As Chris Rock says, "What do you want for doing right? A cookie?"

As I sit here, "it wonders me," as the Pennsylvania Dutch say, how things got so mixed up. Life these days reminds me of the time the optometrist switched the prescriptions in my spectacles, so I was seeing everything wrong until they corrected it. But that was easy to spot and easy to fix.

It doesn't matter how you feel about the life and times of John McCain. Let's agree that he has not been perfect in his life, which is just another way of saying he is human...he's made mistakes, and he's done some valiant things. I liked his vote in support of keeping the ACA alive; I loathed him for dumping the wife who waited for him to come home from the Vietnamese prison camp.  But I don't know what it's like to be away from everything I know and love for five years, so there's that.

I do know it takes some kind of person to fly a fighter jet, and to say that you "like people who don't get shot down" takes away from those heroics.  That is as fatuous a comment as I've ever heard.

I don't know what the word is to describe a person who says that someone else "doesn't matter because they are dying anyway" but I'm pretty sure that Satan smiles and makes a little notation in his book when he hears such horrible things being uttered.  And for the leader of an organization that employs such a person - paid by tax money - to say nothing to rebuke her is unfathomable. It wonders me.

And finally we turn to the large city near the large county where I live, a city riddled with crime and every urban horror you can name. The mayor fires the police commissioner because people keep committing crime, although he himself has committed none that we know of. The mayor names a replacement who, two months later, has to be suspended - paid by tax money - because he failed to file federal or state tax returns for three years in a row.

Provided to help the commissioner remember next time.

He says it's a mistake.  No. A mistake is putting your tax return in your pocket well before April 15, and forgetting to drop it in the mail.  Failing to fill out that return in 2013, 2014 and 2015 is no mistake.  A crime analyst might call it a "pattern," however. 

The commish also says it was the result of "failing to properly prioritize his personal affairs." Even if we don't charge him with splitting an infinitive there, we still throw the penalty flag for throwing out nonsense. And please, let me know how you do if you're caught speeding in the city, or caught holding up a gas station, and tell the police or the judge that you were, at most, guilty of not prioritizing your personal affairs.  The police commissioner is the boss of the men and women who enforce the city's laws. There is a law against not paying your taxes.
But his supporters, chief among them his twin brother, say the commissioner gets a pass on paying his taxes because he was taking care of his parents. It wonders me how he can say that with a straight face, as if no one else ever paid their taxes and cared for ailing parents.

And this all took place in the same week in which a former city police sergeant was sentenced to 15 years in prison for racketeering conspiracy. He admitted that he robbed citizens for years and tipped off his coworkers to the investigation of their crimes.

His friends and family came to court to say that he was an honest cop. He says he was as well.

Sing it with me now. Someone dying of cancer is not fodder for jokes at their expense. You are supposed to pay your taxes. Police officers are not supposed to steal money found at crime scenes, or rob citizens.

Once we learn these things, we'll be ok.