My column for tomorrow is about Sen. Hillary Clinton’s appearance today in Manhattan after her announcement that she is running for president.

That’s a change of schedule.

The column I was going to write, about former Westchester District Attorney Jeanine Pirro, is on hold for now.

The news that Jeanine Pirro was again under investigation by federal prosecutors didn’t even rate the cover of the New York Post earlier in the week.

Instead the story was on Page 3 of the New York City tabloid.

What a difference a failed political bid makes.

Last year, Pirro ran for U.S. Senate against Hillary Clinton but switched to the state attorney general’s race when her campaign flagged.

She lost to Andrew Cuomo.

I write about the latest probe in my column on Monday and about Pirro’s failed jewelry business. How could she have been more successful? I’ve got some suggestions about a different line of baubles.

Remember the outcry over banning smoking in ….

You fill in the blank.

Offices, restaurants, bars.

Now, as “The Journal News”:http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070118/NEWS03/701180396/1017 reported today, Rockland County is considering a ban on smoking in cars while children are present. Such bans have already been adopted in Louisiana, Arkansas, Puerto Rico and Bangor, Maine. It’s a good idea.

Maybe people are becoming used to restrictions on where they can smoke, or maybe it’s just that they understand how susceptible the lungs of children are. But I thought there would be more outraged citizen insisting the government would once again go too far.

This isn’t news to most people but the U.S. Postal Service is not popular.

I wrote about my “post office”:http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070113/COLUMNIST25/701130358/1018/NEWS02 after a customer service representative called me an idiot. And I heard from quite a few people about their own experiences.

There were emails and phone calls about missing mail, lost checks, letters that didn’t get forwarded to Florida, the neighbor’s mail that did get delivered.

And then there was this woman, who asked her local letter carriers if they would move the mail trucks from the spaces in the front of the post office, “spaces allocated for customers — at peak morning hours (up till 10 a.m.), presumably to pick up the mail for their routes. Suggested they park in the side or back parking lots of their own building. Never got an answer.”

Nor have I, for that matter. I’m still waiting to hear from the post office about exactly whom that customer service representative works for. I am not hopeful.

Which is a shame. Because the postal employees in New York, the ones who actually know my post office, were very pleasant.

The government deputy who challenged lawyers representing detainees in Guantano has apologized.

Charles Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, now says the U.S. legal system works best when both sides are represented by competent lawyers.

“I believe that our justice system requires vigorous representation,” he wrote in letter to “The Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/16/AR2007011601383.html today.

Stimson, whom I wrote about in my “column”:http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070117/NEWS01/701170350/1018/NEWS02 today, doesn’t explain his comments last week during a radio interview.

“I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom link in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms,” he said.

It’s still hard to believe that Stimson is lawyer.

Photo from AP

A follow-up on Wesley Autrey, the 50-year-old carpenter who saved a teen-ager who had fallen onto the tracks in New York City.

Autrey jumped on top of the young man and pushed him down into a trough between the rails.

Yesterday in Albany, Autrey was again honored, and again showed the same dignity he has displayed all along.

“This is beautiful,” he said of the proclamation he was given, according to the Associated Press. “But I still don’t feel like a hero.”

Which is funny considering how over-used that word is. And he seems like the real thing.

Photo from AP: Autrey and his daughters at a City Hall ceremony in New York City honoring his bravery.

Scientists and evangelicals, two groups often at odds, are apparently coming together over global warming.

Details are to be released on Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.

“Whether God created the Earth in a millisecond or whether it evolved over billions of years, the issue we agree on is that it needs to be cared for today,” it quoted Rich Cizik, the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Evangelicals.

Which makes absolute sense. The Earth needs to be protected by everyone regardless of your religious beliefs, regardless of when and how you believe it was created.

Evangelicals have come pretty late to the movement and I’m not sure why. Some writers say evangelicals associated environmentalism with secularists and liberals. Well, guess what? Climate change will affect everyone, whoever you are, whatever you stand for. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, religious or not.

In October, the leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals published “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility” that says: “We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part. We are not the owners of creation, but its stewards, summoned by God to ‘watch over and care for it. (Gen. 2:15). This implies the principles of sustainability: our uses of the Earth must be designed to conserve and renew the Earth rather than to deplete and destroy it.”

The group represents 45,000 churches.

In February of last year, 86 evangelical leaders signed a statement saying human-induced global warming was real and needed to be addressed by a governments, businesses, churches and individuals.

This morning the garage was picked up in front of my apartment building.

That wouldn’t be news except that today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

And the civil rights leader was killed in 1968 when he went to Memphis to support the garbage workers’ strike.

I would have thought that if any group were going to get the day off it would have been the New York City Sanitation Department.

Apparently not.

The next time garbage pick-up will be cancelled is Feb. 12 for Lincoln’s Birthday.

Hind Rassam Culhane, who was born and raised in Iraq and who is the co-chairwoman of the behavioral and social sciences division at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, doubts President Bush’s new plan will succeed. There are too many contradictions, she says.

Iraq is a sovereign nation that is expected to protect its territory and make decisions about the country, but at the same time the United States is dictating what should be done. The Iraqis are being told they must step up and perform at the same time the United States remains an occupier.

“Now, I’m not surprised because the Iraqi government has not done anything,” Culhane said. “So it’s a Catch-22. The more, I think, we pressure them, the more they’re going to resent it.”

Read more of my interview with Culhane in my “column”:http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070115/COLUMNIST25/701150332/1018/NEWS02 on Monday.

If you’re like me and see lots of hawks and never any eagles, you might be interested in this: An eagle and rapture raptor hike sponsored by the “Hudson River Audubon Society”:http://www.hras.org and the Wild Bird Center.

Hank Weber of the Wild Bird Center will lead the search for these birds of prey on Saturday, Feb. 3.

Meet at 8:45 a.m. at the large parking lot at the Croton Point Nature Center at the Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson. And bring binoculars.

In fact, there’s a calendar of events for Westchester County’s Nature Centers for that weekend, from helping to get rid of the invasive vines at the Marshlands Conservancy in Rye to learning how to identify trees by their buds and bark at Lenoir Preserve in Yonkers.

Here’s the “link.”:http://www.westchestergov.com/parks

UPDATE on the raptures of spotting a raptor. Yes, as one eagle-eyed reader noticed, that should be raptor above.