We all make bad decisions, but three recent news items show how bad things can look when people don’t see the larger picture.

Let’s begin with the story last week about Mary Jane White, the court-appointed defense attorney in Clayton County who submitted a bill of $50,678 for 800 hours work. 

Her client was facing up to 35 years in prison for allegedly buying cold medicine containing the decongestant pseudoephedrine, which police said he used to make meth. 

It was a complicated case, which White showed with a 971-page history of her client’s less-than-stellar life. She got the charge reduced to possession of a controlled substance and a six-month jail term. 

But when she tried to collect her fee, State Public Defender Adam Gregg slashed it by more than half, saying White spent too much time on the case.

Now contrast White’s fee with the growing tab — $768,000 and mounting — run up by the LaMarca law firm defending Gov. Terry Branstad in a defamation case filed in 2011 by Chris Godfrey.

Godfrey, you may recall, was the constitutionally independent — and by all accounts competent  — Iowa workers compensation commissioner that the governor tried to force out by cutting his salary by more than a third.

News reports say the LaMarca firm is being paid up to $325 an hour, while White’s fee averages out to about $64 an hour, or less than most plumbers charge.

Public Defender Gregg said one reason he cut White’s pay was that his office has a limited budget and can’t afford to spend that much on a case that did not go to trial.  

Here’s a thought: If the state didn’t spend so much money defending the governor from his own poor decisions, it would have more for low-paid public defenders.  

While we’re talking about Gov. Branstad, who happens to be a lawyer, something else happened recently that makes no legal sense.

When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled last month that telemedicine abortions are legal, the governor told reporters that, while he had not yet made a decision on appealing the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was “very disappointed in the court decision. We’re going to be reading, reviewing and analyzing that and determining what is the best course of action for us to take.”

Legal experts responded that it would be a losing cause to because the decision was based on Iowa, not U.S., law.

My final example of a bad decision involves the U.S. Treasury’s plan to replace Alexander Hamilton’s face on the $10 bill with a woman. 

That’s just goofy. 

There’s nothing wrong with putting a woman on U.S. currency, but why not make it the twenty and get rid of Andrew Jackson? Historians agree that placing Jackson on any paper money, never made sense because he was opposed to paper currency and anything else that smacked of monetary policy. 

Hamilton was the country’s first treasury secretary and did yeoman’s work to get the nation’s economy off to a firm start, while Jackson’s foolish ideas launched a depression.

Put a woman on the twenty, not the ten. My recommendation is Abigail Adams, wife of our second president. She was an incredible businesswoman. 

Her premier skill was as a bond speculator, but she was also a small-scale importer, retailer, lender and real estate investor. When it came to money, she was much smarter than her husband, as many women are.