Democrat Endorsement News and Notes

I arrived at the Democratic Endorsement venue on Pittsburgh's South Side early in the afternoon because I was asked to come down and support my friend Bill Peduto.

There's no question he SHOULD be our next mayor.

There were a lot of "incumbent" Luke Ravenstahl signs. Why everyone got out of the habit of referring to him as "interim," I'll never know. As of today, our interim mayor hasn't won anything other than a race of name recognition in his own back yard.

There were too many for a just-turned 27-year-old with virtually no leadership record. That's what you get when you have a disasterous, yet big money governor and a well-connected, seemingly hardworking Allegheny County executive shutting down every usual artery of campaign funding. Qualified leaders be damned, the funding fix is in.

Anyhoo, I ran into a number of friends from the neighborhood. There was one candidate who I will not name who REPEATEDLY called me an entirely different FIRST AND LAST name, despite being in earshot of me re-introducing myself to another colleague.

Embattled city councilwoman Twanda Carlisle's group had a table riddled with presumably her own campaign-funded fancy mugs inside the voting room...why she was allowed inside and everyone else was reduced to handing out pens, writing pads and other trinkets out in the hall, or outside for that matter is anyone's guess. Let's hope her mugs were not someone else's work, and she was presenting them as her own (you may remember her mother's boyfriend was paid a year's worth of city-taxpayer salary to write an essay about her constituency. It turns out the paper featured reams of "borrowed" statistics and observations from a legitimate scholarly study).

I noticed dozens of familiar faces and friends. Let me start by saying Bill Peduto has lost considerable weight and looks 32 instead of 42. Somehow his morning treadmill routines help him lose weight, while my own treadmill and weight lifting routine has only increased my size and weight.

It'll be interesting to see how this vote turns out. When a guy like Governor Tony Soprano is involved, I'm always a little worried.