Sometime last week, the Mayor's campaign chair and I believe the Mayor's brother and possibly other friends of the Mayor went to Mardi Gras. We can only guess that the Mayor might have gone too, if not for the lingering effect of Snowmagedden 2010. But we now know that he didn't go. What did happen was that there were discussions about extending the City's state of emergency on Monday of last week, with the general understanding that the Mayor wanted to do that. The extension was signed on Tuesday by public safety director Mike Huss. Apparently some on Council thought the Mayor, as the top City official should sign, unless he was unavailable. Is he available, Council asked the Mayor's staff. Wellllll, he is in the City, but no one knows where. He is unavailable for cell phone calls. And so on, until a press conference late in the afternoon where the Mayor told the press he was teaching them a lesson.
And so we talked about that for a while. The PG had a fairly scathing (unsigned) editorial raking the Mayor over the coals for his juvenile behavior. And I basically agree with that, except that ....
I can't help feeling like the Mayor has once again gotten away with something, and that he is getting better at getting away with it, he is learning. He used to just hang tough and tell us he was right and his accusers were wrong. Now he is learning tricks.
At the start of the snow storm the Mayor was trapped at Seven Springs, at a celebration of his birthday. The Mayor maintains no one could have know, but we all know that was so much BS. He was staying at a cabin or lodge which he (or whomever) paid for, to a Pittsburgh business. Now, in all honesty I don't know if the Mayor has said how much he paid to any reporter or if the Mayor has reported the amount, all I know is that he told one reporter that it was none of his business how much he paid. Given this Mayor's record on reporting the value of gifts he has accepted, a refusal to say how much he paid is essentially an admission that he knows he did something wrong. And then there is the matter of the man who died because paramedics refused to go to him. Now that clearly wasn't specifically the Mayor's fault, although the poor example he set in skipping town doesn't help much. But neither of these issues will be talked about as much because the Mayor's juvenile game has taken center stage.
Which makes me wonder if that was what the Mayor intended all along, when he became unavailable on Tuesday.
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