By Fred Hiatt

Strangely enough, the 2012 presidential campaign, expected to be the dirtiest in modern memory, may end up being relatively clean.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are both smart and accomplished individuals. That’s why it is so disappointing that neither candidate has taken a truly responsible position when it comes to the nation’s fiscal future.

Facebook’s initial public offering reminds us of a story.

In the early days of the Obama administration, a lot of people, including some Republicans, weren’t much bothered by the new president’s tendency to blame his predecessor for the nation’s problems. After all, Barack Obama did inherit a mess from George W. Bush. The voters were inclined to give Obama time to turn things around.

The second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster passed with little fanfare last month. But with our government on the brink of allowing the oil industry to explore in America’s remote Arctic Ocean this summer, it is worth revisiting some of the lessons learned from the biggest oil spill in the nation’s history.

As the World Health Assembly convenes in Geneva this week, one item on the agenda will be polio – more specifically, how to finally deliver on an epic promise made a quarter-century ago: to liberate humankind from one of the world’s most deadly and debilitating diseases.

If you want to see what women’s health care in America will be like if Mitt Romney becomes president, just look at Texas and Arizona.

Last week, the Avengers continued to confront giant mechanical sea monsters from outer space on the silver screen. In the real world, politicians and businesspeople were locked in similarly intense contests of will. The stakes in both dramas were high. The dialogue was sharp. And as with the Avengers and their merry extended family of mayhem-makers, the collateral damage – from both their conflicts and their collaborations – was catastrophic.

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Andrew Ng is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, and he has a rather charming way of explaining how the new interactive online education company that he cofounded, Coursera, hopes to revolutionize higher education by allowing students from all over the world to not only hear his lectures, but to do homework assignments, be graded, receive a certificate for completing the course and use that to get a better job or gain admission to a better school.

By now, folks have heard much about the announcement that JPMorgan Chase had somehow lost $2 billion over a six-week period. In an irony of ironies, here’s what one JPMorgan risk officer had to say about the behemoth bank just a few months ago: “Our metric of success is ‘no surprises’; no surprises in terms of the impact on the firm of any individual behavior or outside event.”

By now, the story of blind Chinese rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng’s remarkable escape is almost the stuff of legend. On the moonless night of April 22, he evaded the security forces guarding his small Shandong farmhouse, maneuvering sightlessly over several farm walls, past irrigation ditches and through a few streams. After hiding out for several days in Beijing, Chen finally reached safety in the U.S. embassy.

President Barack Obama did the right thing last week by (finally) coming out in favor of marriage equality for all people. Gays and lesbians should have the same rights as hetero-sexuals to marry, and the president’s explicit support should further that goal. But if the Supreme Court forces that change on the American people, the probable backlash would be substantial and might well do more damage than good to the future of gay rights and other important causes.

Proponents of an American Nanny State have a plan to improve your health: tax sugar and “junk” food so you will eat less of it. Subsidies for broccoli and beets are close behind.

Of course we love those macaroni necklaces. And who wouldn’t want another mug?