I'm ready to submit a column idea to the Pulitzer Prize Committee, hoping I'll win one.

It won't be an actual column, mind you, just the idea. I figure if President Barack Obama can win the Nobel Peace Prize for what he hopes to do, there's no sense waiting to actually write the column.

I'm wondering, too, if this is not the new way of the world, rewarding people for their intentions rather than their deeds.

The same morning that President Obama's Nobel was announced, we ran a front-page story on U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan considering a run for Congress against Democratic Rep. Jason Altmire next fall.

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PG STORE

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Brian O'Neill's book, "The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century," is available in the PG store.

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Experts say she needs at least a million bucks. (In America, any schoolchild can grow up to be in Congress -- provided the kid matures into enough shamelessness to ask people for $1,000 a plate to sit down to dinner.)

Ms. Buchanan, you may recall, intended to nail former Mayor Tom Murphy for a political deal he'd made with city firefighters. They got a good contract before the May 2001 Democratic primary and Mayor Murphy got their support, and then we, the people, got to vote on whether we thought Mr. Murphy was doing a good job.

Most people voted yes after this well-publicized pre-election promise. Given that Mr. Murphy was running against Bob O'Connor, who pledged to keep the fire stations open, too, it's hard to see how this amounted to crime.

But Ms. Buchanan spent two years trying to make politics a crime, spending untold dollars in her investigation -- and failed.

Later, she went after Cyril Wecht. Federal prosecutors generally win about 95 percent of the time, so when a grand jury slapped the Allegheny County medical examiner with an 84-count indictment in January 2006, a lot of people saw convicting Mr. Wecht as a slam dunk.

Ms. Buchanan went 0-for-84. She dropped half the charges before the case went to trial in January 2008, and a few months later, the jurors decided they couldn't come to a decision on any of the remaining 41 charges. Last June, she decided this flop would have no sequel. She dropped the charges.

To be fair, it's not as if Ms. Buchanan never won anything. I guess her platform could be:

"I am the one who got Tommy Chong to plead guilty to distributing bongs and marijuana pipes on the Internet. Getting one-half of Cheech and Chong on drug charges might seem the prosecutorial equivalent of a 3-inch putt, but consider how much else I wanted to do. Sure, I didn't win the big ones, but I got a lot of ink, ya gotta admit.''

The Nobel Committee clearly believes goals alone are worthy of the ultimate praise. It lauded our president for reconnecting America with the world and for pledging to reduce the international stock of nuclear arms, to ease conflicts with Muslim nations and to do more to combat climate change.

At the moment, though, the latest Nobel Peace Prize winner is still running two wars. President Obama himself saw this prize not "as a recognition of my own accomplishments'' but of his goals.

"I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,'' he said.

We should only hope that he can live up to the prize and earn the honor after the fact. World peace would be nice, but I'm thinking more of a cheap way to snag a Pulitzer.

You see I had this idea for a column. I was talking with Sandy Jackson of Bridgeville last week about how the state Legislature's inability to enact a budget was costing her $150 a week.

Ms. Jackson's daughter, a single mother, had been using subsidized day-care so she could work. Her day-care provider hadn't received any state money for months, so Ms. Jackson came up with the $150 needed each week to keep her grandson in day care and her daughter working.

Ms. Jackson was among many Pennsylvanians who couldn't figure out what was taking the Legislature so long.

"If I missed my deadline at work, I'd be fired,'' she said. "I'd love to rally all the working moms who really need the day-care money, get them all to Harrisburg so we could leave the kids with these guys for a day. How long do you think it would take them to pass the budget then?"

I'd guess fewer than 101 days. But imagine the Capitol filled with hundreds of screaming Pennsylvanians -- all under 3 feet tall. That would make a great column.

Someone alert the committee. You can reach me at the tuxedo shop.