours. Yet the same commander -- backed by the same force -- comfortably advises every ayatollah and used-camel hustler turned Islamic president within a thousand miles of Suez on all matters under the sun -- administrative, moral, and military. And he expects to be taken seriously.

I was lucky enough not to think of our departing secretary of state, still being lauded as one of the most brilliant foreign policy thinkers in history. You know, Hillary, the lady who did such a good job carrying advice from His Ineptness to Egypt where things are going so swimmingly. You're just a disrespectful smart-alec If you giggle and say her final directive from Foggy Bottom might well read, "Uhh, it's a little hairy over there and you guys better keep your white  infidel  asses out of Cairo these days."

I mean, What Difference Does It Make?