First off, there will be no column today, sorry. Even more drastic, after tomorrow's column, service is about to get very intermittent for the next month. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I'm about to travel to London, Dublin, and Paris to attend a wedding and deal with some other family issues and visits. The second is that almost immediately after returning, I will be flying off once again to attend Netroots Nation.

What it all means to you, Dear Reader, is lots of repeat columns. For which I apologize in advance.

Here is the CW.com schedule for the rest of the month and into June, as it stands now.

Today: no column. For those wishing to explore an issue everyone else seems to be ignoring, I leave the following homework assignment -- Which two Republicans conveniently weren't present for the Ryan budget vote in the Senate? There are 47 Republican senators. Of these, 40 voted for the Ryan budget. Five voted against it -- Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. But that only adds up to 45. So which two very conveniently weren't there? By ducking out, these two avoided their names being in the news about the vote, but also avoided having to vote for it. Dig these names out, because everybody else in the media seems content to allow them to fly under the radar.

Tomorrow: for the first time ever, we are going to prematurely run an Obama Poll Watch column -- before the month under discussion is actually even over. We had two choices: run it four days early, or run it eight or nine days late. Running it late would have meant it was "last week's news" in a very noticeable way; so instead we're going to run it early, and then correct the numbers (if they need minor correction) next month. Also, we want to run this now because it's going to be a fun column to write, as May was the best month the president has ever had in the polls (at least measured as change from the previous month).

What this also means, sadly, is that the Obama Poll Watch column will pre-empt our usual Friday Talking Points column. Both of these recurring series take an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes work here, and it just wasn't possible to do both right before leaving. So I'll try to remember when I get back to: (1.) give Kathy Hochul a well-earned MIDOTW award for her stunning upset in NY-26; and (2.) rescind Harry Reid's MDDOTW award from a few weeks ago and award him his own MIDOTW in its stead, for forcing the Ryan budget vote in the Senate -- with exquisite timing.

Next week: I'll be gone all week. Repeat columns will run. They will be wildly out of date, but may be an interesting look back. Treat each of these as an "open thread," and feel free to discuss whatever you feel like in the comments.

The week after: I'll be returning mid-week, but cannot guarantee when columns will resume (who knows what the Icelandic volcanoes will be doing at that point?). Hopefully, the Friday Talking Points will return on June 10th.

The following week: A few new columns will post, but then I'm off again midweek to Netroots Nation. Perhaps I'll post some things live from the conference this year (I blew off doing so last year), but I haven't worked everything out that far in advance yet.

We will return to our normal schedule here on Monday, June 20th.

A word of caution to everyone: Play nice. Rather than just shutting the site down while I'm absent, I've always kept things up and running here in my absence. This has worked out, for the most part, admirably well in the past. So let's keep that record up. And be warned that Europe actually does have internet access, and I will be checking in when I can (although I can't promise when or how often that will be). So let's keep things under control in the comments section, OK guys and gals?

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Sometimes special elections are harbingers of things to come. And sometimes they are not. The tricky part is that nobody can tell the difference until long afterwards. Which certainly doesn't stop rampant speculation in the meantime. Last night, a Democrat pulled off a surprising upset in New York's 26th congressional district, in an election that was forced due to the resignation of a House member who got caught trolling the internet (with shirtless pictures, no less) for extramarital fun and games. What this signifies for the 2012 election is anyone's guess, at this point.

Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin and Tea Party candidate Jack Davis in a very red district in upstate New York. The big issue in the race was the Paul Ryan budget plan, which would change Medicare as we know it into a voucher system. Hochul decided to make this the centerpiece of her race, and the Republicans responded by pouring money into the district in support of their candidate (who supported the Ryan plan). Despite being heavily outspent in a very Republican district, Hochul won.

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Barack Hussein Obama is not exactly the first name that springs to mind when the average person thinks of American politicians with Irish roots, to say the least. But Obama does indeed have Irish ancestry, and he certainly played this up in his recent visit to the Emerald Isle. Today, we are going to print the full text of Obama's address to an ecstatic Dublin crowd.

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Less than two weeks ago, I first wrote about the Republican field of candidates for the upcoming 2012 presidential primary season. Somehow, it seems a lot longer ago than that, because of all the activity since -- which has included many surprises as to who will and who will not be running.

With all this frantic jumping in and out of the race, I thought it was time to take another look at the Republican field to see how it is shaping up. At this point, there are only a few holdouts left on the sidelines, as most of the bigwigs (and some decidedly "smallwigs") have made their intentions known.

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Americans turn to their government for all sorts of advice, at times. Most especially during a crisis or natural disaster of epic proportions, citizens want solid information from experts in the government as to what they should and shouldn't do to keep their families safe. Forward-looking folks will even check out disaster-preparedness information before disaster actually strikes, in order to get their families through such an event, should worse come to worst. And now all Americans can breathe a huge sigh of relief because the Centers for Disease Control (C.D.C.) just posted instructions so we can all adequately prepare for "Zombie Armageddon."

You just can't make this stuff up, people.

On a C.D.C. official blog, Ali S. Khan (Trekkies, you may insert your own "Wrath of Khan" joke here, if you must) wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about how to prepare for a zombie attack. Or, as he refers to it in the helpful "A Brief History of Zombies" section, the result of your neighbors all contracting "Ataxic Neurodegenerative Satiety Deficiency Syndrome."

A word here about timing is necessary, I think. While the blog post is quite obviously meant as a semi-joke, wouldn't this have been more fun in, say, mid-October -- a few weeks before Hallowe'en? Instead of this week, with the "End of Days" prophesied for midafternoon this Saturday? I'm just saying....

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In this year's version of the "Balloon Boy" fake news story, it was revealed today that the "Botox Mommy" story was a complete fabrication. In other words, those stalwart "journalists" -- busily gatekeeping their little hearts out to keep the mainstream media so very, very far above the blogosphere when it comes to fact-checking -- once again got punked. Not only did they get punked, but it actually cost them at least ten grand in the process.

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Poor Newt.

It's rare for me to have a moment of pity for someone like Newt Gingrich, but I have to admit I'm feeling a little sorry for the guy this week. But before we delve into Newt's campaign problems in greater detail, it seems to me that most pundits are missing a big underlying new reality in the Republican Party. The focus has all been on Newt himself, what he said, and the subsequent ire directed at him by prominent Righties. But after the dust settles on the incident itself, people are going to notice the bigger fact this fracas has illuminated: Republicans are doubling down on Paul Ryan's budget rather than backing away from it, to the point where it has now become the acid test for Republicans in 2012. Which should be good news for Democrats.

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Associated Press headline today: "Coburn drops out of group seeking to cut deficit."

So we're now down to a "Gang of Five," I guess.

For those who don't slavishly follow every power alignment in Washington (which is to say, most people), this is supposed to be momentous news of some sort or another because the "Gang of Six" was supposed to be the sober, realist politicians (three from each party) who were going to hammer out a budget agreement which both sides could live with. A daunting task, to be sure, now made even harder by the fact that Republican Senator Tom Coburn has apparently dropped out of the effort.

Before we delve into what it all means, I have to say one thing. The whole imagery of "gangs" in Congress has always seemed to me to be grossly wrongheaded. I mean, seriously, "gangs"?

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Well, that was a fun couple of weeks, wasn't it? For the past month or so, Donald Trump pretended to run for president and the media pretended he was serious (funniest headline I've seen today, from the Washington Post, "Donald Trump: I'm Fired!"). This entertaining period has now drawn to a close, much to the dismay of late-night comedians everywhere, as The Donald all but admits that the whole thing was a ratings and contract negotiations ploy to boost his "Apprentice" show on NBC. What it all means is that we can now take a look at who is yet to decide to jump into the Republican nomination race in earnest, and without such clownish distraction.

The much bigger nomination news coming out of this weekend was that Mike Huckabee had also decided against another run at the big prize. Unlike Trump, Huckabee would have been a serious candidate with a chance of actually winning the nomination. Like Trump, Huckabee found he enjoyed television more than the rigors of campaigning. Huckabee announced Saturday night that he really didn't have the "fire in the belly" required for a national campaign effort, and that he'd be much more comfortable continuing his commentary from the safe (for Republicans) perch of a Fox News show.

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Ron Paul, apparently, is not a superstitious kind of guy.

Tempting fate, as it were, he announced today that he's running for president once again -- on Friday the thirteenth.

Ron's not the only one making news on this front this particular week, though. I wrote an article on Wednesday looking over the entire Republican field (which is bigger than you might think), and already it's out of date. Newt Gingrich announced his run two days ago, Ron Paul's now officially in, and Mike Huckabee is set to announce his decision tomorrow night (on Fox News, naturally).

In other words, the 2012 race is finally shaping up on the Republican side. There will likely be no nomination race on the Democratic side, since Obama will assumably crush any upstart Democrats who take him on.

One thing worth considering at this point, though, is that we're still a long way off from the 2012 election. And a lot can happen in a year and a half. Pundits who are predicting "the 2012 race will be all about X" (no matter what "X" is) stand a good chance of being wrong. Events have a way of overshadowing carefully crafted campaign plans.

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