This is one of the best days of the entire year.  It might be colder than Hell (actually the weather in Hell, Michigan last night was quite similar to ours—zero with 2-4 inches of snow expected) but today PITCHERS AND CATCHERS report for spring training in Florida and Arizona for the Cardinals and the Royals!

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In my previous life I would have gotten up at 4, put on a coat and a tie and my best winter coat, gone out in the 6-below darkness, swept about four or five inches of snow off of my car, backed out of my snowy driveway, and hoped a snowplow had cleared the way to the Missourinet newsroom.

I have a friend at the Y who used to deliver the mail.

Don’t tell us retirement isn’t great.

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Shot number one is in the arm. It’s February.  By the time of the second shot, there will be baseball. And racing.  Soon after that, there will be color in the back yard grass. And a green a haze will be seena few weeks later in the trees.  This is the season known as Ulocking (see an earlier entry).  In so many ways, it feels as if a cell door has been unlocked—or did until the coldest week of the year hit. Your faithful observer who despises winter almost had to whip himelf to force a trip to the end of the driveway for the morning paper and the afternoon mail.

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Years ago I heard the story of an old farmer who had just endured a drought year and the snow brought little relief.  “The snow was so dry,” he said, “that I just pushed it into a ditch and burned it.”   It kind of seemed like that when I trudge out to get the morning newspaper—snow so cold it crunched underfoot  and even seemed to squeak a little bit, and lacked enough moisture to hold it to gether and make a snowman.

But at least it’s not January.  That’s kind of a glass only half-full-of-snow optimism speaking.

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Congratulations to our General Assembly for proving me wrong.  Recommended pay raises for elected officials have been approved, their first raises since 2008. Enough of our State Representatives refused to disapprove  of the recommendation that it has gone into effect. The House needed a two-thirds vote to reject the recommendation and it came up about ten votes short of disapproval.

Good for them!  The legislators won’t benefit until their next terms, if they get them.  The statewide officials will get 2.5% hikes in each of the next two years.

Your faithful observer can’t be correct all the time.  Our forecast a few weeks ago that the raises would be refused again was wrong.  And that’s okay.

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Late-night talk show hosts are facing a grim reality now that we have a new president.  They need to do a lot of new shows because re-runs of the shows of the past four years that have featured Trump-based humor, or what they hope was Trump-based humor,  are terribly dated. Donald Trump’s exit from the Oval Office must place enormous strain on the writing staffs because, well, Joe Biden is so relatively bland. Where’s the humor in somebody who puts fighting the COVID pandemic at the top of his to-do list?  HAVING a to-do list, at least one that is not self-centered, is a poor match for what they’ve been writing about for four years.

The low-hanging humor fruit has fallen off the tree and rolled to Mar-A-Lago.

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Speaking of the aforesaid ex-chief executive—-we watched the town hall gathering last night with the current chief executive. We thought he wandered more than necessary, interrupted himself too often, talked around some questions and went on excessively to the point that some of the answers to particpants’ questions got lost in the talk.  But we also thought, “Can we imagine his predecessor doing this?  Just talking to folks about the concerns they have?  Would he ever have reassured a child she shouldn’t live in fear of the virus?” Some people care about other people. Some people care about themselves. We think we know which one we saw last night.

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A bill in the legislature would bar any state law enforcement officer, or other state officers or employees, from serving as a law enforcement officer or sheriff or community police officer if they enforce, or try to enforce, any federal firearms law the act defines as illegal in Missouri, the Constitution notwithstanding.

Unfortunatley, this proposal doesn’t go far enough.

During the recent political campaign, one party accused another party of advocating a “defund the police” policy.  This proposal simplifies the process.  Just “de-police” the policy instead.  And let me be the first to suggest that after de-policing the federal law, the funds used for the police could be given back to taxpayers—who could use them to buy guns.

Genius!

As long as we are forbidding Missouri law enforcement officers from enforcing federal gun laws, let’s think of other things our Missouri peace officers should be banned from doing. How about taking away a Highway Patrolman’s badge and banning him or her from any other law enforcement job if they write a ticket for speeding on a federal highway? Funds saved under that program could be used to buy more ambulances and pay for more EMTs who could be stationed on those roads.

You might be inspired to suggest other amendments that would extend this idea to other areas where state officials have no business enforcing federal laws. You may suggest them in the comments box at the end of this entry.

Let the fun begin.