MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“Oficials’ procrastination reflects ours”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, July 17, 2011
Life, liberty — the pursuit of procrastination: Doesn’t anyone do anything without a deadline anymore?
Not so you’d notice in Washington, not this weekend anyway. Not as President Obama and the supposed grown-ups in the House and Senate tussle endlessly over lifting the debt limit. In calmer times, this was considered a clerical formality. But that didn’t offer sufficient opportunity for acrimony, bitterness and delay. So now the debt-limit deadline’s being pushed to the drop-dead date and beyond while the U.S. economy is battered and uncertainty reigns.
What’s the rush? people still ask.
Delay as a core principle of behavior hasn’t taken hold just in Washington. We’re expert delayers around here. How long have we waited to send LIRR trains into Grand Central? How long did we shrug while our job base shriveled up? How long have we stuck with our ’50s concept of suburbia while smart young people keep leaving? How long ’til Nassau finances were slapped into line? Oh, sorry. We’re still waiting on most of those.
Doing hard stuff is hard, it turns out. Delaying doesn’t make it any easier; it just puts the hard stuff off. . But oh, how we 
learned to love delay! We were high-school crammers. We were repeated abusers of the snooze button. We came to understand soon enough: “Never putting off until tomorrow” or the one about the early bird and the worm was nothing but empty words.
So of course, people in public life proudly put off until tomorrow. What else can they do, these not-so-early birds? Sit around Florida diners at 3 in the afternoon?
NOT SO FAST
1. The early bird…will just have to wait around for everyone else.
2. Never put off until tomorrow…what you can put off ′til next week.
3. A journey of a thousand miles…is too damn far to walk.
4. You’ve made your bed…now what do you say to a really long nap?
5. Don’t let the door…make you feel like you have to go.
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
Which part of “public safety officer” does Robert Cole not understand? Nassau cops say Cole was drunk and on duty when he struck and killed a pedestrian on Hempstead Turnpike…Is it really 30 years? By now, Harry Chapin really would be “W-O-L-D”…Exactly what kind of shock can be absorbed by Lei Zuo’s 
award-winning shock absorber? Shock that innovative design still lives on Long Island, in this case at Stony Brook University?…Great name, Carmegeddon — but don’t all the LA-traffic disaster stories make you appreciate the (comparatively) free-flowing LIE?…Are the sharks actually swimming closer to shore? Or are shark-sighting stories just getting more play this summer? Fishermen do report quite a few threshers and small makos enjoying shallow, beachside swims…Is University of North Dakota sophomore Brock Nelson-last year’s first-round Entry Draft pick-the future of the New York Islanders? Brad has some big skates to fill, as the grandson, great-nephew and nephew of gold-medal Olympic 
hockey champs…The Mets and Yanks have their “subway series,” but can’t we do better than “Expressway Series” for future match-ups between the LI Ducks and Frank Boulton’s Nassau dream team?…Why the business-group schism over the Coliseum plan? Vision Long Island and the Long Island Association are for it while the Association for a Better Long Island is against. In big-dollar development tussles, aren’t these biz groups usually on the same side?…Sick of all those big-dollar charity golf tournaments and their sky-high greens fees? A bargain and highly worthy alternative: Tuesday’s Nine-Hole and Mini-Golf Outing and Networking Event (and dinner at Bella Verde) sponsored by the not-for-profit Long Island Center for Business and Professional Women.
LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK
THE POTTER KIDS
Miles from Hogwarts, Long Island has always been major “Harry Potter” terrain, as we were reminded again late 
Thursday night. Huge throngs gathered at local theaters for midnight screenings of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part Two,” billed as the final chapter in the series. They came as they always have: In robes and scarves and Harry glasses, waving wands and trading spells. And this much was clear: The real spell in the land of “Harry” was never witchcraft or wizardry or goofy costumes. It was how those books – and the movies they followed them – inspired so many children to read so well. Now that’s magic!
E-mail ellis@henican.com.
Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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Politicians on hold in the debt talks is a feature of our complicated electronic age and the uber complicated individuals that all of us are. When I was a little boy in New York my parents would give me a $1.00 a week and that was more than enough. We have liability and privacy laws to day. Every where I go and on the phone and on the Web, I have to recite and recall so many bits of acceptance that I shun from all of this. The big money, the nervousness and the complexity of what we all are doing is the reason why we are constantly been supplied with figures we cannot verify. We are told our country will default, I say poppycock.the US takes in enough income per month to make this a non issue.