1416 Cyber Monday

It’s Cyber Monday! Let’s all stay in our pajamas and do what real Americans do: Shop.

Guys: make sure you don’t shave. They can’t see you. They can’t see the turkey gravy stain on your undershirt or tie.  

Ladies: No makeup today. And you can wear that frumpy nightgown your mother gave you… the one she knows will make you unattractive to that scuz you married over her heartfelt objections.  And which doesn’t.

First let’s say that you’re smarter than the average Black Friday shopper.  You don’t pitch a tent at Best Buy on a perfectly lovely Thanksgiving evening, leaving the dishes for your spouse and the kids.

If you’re a stereotypical woman you KNOW they won’t wash the dishes adequately and you’ll have to re-do them when you get home from your concrete camping trip.

If you’re a stereotypical man and you actually camped out at Dick’s Sporting Goods Thursday, you are an idiot. Unless, of course, they offered on site tent rentals, which they didn’t.

Camping out the night before Amazon opens doesn’t get you very far.  First, what kind of camping trip is it if you’re camping at your dining room table? Second, Amazon doesn’t open, because it doesn’t close.

It’s kind of like camping out in front of the Sears catalog when there was one.

Of course you’ve received 1,000 holiday catalogs from places you’ve never heard of.  The Vermont Country Store?  Or from places in the witness protection program like Duluth Trading Company which is hiding in Wisconsin.

How about the Albino, Texas Fruit Cake Company, serving building blocks since 1888?  Or the Shabaaz Bakery #43721 of Chicago but which actually is in Cicero?

Ah, but we digress.  The real action is in your inbox. Drugstore.com, Zappos, Deeringbanjo, and somehow those Canadian Pharmacies -- many of which are in the witness protection program in India -- are offering Cyber Monday deals on such items as fake Viagra and fake Zoloft and other things for which mere mortal merchants require (shudder!) a prescription.

These meds may or may not work.  But at least you don’t have to listen to ten minutes of terror inducing side effects to buy them.

You can’t buy gasoline on the internet.  But the day will come.  And it probably will be delivered by drone.

At least Cyber Monday crowds don’t provoke fights.  It’s not unusual to see 15 people staking claims to the three giant TV sets that Mega-Mart sets aside for early sale in its 15,234 stores.

To get into a fight on the LL Bean site (over one of those stylish green and tan rubber boots, no doubt) you have to punch yourself in the nose.  

Most of us won’t do that.

Most, but not all.

Shrapnel:

--Unindicted murder “suspect” Darren Wilson has quit the cops -- Ferguson’s Finest.  No severance, no pension, but a hope of continuing with police work somewhere.  Right, Darr… the closest you’ll get is when they slap the cuffs on.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1415 A Murder in Ferguson, Missouri

Let’s get a few little things out of the way first.

--Peaceful protests do no harm but often little good.

--The only beneficiaries of a riot are the rebuilding companies and the bill collectors.

--Then, there’s the old lawyer joke: “Given the will, any district attorney can indict a ham sandwich.”

--Michael Brown, 18, was not the kind of guy you’d ask to watch your handbag when you had to use the restroom in the diner.

--Darren Wilson, 28, probably could be trusted to watch the handbag.  But at a traffic stop, you’d want to make sure the dash cam in his patrol car was running and in focus.

--Prosecutor Robert McCulloch has held that job since 1991 and is the son of a St. Louis police officer killed in the line of duty.  McCulloch is known locally as “the policeman’s best friend.”

--McCullough also is president of a group called “Backstoppers.”  It makes contributions to police, fire, EMS workers killed or injured in the line of duty.  According to published reports, Backstoppers benefitted from the sale of “Support Darren Wilson” t-shirts with proceeds going to his defense.  Backstoppers denies this.

Too bad Wilson isn’t a ham sandwich.  Because if he were, he’d be where he belongs which is behind bars.

It’s been said in some quarters that McCullough is what happens when you elect the village idiot.  This of course is untrue.  McCullough is tainted, but his errors of omission in this case were not bumbling or bungling. They were clever. They were devious.

Did the grand jury ever hear that Brown was not only an unsavory thug who may have beaten the owner of a small convenience store while stealing smokes, but was unarmed?  Apparently not.

They got a collective belly full of the unsavory thug and robber part, alright.  But not the unarmed part.  They may have known that anyway because the evil media covered it pretty thoroughly considering the story is about an 18 year old dead black kid.  But they never heard it out of an official mouth.

McCullough lobbed his hamwich of conflicting witness testimony on the table and said, in effect, “sort this stuff out for yourselves ladies and gentlemen. Get back to me when you have a decision.”

A typically enthusiastic prosecutor would have let the jurors know he wanted to put gunslinger Wilson on trial for pulling the trigger 12 -- count ‘em 12 -- times.

He would have thundered and rumbled and instilled his enthusiasm in the grand jurors who surely would have voted for an indictment.

Question: You ever buy a bag of white rice and find some stray grains of brown or black rice in it?  It happens.  This is not just about rice.  It’s also is a graphic description of the Ferguson police department. And of a grand jury that needed seven votes among the ten members to hand up a decision.  The grand jury was seven white people and three black.

Not everyone always votes on color lines. But such is the separation of majority blacks and minority whites in this town that it can almost be guaranteed in a case like this.

Do you think McCullough is going to convene a second grand jury?  And before you bleat about double jeopardy, that applies only if there’s a guilty verdict in a formal charge or an un-coerced confession which is the same thing as a conviction if it happens before or during a trial.

No indictment means no charge which means no trial and no verdict, hence no double jeopardy. But the prosecutor has to want a second bite. Are you willing to hold your breath until this one does?

In any event, with Michael the evil Giant out of the way, you don’t have to be as careful of where you leave your purse … if you can find a place to set it down amid the physical and emotional ruin that once was Ferguson, Missouri.

---

And now, the Wessays™ Guide to things you can say if you agree with the grand jury decision and don’t want to be … um … mistaken for a racist:

- “A crime is a crime and the color doesn’t matter.”  --Talk show guest.

- “(Michael Brown) looked like a demon.”  -- Police officer Darren Wilson.

- “We need to tackle criminal justice reform.”

-- Barack Obama.

- “This (riot) was … a strategic plan…” -- Rush

Limbaugh.

- (The autopsy report showed) “...Michael Brown had marijuana in his system when he died.” --Newsmax.com.

- “...this isn’t  a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors (sic) spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened.” -- Politico quoted by the National Review.

-“The riotous situation in Ferguson… has been hijacked by the media and diluted the real issue…”

--Former NYC Police Commissioner Bernard Kerick on the Steve Malzberg radio show, quoted by Newsmax.

-”That was one gutsy grand jury.” -- NYPost Editorial 11/25/14.

-”If Brown had surrendered, he’d be alive today.” -- too many sources to single out one.”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014

1411 Reach for the Floor

Here it is, people, the self help advice that can get you ahead in today’s complicated, lopsided world.

They’ve told us all along “reach for the stars.”  Bah-Loney! Reach for the floor.

The only way to get by these days is to become filthy rich or to become filthy poor.  Since the former is out of the question for most of us, consider the latter.

The first thing to do is get rid of that job if you have one.  Get fired. Collect unemployment comp.  Since you’ll be jobless, you’ll have only one real asset to squander: time.

And that’s good.  You can sit in the waiting area at the emergency room all day, because what else are you going to do with your time, wash your BMW?  Presto: free medical care.  It just takes awhile.  They can’t turn you away.

Food stamps!  Not poor enough? Shed assets. Reach for the floor.  There’s nothing stopping you but your own fear.

Remember what Reagan taught us: Ketchup is a vegetable.

Remember what Napoleon Hill taught us:  If you can conceive and believe, you can achieve.  In this case, it doesn’t even take hard work and dedication.

Need help with your heating this winter?  If you’re working for Mickey D 15 hours a week, you’re not quite poor enough to qualify.  So ditch that unwanted job and get your fuel oil on the cheap.

Don’t work hard, work smart!  Drain that bank account.  Break that CD before deadline.  You’ll lose some interest.  But these days the only interest that’s paid is chump change. Certificates of deposit have become like savings accounts:  just take out what you need.  

(In a savings account, you not only withdraw at will, you can deposit.  But you won’t have anything to deposit, so that’s an irrelevant consequence.)

Reach for the floor.  Obey the law of gravity!  Things go down for a reason. Don’t try climbing up. It’s not worth the effort.

Think about it.  All this striving to get to wherever it is you got?  What has it really gotten you besides not being rich enough or poor enough to live decently?

At root, having others pay for your benefits is the most important characteristic the rich and the poor share.  

So forget this “reach for the stars” stuff.  Reach for the floor:  it’s right there for the taking.  It’s right under your feet.  It’s like … falling down.

Shrapnel:

--So the Democrats got together and managed to kill the Keystone Pipeline, at least for now.  Good work, boys and girls.  But it’ll be back, so what’s your “plan B and where were you when we needed you for really important stuff?

--And where were you when we first learned that killer airbags were our undeclared and uninvited passengers?  Now, they want a national recall. Fasten your seatbelts, and buy a helmet.

--Arms dealers in Ferguson, Missouri report a sales boomlet.  Everyone’s breath- holding,  awaiting a grand jury decision on whether to charge the cop who shot and killed the kid.  Talk about damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2014