The ironies don’t get much crueler, for a guy who cheated on his terminally ill wife, fathered a love-child blamed on another man, and attempted to take his Party down with him. CNN knows how to bring the pain, certainly. Favorite element of this carefully constructed bit of knife-twisting? “Click to Play.” Well, Edwards can tell himself that he’ll always have the sane and comforting Rielle Hunter.

In all the healthcare hullaballoo, this brilliant story slipped by almost undetected, and it’s a big, big bit of brilliance: regulators in New York State nixed Entergy’s proposal to create the now-infamous spin-off, Enexus. If you remember, the idea was that Entergy would create an LLC called Enexus, a shell corporation, which would in turn borrow billions for no other reason than to hand them back to Entergy, in exchange for its six aging nuclear plants and all their clean-up and maintenance issues into perpetuity.

Not a bad deal, for the folks in Louisiana anyway. How do you work out a deal like that? Make sure you’re both buyer and seller. That’s key.

But now there’s a fly in the ointment, and the fly has a New York accent. Regulators determined, after much thought, that there was essentially nothing in it for taxpayers or ratepayers. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, nuclear activists and critical Vermont lawmakers have been saying for years now.

And that raises a final interesting question. If New York regulators don’t like the deal, and Vermont lawmakers don’t like the deal, and voters who get wind of the deal don’t like the deal, why does Governor Douglas like the deal?

Right. Because he’ll be long gone when that particular deal goes down. Always thinking, that Uncle Jim. Always thinking.

We brought you coverage of the plot to get Michael Steele a few weeks back, and argued that with the elite of his party so clearly gunning for him, Steele had until May Day or thereabouts before he’d be packing his bags at the RNC. Right on time: today’s damaging spending reports, especially charges rung up at a California bondage club. Steele claims (with cause, we would argue) that someone’s out to get him.

But let’s face facts. When Steele took over last year, the RNC had $22 million and they’ve raised $96 million since. Which is a total of $118 million. How much left today, just 365 days later? Less than $10 million.

Which is ballgame, friends.

Sarah Palin tries so hard to blow the dog whistle, but it just takes a little more nuance than she can manage, finally. So if you listen to her long enough, you’ll find the revealing and the ugly always come tumbling out. Case in point: Palin in Searchlight, Nevada, trying to simultaneously whip up the Tea Partiers and rewrite the current narrative concerning violence on the Right. But right in the middle of it all, nuance be damned, she just comes right out with it: