By DAN K. THOMASSON, Scripps Howard News Service

The U.S. Supreme Court is about to get involved in one of the most difficult of American subjects -- middle schools and the care of their inmates who as they emerge half baked from babyhood more resemble zoo animals.

Finally, there comes an end to negotiations with international thugs.

In television's long running "Law and Order" series, the prosecutors are portrayed as righteous, dedicated searchers for the truth who seldom, if ever, fail to find it and the defense attorneys are depicted as a necessary evil, capable of underhanded, devious action to free their clients whom everyone knows are guilty.

So these are our allies in the war against terrorism?

Would you buy a used car from this man -- Barack Obama, that is?

The startling rise of violence in Mexico and along the southwest border of the United States has sharpened the focus on a long-existing problem neither Congress nor a succession of presidents has been willing to resolve -- the startling lack of manpower in a key agency in what promises to be a long battle.

Here's today's puzzler. When is a press conference not a press conference?
The answer is:

With apologies to Garrison Keillor: It has been a difficult week in our hometown, Lake Woe Is Me.
The images of cheering throngs in Denver and in Grant Park seem to be fading rather quickly for President Obama as more and more Americans realize what they should have understood in the first place -- pledges sold in a campaign frequently have a very short shelf life.

For 124 years Washington's Gridiron Club has been doing what Russian Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin once said no other nation in the world, even the democratic ones, would tolerate, poking fun at government institutions from the White House to Capitol Hill in its annual spring dinner.

President Obama's ambitious plans to overhaul the nation's public school system with a $100 billion infusion of taxpayer money as part of the general rebuilding of the economic infrastructure has some major hurdles to clear, not the least of which is his own party's traditional opposition to some of the changes he is recommending.