Ushers won’t let you sleep in the galleries of our nation’s capitol.

The stranger I sat next to in the Senate last week, no doubt weary from walking to points of interest and standing in lines on a muggy afternoon, closed his eyes as New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte prepared to speak. A Capitol usher quickly snapped her fingers and whispered harshly that there was “no sleeping in the gallery.”

Perhaps the biggest issue facing Massachusetts’ voters this November will have nothing to do with candidates for public office. It will be a citizens’ initiative to repeal the state’s 2011 casino gambling law before it has a chance to lay roots.

Only two states, Hawaii and Utah, do not allow gambling in any form, and full-scale non-reservation casino gambling has been growing, spreading to almost half of all states, and particularly in the Northeast. 

As anyone who has been married awhile will attest, it’s best not to debate important decisions when you are tired and cranky. So it makes sense, then, for Utah lawmakers to hold a hearing on daylight saving time now, when we’re all about as far from springing and falling, backward or forward, as we can be.

But, really, it’s not hard to predict what they will hear at a July 10 forum on the subject at the Clark Planetarium and at a rural summit in Cedar City in August.

One sentence out of an 846-page law passed in 1965. That’s what President Obama is relying on to impose tough new regulations on for-profit colleges and programs — rules that could soon shut down Corinthian Colleges, a chain that includes 107 centers and serves 72,000 students — without any input from Congress.

That sentence says the federal government has the power to grant financial aid to people who attend higher education programs

Even a nation as cynical as ours shouldn’t be too shocked to learn that a financial contribution of the correct amount can earn you an ambassadorship to some cushy country — Norway, for instance.

We would like to believe otherwise. I’ve listened to my share of politicians and their donors through the years insisting that the money that changes hands during campaign season is a mere token of support, not a payment attached to any sort of expectation. But they over-estimate my gullibility, let alone that of many Americans.

We know what it means to slip the maître d a little extra for a nice table. Why should politics be different? Besides, what harm could it do to put an ambassadorship to a peaceful and mostly quiet ally up for sale?

Well … listen to the snippets NPR recently broadcast of the confirmation hearing last January of George Tsunis, nominated 

Ten years ago, when the acronym UTOPIA still had a ring of promise to it, this newspaper published a letter to the editor that turned out to be prophetic.

The writer noted that organizers said one of every three households needed to sign up for broadband along the UTOPIA network in order for it to be successful. Then he went to the dictionary for a prediction of what would happen. Webster’s, he wrote, defines utopia “as an ‘impractical scheme for social improvement.’”

What’s more embarrassing than President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003?

Try this:

“We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

That’s what President Obama said in December of 2011 as he announced that troops had been withdrawn and the U.S. war in Iraq was over.

If the media gets a federal law making it harder for the government to force reporters to rat on their confidential sources, they may have President Obama to thank.

But in the same sort of way you can credit many air safety regulations on horrible disasters.

Many of you don’t like the way reporters behave themselves. You