Monday: Crunch Time

Hoping to help families during a rough economy, the Pittsburgh Public Schools this school year will offer free breakfasts to all district students, plus free lunches to all students at 41 schools and early-childhood centers. (P-G, Joe Smydo)

Inwardly, the Comet has cued the balloons and jazz music! This is the kind of performance-oriented reform we've been agitating toward.

In a memo, Mr. Peck said students who eat breakfast at school may behave better, have fewer health problems and score better on standardized tests.

"School breakfast really is the most important meal of the day," he said.

Great job, Mr., uh -- Mr. Peck, School District food service director.

Mr. Peck said the expanded free-meal program the district is introducing this school year is not uncommon among urban districts with high poverty rates.

We guess that's what we are, huh?

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The Pittsburgh Police Bureau does not have statistics on car-on-bike accidents. Mr. Ravenstahl said it will start tracking such incidents. (P-G, Rich Lord)

How about car-on-car accidents caused by bikes?

Whoa! When did we become Lou Dobbs on this issue?

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Suckers that most public officials are, they bought the threat -- skates, sticks and pucks -- and came up with a mix of public, gambling and private dollars. Ground was broken Thursday for a new $290 million arena. There's a Penguins-benefiting multimillion-dollar development sweetheart side deal, too.

Lemieux calls the moving threats a negotiating tactic. But let's call it what it was -- a lie.

And we would remind Lemieux and public officials who rationalized his remarks of this remark by a fella named Cicero, the Roman orator and statesmen:

"What is come by dishonestly vanishes in profligacy." (Trib, Edit Board)

Okay, this is light-years beyond the Post-Gazette's sanctimonious boosterism and eager complicity on this particular subject -- a subject which does raise its head in our city in various forms from time to time.

Yet the Trib actually places too much blame on Mr. Lemieux for our taste. Businesses must negotiate, and it is going too far to call negotiating postures "lies".

It's our public officials, who bought the threats as though crossbows were being pressed against their chests, and who then rolled over like cuddly kittens onto their backs, who are to blame.

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414 Grant Street connects a couple of dots and makes some wild allegations involving this story.

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The One Hill Coalition, along with the Penguins, the SEA, Mayor Ravenstahl and County Executive Dan Onorato will take part in a signing of the Community Benefits Agreement on Tuesday morning at 9:00 a.m. at historic Freedom Corner in the Hill.

A fitting backdrop for a laudable and historic arrangement, that is markedly imperfect and incomplete.

The appointment of a planning board that is genuinely representative of the Hill District in all its contentious and well-meaning splendor -- that would carry a strong likelihood of a political reunification of the Hill under its present leadership -- would make it perfect.

Prevailing upon both the Penguins and the City and its Authorities to identify some very modest funding by which we can get the Neighborhood Partnership Initiative off to a good start; wishing it bona fortuna -- to demonstrate to other potential donors that placing real responsibility in the hands of Hill residents is an idea actually worthy of confidence and investment -- would make it fully complete.