Dan K. Thomasson

WASHINGTON -- Whatever the outcome of the federal prosecution of former Sen. John Edwards, one thing is abundantly clear -- all the principal players involved deserve one another.

About the only saving grace -- if there is one at all -- in this tawdry version of a bedroom farce is that Edwards failed in his multiple attempts to reach the White House either as a candidate for the top job or as Sen. John Kerry's running mate in 2004. How lucky we should consider ourselves.

Whatever the outcome of President Barack Obama's efforts to keep the 3.4 percent interest rate on college loans from doubling July 1, it is clear that the system badly needs a new approach.

Keeping the current rate is about the only thing the president and his presumptive Republican opponent in November, Mitt Romney, seem to agree is necessary. For both candidates, it is merely a matter of practical politics.

WASHINGTON -- The march by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney toward the fall election is likely to focus as never before on a portion of the electorate too long taken for granted: women. Unless Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, can make up a significant portion of the 20 percent gap between him and the president among female voters, his chances of winning in November are considerably diminished.

You shouldn't confuse the University of Kentucky team that rolled through the NCAA tournament with a college organization made up of student athletes. It was a group of players of advanced ability recruited carefully from around the nation to wear the school colors for one year, and if the professional league rules allowed, the nucleus of the unit would have gone directly there.

WASHINGTON -- Put aside for a moment the politics of birth control and your personal beliefs, religious or otherwise, about whether contraception has a place in the national health care debate, whether those who don't condone the practice should have to provide support for it anyway.

Lay all that aside, if possible. What is left in the ravings of Rush Limbaugh is a much deeper and darker element that is frighteningly out of tune with decency. It is a meanness and hatefulness that transcends honest commentary and can't be explained away or excused as just the shtick of a veteran mouthpiece of political discourse.

If you wonder why Americans are increasingly disillusioned about the dysfunction of their government, take a look at President Barack Obama's proposed budget -- an $8.3 trillion nightmare that has no chance of adoption and fails to address most of the nation's pressing problems.

The president's last budget before the November election is a campaign document and nothing else. Absent is any real solution to the runaway entitlement programs of Social Security and Medicare. But even more startling is the lack of any realistic effort to lower the national debt except to tax the rich who make more than $250,000 annually by doing away with the Bush era tax cuts.

Talk about closing the barn door after the animals have fled. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure has hired a big-time public relations firm to improve its now-tattered image among millions of American women.