A lighthearted look at news of the day:

I’m looking forward to the first time President Donald Trump tries to fire Vladimir Putin.

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Trump announced last week that he is running for president. He may drop out when he learns he can’t claim his hair as his running mate.

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Having Trump as president would be like having had John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan as president in the late 19th century. This shows how far we’ve fallen. Back then, rich people just tried to buy presidents. They knew better than to waste money trying to become one.

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In Toronto, former mayor Rob Ford praised Trump, saying he is a good candidate. Ford said he understood Trump because he has been in his shoes. It was probably near the end of a party, when a lot of people were confused about whose shoes were whose.

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Utah politicians continue to wrangle over where to move the state prison. Ironically, after all the abuse they’ve taken at public hearings, members of the Prison Relocation Commission may need to retire to a padded cell to work things out.

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Gov. Gary Herbert stepped into the fray last week by suggesting that maybe the prison should remain in Draper, a subtle move calculated to make him the nation’s first governor ever re-elected by a unanimous vote.

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Rachel Dolezal resigned her post as president of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP last week because she had chosen to identify herself as part black, even though this isn’t literally true. No word yet on whether the black man she had claimed to be her father has chosen to identify her as his daughter.

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Writing in her defense, Kareem Abdul Jabbar joked that he’s really 5 foot 8. Well, of course. He always played on television, and the camera always adds about a foot and a half.

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Greek officials are in trouble with the European Union again after reportedly betting their nation’s entire GDP on the Cleveland Cavaliers.

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Remember the days when if a baseball team signed a hack, it meant they got someone who swung at every pitch? Now it seems the Houston Astros may be hiring Ed Snowden soon as an assistant coach in charge of intercepting hacks from the St. Louis Cardinals. And the sad thing is that sentence makes perfect sense.

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The FBI announced last week it was investigating whether the Cardinals hacked into the Astros’ computers and stole scouting reports, among other things. Apparently, stealing signs from second base has become so last century.

A lighthearted look at news of the day:

A federal court has ruled the U.S. Postal Service must roll back at least part of a postage rate increase that went into effect last year. Members of the millennial generation reacted by saying, “What is postage?”

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The court said the Postal Service could claim no more than $3 billion from its rate hike. Its losses, however, can continue without any limits.

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Dick Costolo has resigned as Twitter’s CEO. This is bad news, not so much because he is irreplaceable, but because it’s hard to pick a replacement from resumes that can be no more than 140 characters in length.

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Authorities in upstate New York were searching for two men who staged a brazen escape from a penitentiary. The worry was the escapees had signed up to run for president as Republicans. No one could ever find them in a crowd that big.

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Meanwhile, Democratic presidential hopeful Lincoln Chafee continued his campaign to get America converted to the metric system. Despite public apathy, he is refusing to budge a centimeter on the subject.

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It’s easy to poke fun at a politician who wants to change the way we measure things. But really, you shouldn’t judge him until you’ve walked a kilometer in his shoes.

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Chafee was the governor of Rhode Island, a state so small Donald Trump has promised, if elected, to carpet it.

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Trump, meanwhile, hasn’t officially decided whether to run, despite a petition urging him on, signed by every late-night talk show host and comedian in the land.

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Former president Bill Clinton, meanwhile, has said he’ll stop his practice of charging for speeches if Hillary is elected. Upon hearing this, a lot of Americans were persuaded to support her, until Bill clarified that he wasn’t going to stop speaking, just stop charging for it.

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Bill Clinton told reporters that Hillary is the “rock” of his family and that he has trusted her with his life, “on more than one occasion.” Americans can probably think of at least one occasion in which he wondered if the “rock” would came flying at his head.

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President Obama learned last week that the only fast track he has in his future is the fast track to lame duck irrelevancy.

A lighthearted look at news of the day:

This year, the national spelling bee produced two winners, Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam. Both won mainly because they were not required to spell each other’s names.
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One of the winning words was “scherenschnitte.” The other was “nunatak.” We use these every day in sentences, such as, “Don’t throw a ‘scherenschnitte’ near the convent or you’ll be in for a nunatak.”
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This was the second year in a row the spelling bee ended with two winners. I don’t think they’re trying hard enough. If the judges exhaust the dictionary, they should start making the kids spell things with the Cyrillic alphabet.
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A recent secret test of TSA agents nationwide found that they missed weapons and explosives 95 percent of the time. Everyone focuses on the negatives. It turns out the TSA was pretty accurate at finding bottles containing more than 3 ounces of water being carried by 4-year-old children.
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Given these results, the government should announce a new policy. From now on, just drive your car up to the airplane and jump on. What does it matter?
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Forget about airports. The places that really need security are the hearing rooms where the Utah Prison Relocation Commission meets.
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The commission might as well decide to build the prison on a community golf course. At least then, people would get teed off with more than one purpose in mind, and the commission could be excused for having a bunker mentality.
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Last week’s prison hearing in Eagle Mountain had a touch of magic to it. More people showed up than actually live in the city.
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The Obama administration continues its extradition fight for Ed Snowden, who is exiled in Russia and wanted on espionage charges for revealing things Congress and president now agree changed the country for the better. I hope they can give him what he deserves soon.
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Snowden is like the friend who tells you your girlfriend is secretly gathering information so she can dump you. You have mixed feelings. You’re not sure whom to blame. Then you find out the girlfriend also is gathering information on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and millions of other people. Yeah, it’s just like that.
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Former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee announced his candidacy for president last week. His brilliant campaign strategy is to promise to put the nation on the metric system. In political circles, this is known as measuring once, cutting twice.