The Tube City Almanac (tubecityonline.com/almanac/) isn't happy with the national media's coverage of the Pennsylvania primary:

Finally, the presidential candidates found their way into the Mon Valley.

And finally, the national media have obliged us with the kind of stories we've been waiting for -- we're a bunch of beer-swilling, redneck rubes who live for the past in "crumbling ghost towns."

Yeah, there's an element of truth in these stories. I'm not blind. I know what our towns look like. But these reports don't do us any favors.

Reform Pittsburgh Now (reformpittsburghnow.com/) pleads with City Council to approve reform legislation that would set limits on contributions to candidates, require more public disclosure of who's donating to whom and prohibit anyone who gives a maximum donation from getting a no-bid contract from the city. The blog rolls through the issue chapter and verse, and includes information about the effectiveness of similar laws in other cities. In recent elections, some Pittsburgh officials have received five-figure donations.

At Consortium News (consortiumnews.com), Robert Parry rips into the Hillary Clinton campaign for pushing the tenuous connection between Barack Obama, 9/11 and William Ayers, a Vietnam-era radical who lives in the same neighborhood. Not only has Mr. Ayers been a productive member of society for 40 years, the suggestion that he praised the 9/11 attacks is false, Mr. Parry says. The Ayers comments in question were published on 9/11, which means he made them before the attacks.

David Gompert of RAND Corp. stopped by the Post-Gazette the other day to discuss his most recent visits to Iraq and Afghanistan and the latest RAND report on how to counter Muslim insurgencies. Key points include: The United States needs to rearrange its post-9/11 priorities and focus more on civilian nation-building and less on military action (rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG595.2/).

The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat (angrydrunkbureaucrat.blogspot.com) revisits the Pat Ford tangle:

So, over the weekend I grabbed a drink or two (or twelve) with a handful of my compatriots here in The Bureaucracy and, of course, the discussion eventually turned towards the Pat Ford fracas, and we started laying odds on whether Mr. Ford would be back in the Pittsburgh public service realm or not. I'm laying 2-1 odds that he's gone permanently. My guess is that he'll be cleared by the State Ethics Commission of any wrongdoing, but will ultimately decide that Florida is a much better place to work.

The ADB (see above) also provides some "Rules of Bureaucracy" that provide insight into how human organizations function.

For bureaucrats:

Rule #2 [The Sixty Minutes Rule]: "Never do anything that would cause Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Steve Croft, Leslie Stahl, or even Andy Rooney to pursue you down a hallway with a camera crew."

For those afflicted by bureaucrats:

Rule #5: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

From AntiRust (antirust.typepad.com/my_weblog/):

How in the hell do you get to the Amtrak station in Pittsburgh? I am going to NYC ... Amtrak seemed like the best bet. But I am already frustrated beyond belief.

I could drive and park. Where would I park? I need to be there very early. I have a lot of stuff. So I can't walk 10 miles from a garage. Does Amtrak have one? What is the closest garage lot? Which ones are open at the appropriate times? Which ones will cost less than, say, a billion dollars a day, seeing as my car would be there for a few days?

There is no way to know. Why? Because Amtrak does not maintain a useful Web site for individual stations.

PittGirl at theburghblog.com goes ballistic on poet Jan Beatty for charging Joseph-Beth Booksellers with censorship. The bookshop asked her not to read erotic selections from her latest volume of poetry because children might be nearby. After Joseph-Beth offered to let her read any poems as long as she did so quietly, without a microphone, Beatty refused the offer.

PittGirl's take: Asking you to speak quietly is NOT CENSORSHIP, you self-important ... etc.