Wouldn't it be nice (he's thinking) if, sometime this afternoon, before the three-day weekend, I could hold a celebratory press conference with Mario Lemieux? Franco Harris is not getting the job done.Wouldn't it be nice (Don Barden and Ron Burkle must be thinking) if Luke finds himself desperate to hold a celebratory press conference with Mario Lemieux?
Isn't it a fact (everyone must be thinking) that preliminary injunctions against former operations directors are simply too inside-baseball for voters without the same dozen blogs in their favorites folder?
Would it seem opportunistic (Bill Peduto must be thinking) if, after letting Luke stew in these juices over the long weekend, I went and picked Tuesday to officially announce?
Isn't it a fact (the Comet is thinking) that such a notion is really, really too inside-baseball?
The P-G's Mark Belko recalls Dennis Regan saying he "had no involvement" in the transfers of police officers including Rende, despite the sworn testimony of Police Chief Dominic Costa that Regan had involved himself on three separate and escalating occasions.
Belko also has Ravenstahl saying, "There was no rule broken, no law broken. If anything, maybe bad judgment was used," perhaps opening the door just a hint of a smidgen toward the notion of settling with Cmdr. McNeilly out of court.
A further indication of the Mayor's possible Proudly-Backing-Away posture is this quote obtained from WTAE: "(Regan) worked for Mayor O'Connor, and Mayor O'Connor gave him the ability and authority to do what he felt was appropriate. Most of these actions and allegations took place under Mayor O'Connor."
Meanwhile the Trib and Jeremy Boren go for the throat with the headline, City Solicitor's Probe Blasted, focusing on the presence of City Solicitor George Specter at some of those Regan-Costa meetings.
No major news outlet seem to have posted a recent editorial on the matter.
I'll go so far as to admit that I am stupid, but I don't get what "inside-baseball" means. Are you refering to "brushback" pitches that are thrown to the inside of the plate? Hits that don't leave the infield? Or do you mean that these issues are so esoteric that only a select few wonkish people like us bloggers are paying attention to them?
ReplyDeleteIf so, then I have a few additional observations. Lots of things start off seeming wonkish, with only a select few geeky people like me paying any attention to them. But sometimes these things, which started so small, erupt upward and outward.
A good example may be the whole 2004 Dan Rather/60 Minutes/Texas Air National Guard story. It started with some really geeky bloggers arguing things like kerning and font styles, but then went supercritical. The fireball expanded far enough to incinerate a storied broadcasting career which had exteneded for over half a century.
That kind of thing probably won't happen here, but this story is definitely in people's minds. The way I can tell is that the local TV stations are still doing news stories on it.
Print coverage is almost a given on something like this, because the additional cost of a story -- even if only a very few people are paying attention -- is very low. But broadcast is vastly different. They only have so many minutes to available, and they must maintain their audience as they move from story to story. TV news directors are very sensitive to what the public wants, and they wouldn't be running these stories if they weren't real confident that there was a market for them.
So at least some members of the public, even those who don't read blogs, are paying some degree of attention to this story.
This isn't going to ruin Mayor Ravenstahl on it's own. I don't inflate my own importance. But if every night brings yet another story on the local TV news where the words "corruption" and "Ravenstahl" keep appearing in the same story, the cummulative effect could be very important.