MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.

Too many louts get away with being one. So it was intensely satisfying to learn that the U.S. government, in the form of the Justice Department, was focusing its considerable might on John Edwards.

The war on women, waged mostly by men, has given way to the war among women, waged by women on one another.

Mitt Romney’s troubles bring to mind a pop-psychology bestseller from a few years ago called “He’s Just Not That Into You.”

Instead of lying, the military owned up to the awful truth that a 19-year-old private, Danny Chen, died at the hands of his fellow soldiers.

Tuning in to the Republican debate Dec. 10 in Iowa, the first since Newt Gingrich became the front-runner, was like watching a 3-year-old at a birthday party. I kept wondering whether Gingrich would hold it together through the slicing of the cake or collapse in a heap before another sugar infusion sent him reeling.

We don’t know if the editorial board of the New Hampshire Union Leader had to hold its nose and squeeze its eyes shut in order to endorse Newt Gingrich for president this week.

On Sept. 11, I watched as so many good people put their lives in peril to save others. But there were no burning towers at Penn State. Doing the right thing to protect a small boy would have taken very little.

Some women just bug men. Hillary Clinton did (and still does). Nancy Pelosi, who has replaced Clinton as the Scary Democratic Woman in Republican fundraising appeals, surely does. And now Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has joined the club.

The Republican Party has been speed dating, racing through presidential prospects like a Hollywood starlet working her way through leading men. The fickleness suggests a party that doesn’t know whether its Tea Party heart or its establishment head should prevail in 2012. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was next in line, which is usually the right place to be in a Republican nomination contest. He checks some important boxes — successful businessman, former governor — and his conversion to conservative positions occurred far enough in the past that the phrase “flip-flop” no longer shows up in every story about him. He’s against health care reform, though still dogged by the fact that he once was for it

One month after Texas Governor Rick Perry told the Des Moines Register that he felt called to run for president, he is scheduled to answer the summons at an event this Saturday in South Carolina. To get a sense of what a Perry presidential campaign might be like, his appearance last weekend at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Houston is instructive. The event offered high-tech visuals, thumping Christian rock music, country singers and plenty of old-time religion.

The credit rating on U.S. bonds may survive the debt-ceiling fiasco, but the president and speaker of the House, the two most powerful figures in American government, have already been downgraded. Both leaders are trying to govern in a world that doesn’t exist. Barack Obama, who came to the White House as a unifying force at a perilous moment, is the sole occupant of the post-partisan utopia he conjured as a candidate — a land where reason is king and we all get along. He loves the center the way a kid loves ice cream. Too bad the center no longer exists in Washington, where the Republican opposition is openly determined to destroy Obama’s presidency.