It’s hard to believe, but there is a bright side to the tawdry tale of a Lakewood police officer accused of embezzling money meant for the families of four murdered fellow officers.

Education reform – serious education reform – remains alive in the Legislature. No thanks to the Legislature’s education chairwomen.

We’re all guilty of it – squirreling leftover medicine away on the off chance we might need it someday. When we go to use it, we discover it’s years past its expiration date. So we dump it in the garbage can or, if we’re feeling more responsible, flush it down the toilet.

‘There but for the grace of God,” is a conventional and charitable attitude toward people who get in trouble with the law. The idea is that good guys and bad guys share a common humanity that the good guys do well to ack-nowledge.

The Internet website LiveScience recklessly reveals a dirty little secret about cats with no apparent realization that the information might put cats out of business if we all come to realize what we have been sponsoring all these years.

WASHINGTON – Criticism of Mitt Romney for lacking a coherent message is grossly unfair. He has been forthright, consistent and even eloquent in pressing home his campaign’s central theme: Mitt Romney desperately wants to be president.

I walk in McCormick Forest Park four to five times a week with my two Labs, Arlo and Dooby. I feel I have an ownership of the woods because of the many volunteer hours I’ve spent working on the trails that were put through this beautiful forest in Gig Harbor.

A Feb. 5 News Tribune article described the Tacoma School District’s efforts to be designated as Washington state’s first “district-wide Innovative School Zone.”

This was the week Mitt Romney should have sealed the Republican presidential nomination. He was expected to win Tuesday’s caucuses in Colorado, to win or tie in Minnesota and to do credibly well in Missouri. Instead, the former Massa-chusetts governor managed to lose all three contests to Rick Santorum, a candidate who has spent most of the campaign stuck near the bottom of the polls.

When good news happens to a bad candidate like Mitt Romney, it makes an already difficult situation worse. He has enough trouble communicating any message, much less a mixed one.

Are you fed up with hard, honest work? Does responsibility leave you blasé? Interested in combining your cravings of instant gratification and increased stress? Then procrastination might be the thing for you!