The Thursday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

There’s a special place in hell for whoever did this
Dirt bags tied up a 93-year-old man in New Castle man while they robbed his house.

Channel 11 tells us: They waited until I opened the door to tape my hands. They frisked me down. I said, ‘Don’t worry boys. I ain’t going to fight ya,” said Isaac. “I’m glad to be alive. I’m 93. I gotta make 100 you know.”

Drilling dollars
WDUQ dug through the latest campaign finance filings for the gubernatorial candidates.

Among Scott Detrow’s findings was “Both candidates received money from companies drilling for gas in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation: Cabot Oil and Gas, who has been fined by the Department of Environmental Protection for serious violations, gave 10-thousand dollars to Corbett, while Range Resources donated 55-hundred to Onorato.”

The Monday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

Get First Amendment Uppity
It’s six weeks until election day and we suggest that news organizations considering who they’re going to endorse should not only consider their editorial board’s political agenda and the good of their readers when they pick a candidate. Don’t be afraid to consider your own self interest and support candidates whom you can reasonably expect to be accessible and respect the First Amendment.

On Twitter today, Scott Detrow of  Pennsylvania Public Radio  had this trio of tweets that are telling about the Senate candidates:

– “Toomey cuts press off after two questions. Gets in car and speeds away.”
– “Typical post-event Sestak gaggle, on the other hand, seems to never end. ”
– “So here in PA we have a candiate who holds 45 min press avails, and one who doesn’t let you ask more than one question.”

And consider that Tom Corbett is making himself inaccessible even as he’s running for governor.

It’s not about blue or red. It’s about who returns your calls and respects what you do.

Don’t call it a content mill
It’s just a breakout on a fall fashion story about what to wear in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We get it. But since when is ehow.com an acceptable source for anything that goes in a general audience newspaper?

Setting journalistic objections aside, remember we have fashion week coming up.

The Wednesday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

Home stretch in the governor’s race
This morning KDKA’s Jon Delano took a look at the latest poll numbers showing Corbett with a 15-point lead and asked “What does Dan Onorato have to do to win?”

The answer seems to be a mile deep in a formation called the Marcellus Shale.

PoliticsPA’s Alex Roarty writes that Onorato’s strategy of hammering away at Corbett’s refusal to back a severance tax on the drillers who hope to extract all that natural gas from beneath Pennsylvania will be a winner, particularly in the all-important southeast.

Roarty writes: “Voters are far more inclined to support taxes on big industries, particularly if the Democrat can tout the programs that the levy will fund. But it also gives Corbett an opportunity to name a specific tax supported by Onorato, who has gone to great lengths trying to portray himself as a fiscal conservative averse to all taxes.”

Gagasaurus
An awesome welcome for Lady Gaga at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

The Monday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

Route 28, your nightare begins
In case you need something to read while you’re stuck in Route 28 construction traffic, here’s an interesting history of the Valley’s main artery.

Tax baby, tax
Ed Rendell is pressing the state legislature to pass a severance tax on Marcellus Shale drilling operations.

“The governor notes that Pennsylvania is the only major energy-producing state that does not levy a tax on natural gas extraction.”

The legislature is under a self-imposed deadline to create a tax by Oct. 1. Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Corbett opposes the tax, Democrat Dan Onorato supports it.

The Wednesday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

Might want to ask George Bush the elder how this worked for him
Less meaningful than a tax hike he voted for as a township supervisor 22 years ago is probably Tom Corbett’s flip flop on whether a fee is a tax and if he’d raise those.

He told Jon Delano back in March that the pledge he signed for Americans for Tax Reform means that he won’t support raising taxes or fees.

“No tax increases whatsoever,” he says.

“No fees, or anything?” Delano asks.

“No.”

(This was after he said in January that he could not rule out signing a tax increase if elected.)

He said this week that fees aren’t taxes and therefore not covered by his no-tax pledge. And his campaign spokesman said today that he can’t answer why Corbett said back in March that he was pledging not to raise fees as well as not to raise taxes.

And the fallout has been coming pretty much all day.

The Wednesday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

Gone to the dogs
I’m at a real loss to pull out the funniest lines of this Timothy McNulty story about a guy from Green Tree who wears a red dog collar around and wants to change his name to Boomer the Dog.

I could start here: ” Mr. Mathews, who is single…”

Also, there’s this message of encouragement from the guy who runs the annual furries conventions: “I wish Mr. the Dog luck in his pursuit, with the earnest hope that he has chosen a career path for which such a monicker would be of benefit.”

Who’s a rat?
Tom Corbett’s campaign team is overplaying a Tribune-Review editorial that smacks Dan Onorato’s sketchy campaign tactics. First, no one is surprised the Trib is backing Corbett and smacking around Onorato.

And second, to paraphrase Jeff Spicoli,  Tom Corbett, if you’re from Pittsburgh, and Dan Onorato’s from Pittsburgh, doesn’t that make the Trib your hometown newspaper too?

Also, usually the Trib’s editorials are beneath notice or comment. This really should be no different, but since we’re on the subject, did they really call him Dan OnoRATo?

File this in the should-go-without-saying category, but it’s that kind of uninspired sixth-grade trash talk that crushes your credibility when you’ve actually got something worthwhile to say. Not that you haven’t been told that a bazillion times for the last 20 years or more.

The Tuesday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

The Tunnel to Nowhere
Republican senators blasted the North Shore Connector project as one of the 100 stiumulus projects that have been a waste of money. Republicans, you might have noticed in recent weeks, have some concerns about the deficit.

Interestingly, the Trib has been slow to post a story on the subject, even though they’re the paper who dubbed it Tunnel to Nowhere.

Also slow to say anything has been Tom Corbett and/or Dan Onorato, the latter of whom has taken heat in the past for sometimes being for the tunnel and sometimes being against it.

His predecessor, Jim Roddey, put it like this to the Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this summer: “For anybody who thinks it’s a boondoggle, he says he had nothing to do with it,” said Roddey, who preceded Onorato as county executive and is now the Allegheny County GOP chairman. “For anybody who likes it, he says it’s a good thing. He is covering his bases.”

Of course your gran from Troy Hill gets the same attention
The Trib has this interesting analysis of the burgeoning number of lobbyists working Pittsburgh City Hall. Since a new law requires them to register and pay a $100 fee, it’s now possible to track who – and how many – they are. They’ve tripled in number since January.

Among the legislation they’ve influenced, we learn, is the failed attempt to impose a tax on tuition that would get revenue out of nonresident students who attend Pittsburgh’s colleges and universities.  (Now they’ll just have to pay more to park, presumably.) Three out of four lobbyists who spoke to Councilwoman Theresa Smith were arguing against the tax, she told the Trib.

And Peter Calcara, president of the more than 300-strong lobbyists’ group Pennsylvania Association for Government Relations, added this insult to your intelligence:

“In my experience, politicians are as responsive, if not more responsive, to those local individuals,” he said.

The Monday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

Drink up, we’re taxing the Kool Aid next
What amazes me here is that the resist the urge to call it DAN ONORATO’s Drink Tax, even on first reference, since in the wake of his “the jobs are out there” gaffe, it seems to be the major weapon in Tom Corbett’s campaign against the county executive in the race for governor. Onorato isn’t even mentioned by name once in the story, which is stunning.

The arguments here remind of the complaints from bar owners who said the smoking ban had put them out of business. This in a recession when the poor economy killed something like 4 million small businesses in the US  in 2007 and 2008, even in counties with no DAN ONORATO Drink Tax and no smoking ban.

Also, I love how the single-issue advocacy group quit tallying the supposed damage to constituents after the first year: “Sales at bars and restaurants in the county dropped by $64 million in the tax’s first year, claims Friends Against Counterproductive Taxation, a group of restaurateurs fighting the tax. The group said it stopped keeping track of sales numbers.”

Piling on
Revelations that the Orie sisters had a habit of consulting a “seer”  is just the gift that’s going to keep giving jokes or, in this case, sight gags, for the rest of those girls’ lives.

Forget what they asked “Angel Lady” Carolann Sano about the fate of their scheme to bully Stephen Zappala, I want someone to uncover which state supreme court cases she (or some other Oracle of the Susquehanna) helped rule on for Justice Joan Orie Melvin.

The Monday Reader

We read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to.

A Republican misusing federal money apparently being different than a Democrat misusing county money
Missing from this story about former USA Mary Beth Buchanan’s alleged misuse of public money to pay for annual trips to New York City is the rather obvious fact that aside from being perhaps the worst Congressional candidate in Western PA history, Buchanan is best known for her crusade against Cyril Wecht, whom she unsuccessfully prosecuted for allegedly using public resources for the benefit of his private pathology business.

“She has no shame,” Cyril once said.

And speaking of lessons to be learned from Buchanan
Eric Heyl  makes fun of the fact that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato is – gasp – campaigning in the summer. Onorato should know everyone is preoccupied with vacations and tans and such and not paying attention, Heyl writes. He then goes on to say it’s all just a waste of time anyway because Onorato is “far behind Corbett in the polls.”

OK, if he’s far behind, one might argue that means he should keep campaigning through the summer. But actually, the last Quinnipiac poll on that race, from mid-May, shows Corbett at 43 percent and Onorato at 37 percent with 19 percent still undecided.

And remember, it was Heyl who told us all in late April, just weeks before Buchanan’s embarrassing drubbing in the 4th Congressional District primary, “Ready the carpet swatches. So smoothly is Mary Beth Buchanan’s congressional campaign proceeding that there is little left to do but to begin pondering how she will decorate her new office in Washington come January.”

Sunday with Jack, someone else’s turn
No one has the strength to try to unravel Jack Kelly’s column  two weeks in a row, so this week we leave it to 2 political junkies  to explain the myriad ways in which he doesn’t make sense and preview this week’s soon-to-be corrections.

Do the folks at the PG copydesk draw straws to see who has to wade through this every Friday?

The Friday quotes

I read the news in Pittsburgh so you don’t have to. 

Something about this is backwards
“I don’t want to get into discussing contractual status. I have confidence in John (Russell) and Neal (Huntingdon.) I don’t want an atmosphere of them fearing for their jobs and hearing about it in the media.”
Pirates president Frank Coonelly, in response Trib columnist Joe Starkey’s asking why he hasn’t extended their contracts.

Fheww, yeah, it was almost expensive
“Thank goodness our people caught it early.”
Port Authority CEO Steve Bland, talking about a $1.2 million wiring mistake that has to be fixed on the North Shore Connector project.

Amen, brother
“Anytime you’ve got the government officer using a subpoena to unmask a political critic, it raises serious First Amendment concerns. It is a prized American possession to criticize the government and to do so anonymously in the tradition of the Federalist Papers and Mark Twain.”
The ACLU’s Vic Walczak, talking about Tom Corbett’s subpoena to unmask twitter users who criticize him anonymously.

Opra should know better
“Dear Oprah, It is spelled with an H.”
Virginia Montanez, aka PittGirl, correcting Oprah’s website, which spelled it Pittsburg cause people in Chicago aren’t bright.