Liz Halloran

There has been good news over the past 24 hours for Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Diversion of rising Mississippi River waters though the Morganza Spillway northwest of the cities and into the Atchafalaya River basin appears to have helped lower the chances that the urban areas will be swamped.

Mitt Romney knew Thursday would be brutal, and it was.

Even before it started.

On the morning of his much-touted health care speech Thursday at the University of Michigan's Cardiovascular Center in Ann Arbor, Romney woke up to a spanking on the conservative editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, followed by a fusillade of criticism from Democrats as eager
as the Journal to undermine his presidential aspirations.

Newt Gingrich, the 67-year-old former Republican House speaker, in an announcement on Twitter, said he intends to run for president of the United States.

No surprise: Gingrich's spokesman two days earlier had already announced that his boss was going to make it official, becoming only the third among a slew of would-be GOP candidates to issue an unqualified "I'm in" statement.

A singular figure, the thrice-married Gingrich has thrilled, disappointed and confounded supporters and critics alike since he left elective politics in 1999.

President Obama plans to pivot this week from foreign affairs and the targeted killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden to a domestic issue that continues to bedevil his administration: comprehensive immigration reform.

Or the lack thereof.

Given the expectations preceding the president's scheduled speech Tuesday in El Paso on immigration reform and border security, a comprehensive overhaul appears as elusive as the Sept. 11 mastermind proved to be.

Frank Luntz, the Republican Party's erstwhile message-meister, was amazed.

He said he'd never seen anything like it.

"Something very special happened this evening," Luntz told the Fox News audience that had tuned in Thursday night to see the first GOP debate of the presidential season.

When President Obama lays a wreath at ground zero in New York City to honor the nearly 2,800 victims of Sept. 11, he will walk on ground that shelters the remains of most of them.

It is a place sad and sacred to many Americans, and especially New Yorkers.

It is also a place that has been mired in conflict, controversy and inevitable big-city bureaucracy in the decade since Islamic terrorists flew two passenger jets into the twin towers and took them down.

The death of Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Pakistan has brought to full boil the long-simmering debate over the current aims and merits of the nation's 10-year war in Afghanistan.

And though there are those still making forceful arguments for sustained military engagement in the country that harbored bin Laden and his al-Qaida operatives after the 2001 attacks, his demise has broadened and intensified calls for the U.S. to get out.

It's closing in on presidential primary fish-or-cut-bait time, and in Minnesota politicos have been watching, a bit bemused, as two of their home-staters dip their toes into the 2012 Republican presidential waters.

There's former two-term Gov. Tim Pawlenty, 50, the amiable "T-Paw," who has been rolling out a more aggressively conservative "Tea-Paw"-as-in-Tea Party persona as he fights to build name recognition and activist support.

President Obama opened a three-day, campaign-style swing at a town hall event in Virginia today that was designed to begin selling voters on his deficit-reduction blueprint.

President Obama, under increasing pressure to address the nation's burgeoning debt, on Wednesday laid out a sweeping vision to cut government deficits by more than $4 trillion in 12 years through tax increases and spending cuts phased in over time.

No one is expecting a bipartisan consensus any time soon over what to do about the nation's exploding deficit, and when to do it. Far from it.

But what many government watchers agree has been unfolding in Washington is a historic and potentially authentic conversation over federal spending, taxes and the role of government in the lives of Americans — from family planning clinics to Social Security benefits.

As the partisan brawlers on Capitol Hill narrowly avoided the first federal government shutdown in 15 years, others were looking ahead to much larger spending battles Congress faces.

"This is just the undercard," says fiscal policy expert J.D. Foster, of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

After all, the partisan struggle playing out over funding for the six months remaining in the current fiscal year involves just policy and billions of dollars, not policy and trillions.

President Obama on Monday offered a resolute answer to a question that has been on the minds of many war-weary Americans over the past 10 days: Why did we mobilize the U.S. military in Libya? And why now?

But for some, the president's defense of intervention fell short.

In his nationally televised speech at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., the president laid out his argument that Libya presented special moral and humanitarian circumstances.