Leaders in Washington want to be congratulated today for avoiding a government shut down.  None are in order. All they did was their jobs, and almost a year late. Every Congress since the nation’s founding has approved an annual budget.

But huge credit is deserved by one leader.  Not for the budget, but for the conversation change he has brought to Washington in very short order.  That is John Boehner, of course, the Republican House leader.

Deficit reduction was a talking point a year ago in Washington. Today it is the main course.  Boehner gets full credit for that, as is pointed out today in Politico.

Last night’s deal to trim federal spending by $38.5 billion will have no effect on the nation’s headlong spiral into insolvency, but the change in attitude in Washington may, and Boehner engineered it.

A year ago, many in Congress – and in the White House – were still talking up massive deficit spending as the cure to our nation’s ills  (a convenient theory to rationalize larger government.) Only Paul Krugmanites are still doing that today, all seven or eight of them.

A majority of Americans want Congress to get real.  And Boehner has become their voice.

In a flurry of meetings this morning, and with everything going on — or not going on — with the federal government, I missed this story in the Wall Street Journal.

It seems that the MoveOn.org/CSEA judicial candidate in Wisconsin, JoAnne Kloppenburg, did not, in fact, win the heated and nationally significant judicial race in the Badger State this week.  The other guy did, sitting Supreme Court Justice David Prosser.  Forty thousand votes from a conservative suburb of Milwaukee had somehow gone uncounted.

This story does not seem to be getting much ink today with everything happening in the world, but its implications are tremendous.  It looks like the union Left has just been handed a second shattering loss in Madison.

With Judge Prosser remaining on the bench, we can expect to see Governor Scott Walker’s public union reforms promptly enacted.

If President Obama loses re-election, his single biggest mistake — if you can pick one — may be his decision to begin his re-election campaign so early.

In practice, re-election drives never begin or end. Politicians  continuously run. But in announcing an official start to the campaign, Mr. Obama and his team may have made a fatal mistake, for two reasons: 1.) Everything he now does will be viewed through the cynical  prism of campaign politics, and 2.) He has not yet fully seized the mantle of his office or accomplished enough to warrant re-election. Why drive those points home to voters now?

When you announce a candidacy, you are implicitly asking voters to judge your performance that day. It’s where you are instructing their minds to go. And here’s where the President’s performance stands today:

–The federal government is on the verge of shutting down and both Democrats and Republicans are pointing to the President’s lack of hands-on leadership as a reason;

–We are a facing a catastrophic debt crisis, and the President has refused to address it;

–The situation in Libya is turning into a disaster. The President’s halting, indeed, halted, leadership and rhetorical ambiguity has been noticed worldwide;

–Our largest Arab ally, Egypt, is in crisis, and our eye appears off that ball;

–The President has deeply strained relations with Israel, our chief ally in the Middle East, which, itself, is under existential threat from Iran and Iranian-backed militias;

–Gas prices are skyrocketing and the terrifying specter of inflation is emerging;

–The economy is effectively stalled, and

— We are still fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and neither are going well.

There’s more, of course.

Not all these things were caused by President Obama.  But all of them are his problems. He’s the President. He owns them, like it or not.

For someone who has such brilliant timing in public speaking, President Obama seems to have lousy timing here.  You are supposed to announce re-election campaigns atop victories.

President Lincoln understood that. He knew he needed a victory to spring the Emancipation Proclamation (and his re-election drive) on a war-weary public, and he got it at Gettysburg. President Obama has no such victory on which to run. His biggest “accomplishment” to date is deeply unpopular and it doesn’t even belong to him. Because let’s face it, Obamacare is really Pelosicare.

The lofty rhetoric that hypnotized hope-filled voters in 2008 rings hollow now. It is insubstantial.  It is wind. Yet that’s what the President will be giving us from here on out. Wind. He does not govern well; he campaigns well, so that’s what we’ll be shown on TV.

Paris Hilton was cruelly used in a campaign ad by then candidate John McCain. God help me, but she comes to mind again. It’s the same old question. Why is she famous?  What does she actually do? Can she really just be a professional celebrity?

This ill-timed re-election announcement begs a similarly biting question: Is Mr. Obama just a professional campaigner?

So if they shut down the federal government, will they promise to keep it shut for a little while?  Or how about a day or two a week — forever?

Conservatives get pinged by the Left for their definitional resistance to progressivism. They are portrayed as grumpy, mean, and calcified.

But conservatives are not inherently opposed to change.  They are wary of it.  There is a difference. Bright packages wrapped in bows are not always gifts.  They need to be opened slowly and examined over time. Dispensing of thousands of years of practical wisdom  for today’s “new and better” idea sometimes ends up biting you on the you know what.  The law of unintended consequences is funny like that.

The New York Times today tells the story of yet another example of that law.  The bright idea of biofuels is wreaking havoc on the globe, in the world’s poorest nations especially.  Food crops that used to go to filling stomachs are now filling gas tanks. Food staples are being siphoned off to countries with governments that jumped head-long into biofuel mandates, with every good intention, during the last spike in oil prices.  Now, the world’s poorest people are facing skyrocketing prices for basic food necessities, rioting, and possibly starvation.  Oops.

Liberals tend to see the world for how it ought to be, and conservatives see the world for how it is.  I think that’s a fair assessment.  This story is a perfect example. Biofuels are great in theory.  They are a hugely promising discovery.  They ought to be our future.  But turning the world’s time-tested food delivery systems on their head with hastily-passed government mandates may end up creating a worldwide disaster.  That’s the way it is. And people are paying for it.

New York City Council Member Leroy Comrie (D-Queens) is introducing a bill to ban Happy Meals at New York McDonalds outlets. Comrie sees a conspiracy: McDonalds is giving Happy Meal toys to poor children to trick them into eating high calorie food.

“It comes as no surprise that these ads and meals are also targeted in low income and minority neighborhoods that are already at risk for childhood obesity,” Comrie tells CBS News. “These are the same communities that have limited access to supermarkets, limited access to healthy food options.”

I have a diametrically opposite take on McDonald’s. I brought my daughter to a McDonalds recently to have dinner and to play on their jungle gym.  The place was immaculate, bright, and festive feeling — a perfect place for children.  We ate a small dinner and she played gleefully for an hour with the other kids. And yes, some of them were black and Hispanic.

It cost me less than $6 total.  A night out with my daughter — a night out with Dad, plus a toy — for $6.  As I was leaving, I saw a man buying vanilla  ice cream cones for his two daughters.  He appeared to be a migrant worker. I watched him take the money out of his wallet to pay for the cones and it almost made me cry.  It cost him $1.  One dollar for the blessing of buying ice cream cones for his two little girls.

McDonalds is one of my favorite places on earth.

Fukishima has naturally spurred debate in the U.S. over nuclear power.

Here in New York, the most hotly contested facility remains Indian Point. Its opponents dusted off their talking points within hours of the Fukishima situation and cranked back up the PR machine. We’re reading the stories they’ve generated now.

But everyone knows Indian Point isn’t going anywhere. Even its opponents know that. And the reason is a larger problem, far more dangerous to New York than any nuclear facility. It’s that nothing big happens here anymore.

The Empire State has become the Stasis State.  Grand projects come here to die. Whether it’s a stadium project, infrastructure development, or natural gas drilling, New York finds a way to kill it.

Indian Point, like it or not, cannot be replaced. It provides nearly a quarter of New York City’s and Westchester’s electricity, a full 12 percent of the state’s power. Just try replacing that. With what?  In which state?

Politico has a good story on this today. It cites frustration  with Governor Andrew Cuomo among Indian Point opponents for his failure to plan for alternative energy sources that might replace Indian Point’s 2000 megawatts of power.

In fairness to the Governor, he’s been in office for four months, and he’s been a little busy with the budget. But even if this was his number one priority, what would he propose? Ten new coal plants along the Hudson River, stretching from, say, 287 to the West 79th Street Boat Basin? A massive — and potentially vulnerable — gas pipeline from Canada, cutting through hundreds of billions of dollars worth of private real estate? Just how many lawyers does the state have?

Plant sightings are so controversial that there’s not even a law on the books in New York to allow for them. The former law, called Article X, expired a decade ago. In the past, power generating plants were put in less desirable places, i.e, where poor people live (or vice versa.)  That no longer flies, so any new plants would have to be “geographically balanced.” I wonder how Scarsdalians feel about coal?

The debate over Indian Point is sure to go on. Too many non-for-profit organizations and aspiring politicians have an stake in it.  A lot of paper and emails will fly back and forth.  Hearings will be held,  and big fat reports will get written, all under the lights provided by one power facility in Buchanan, NY called Indian Point.

P.S.: Sorry for the blank page all morning.  My internet has been down.

Nobody roots for newspapers more than I do. I had one tucked under my arm at an embarrassingly early age, so it hurts me to say:  boy are hard copy papers in trouble. It’s not exactly a news flash, but the competitive advantage  of online journalism vs. print is growing increasingly obvious every day.

I am sitting on a train next to a woman reading stories I read 30 hours ago. She is reading a hard copy New York Times; I read the exact same words on the Times website yesterday afternoon — and happily paid for the privilege. (Momentum in the war in Libya has switched a half dozen times in that time span.) She and I aren’t competing for anything, but if we were, she’d be in trouble. As the saying goes, information is power. And whoever gets the information first can act on it.

A journalist friend of mine — a young old-school reporter — correctly pointed out to me last week that not all journalism is meant to be chugged. Some of it needs to be digested slowly, savored even. I agree. But for breaking news, speed is everything. And if newspapers can’t compete in the breaking news market, they will eventually cease being newspapers. They will become magazines.

Nobody working in my business today can survive reading hard copy papers alone. It would like entering a scavenger hunt without clues. I’m sure it’s the same for people in other businesses.

I am increasingly sanguine, though, about journalism’s ability to remain profitable. I was just thumbing through Rupert Murdoch’s subscription-based IPad invention, The Daily, and it seems to be gaining in attitude and depth every day. Its photographs are startlingly brilliant. I actually turned my IPad away from my Times-reading trainmate because I didn’t won’t to make her feel badly. The photos are that good.

One thing The Daily seems to be doing, though — perhaps necessarily — is dumbing down content. By making stories punchy and brief, they can fit on a single IPad page. But other online papers are remaining comprehensive, if not quite so beautifully.

Newspaper lovers, myself included, often convince ourselves with unconvincing arguments that the hard-copy newspaper will live on. But one quick scan of the aisles of a commuter railroad train will tell you the truth: “not a chance.”

Amaunet, "The Hidden One"

It is with enormous pride that I announce that, after receiving more than 33,000 submissions, the Bronx Zoo has chosen my sister’s name for the recaptured Egyptian Cobra as one of five finalists in a naming contest.  Her submitted name is “Amaunet,” for the ancient Egyptian goddess Amaunet known as “The Hidden One.”

The Bronx Zoo is asking New Yorkers to vote for their favorite name here.  Please don’t let me influence you — Amaunet, Amaunet, Amaunet, Amaunet, Amaunet.

Did I say that out loud?

P.S.  I neglected to mention that Trish has a knack for this sort of thing.  She won a contest to name her school paper (Pelham Memorial High School) some years ago — “The Pelegram” — and she named the show “Capitol Edition” when working at CBS in Washington in the early 1980’s.  She did not — I repeat not — name this blog.