Just a quick note to inform you that Rusted Root's show tonight and The Clarks' show tomorrow on the Gateway Clipper have both been postponed because of imminent flooding. Rusted Root's show is being made up on April 10; The Clarks are playing on the big boat next Friday, the 19th. Also, ten bucks to whoever can get Rusted Root to cover "I'm On a Boat."

It's not easy being Congressman Jason Altmire. Lefties hate him for not supporting Democratic healthcare reform proposals. Meanwhile, he's now being targeted in an ad that is trying to kill off the reforms entirely.

The ad, which is highly similar to this one, uses lots of storm imagery -- hurricane satellite photos, lightning strikes -- to warn that "Americans are in the middle of economic storm. And an even bigger crisis is brewing." If Congress passes healthcare reform, it informs us, we'll be sunk in trillions of dollars of debt, and economic catastrophe will befall us all. Also, apparently, we will be beset by massive hurricanes. The ad ends by urging viewers to call up Altmire and share their views with him.

The ads are sponsored by the Committee to Rethink Reform, which bills itself as a project of the Employment Policies Institute (EPI). And who is EPI? Why, they are "a non-profit, non-partisan research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding employment economics. EPI sponsors non-partisan research by independent economists at major universities around the country."

As we've seen before, anytime a think tank sounds this innocuous, you know they're up to something. And sure enough, EPI turns out to be a front group created by Richard Berman.

Berman is occasionally referred to as "Dr. Evil" by his opponents. He's sometimes said to be the real-life equivalent of Nick Naylor, the affable-if-morally-vacuous spinmeister anti-hero of Christopher Buckley's book Thank You For Smoking. Just to give you an idea, USA Today has reported that in the 1990s, Berman "used Philip Morris money to fight the move to put no-smoking sections in restaurants."

Berman specializes in creating "non-partisan" think tanks, and other such "astroturf" action groups that are designed to mimic grassroots movements. Those allow his clients to maintain an arm's length distance from their own propaganda. Berman isn't obliged to reveal his client list, so it isn't always clear whose interests he's acting in. But you can make some pretty educated guesses. Some of Berman's opponents have created a Web site dedicated to identifying these groups, which have such delicious names as "PETA Kills Animals." 

It probably goes without saying that the "Rethink Reform" spot makes some pretty debatable arguments. For example, it suggests that most Americans oppose healthcare reform. Polling indeed shows that the issue is divisive. But it also suggests that many Americans are wary of current reform proposals because they don't think the proposals go far enough, or because they simply have tuned out the discussion.

The ad also warns that, in a time of economic crisis when deficits are already mounting, healthcare reform would be an economic "disaster." But the Congressional Budget Office has found that the Senate's healthcare reform proposal would actually reduce deficits that would be incurred if Congress did nothing.

Of course, there's plenty of debate about those findings. But we ought to be able to agree on at least one thing: A guy who opposed non-smoking sections in restaurants may not be the best source of information on our health.

Here's a note on two visual-arts venues, one brand-new and one that might as well be.

The technically new one is Point Park's, located in Lawrence Hall. The entrance is on Wood Street, just before the Boulevard of the Allies; walk through the lobby, skirting a lounge area (with its own art display I'll get to in a minute) and down a short hall.

The airy, day-lit space just wrapped its inaugural exhibit, 16 oil paintings by the late Frank Herbert Mason. The longtime teacher at New York's Art Students League worked in a classical vein, with Bible scenes, landscapes and still lifes predominating. It's a nice start for the space, and it'll be interesting to see what Point Park does with it next. (The gallery is open 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays.)

Especially with the Mason show over, you're free to spend additional well-deserved lunch-hour time back in the Lawrence Hall lobby with Resurrected: After Exoneration. 

Export, Pa., painter Dan Bolick's show of vivid expressionistic paintings and drawings, from large canvases to framed prints, capture the intelligence, pain, anger and even humor of former death-row inmates who were later exonerated.

The men served from five to 27 years in places like Louisiana's infamous Angola State Prison. The prints include text apparently transcribed verbatim from Bolling's subjects themselves.

"I never though about freedom because I was faced with a natural life sentence," said Clyde Charles, who served 18 years. "And mostly, people who face a natural life sentence in this state here, they see the graveyard."

Dan Bright, who served 10 years at Angola, said, "No one has taken responsibility for the nightmare I lived … The cimrinal-justice system doesn't work for society as a whole. If it failed me, it is failing everybody."

The exhibit, sponsored by Point Park's Innocence Institute, is a smaller version of show last year at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. It's up at Point Park through April 2. 

Across Downtown, meanwhile, is the Robert Morris Media Arts Gallery. It's in one of RMU's nondescript buildings, the one at 600 Fifth Avenue. The gallery's been operating for a couple years, but I first started hearing about it late last year, after RMU faculty member Carolina Loyola-Garcia became coordinator.

The latest exhibit, curated by Brigitte Martin of Lawrenceville's Luke & Eloy Gallery, stretches the definition of "media" to include ceramics. Ceramic Expressions is a cool little show featuring work by Pittsburgh's Laura Jean McLaughlin and out-of-towners Diem Chau and Joseph Gower.

McLaughlin's surreal style is familiar, but she continues to intrigue and unnerve with her permutations of human and animals bodies. Chau's contemplative evocations of domesticity are gossamer hybrids of fiber art and found china. Gower's more pop-art styled work includes large-scale takes on things like automobile hoods and tool chests.

The versatile little gallery remains pretty low-profile. Though you can sort of see it from the sidewalk on an admittedly gray streetcorner, there's no permanent signage outside. Still, now that you know, it'll be easier to make it over. It's open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and admission is free.

In the latest sign of an emerging trend, the Pittsburgh Media Scoops and Gossip site has apparently been served with a subpoeana to provide information that could identify an anonymous commenter. The site has publicly notified the commenter of the subpoena, and given him/her 30 days to respond. 

The subpoeana comes as part of a lawsuit being filed by a former employee of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Karen Roebuck.

Roebuck alleges that she was "seperated from her employment" at the paper while on sick leave more than a year ago -- and that her departure became the subject of libelous commentary on the site. Roebuck's attorney, John Newborg, is seeking to identify one of the posters who commented on Roebuck's departure, as part of a libel suit.

The thread in question can be found here. From what I can tell, the posts at issue have been removed, but they are featured in a motion filed for the case. The poster -- who commented under the pseudonym "none" -- accused Roebuck of abusing the paper's sick leave policy. Earlier posters had decried the departure of Roebuck and another staffer; this poster asserted that "The folks in question were abusing the system. They certainly were not losses, and the newsroom is better off for their departure."

Roebuck's lawsuit seems to assume that the anonymous posts were made by a Tribune-Review employee. She is filing suit against the Trib and the "John Doe" who posted the remarks.

I make no representation about the merits of this case, and in its own legal filing, the Trib gripes that Roebuck waited nearly a year before commencing legal action. It asserts that the paper has no connection with the Web site, and no way of knowing who posted the comments. Even if the poster was a Tribune-Review employee, the paper argues, he or she would not have been acting at the behest of the company or its supervisors. 

In any case, though, these developments represents another example of a trend I've noted before: people filing suit on the basis of comments made on Web sites.

Under the federal Communications Decency Act, a blogger or online chatroom cannot be sued over what other people post there. (City Paper, for example, can't be held liable for what other people post in the comments section of our Web site.) But the host of a site can be required to furnish IP address and other information to help identify the commenters. That's the request Roebuck is making here.

And so far, the Roebuck case seems to be following a pattern established in earlier cases. The Web site is publicly notifying the author of the subpoeana, and giving the author 30 days to respond with a motion to quash it.

But at least two things make this case unusual right from the start. First, it's a journalist undertaking the lawsuit -- usually our tribe is on the other end of libel actions.

Second, the Media Scoops and Gossip forum is a site that has given local journos plenty of cause to grit their teeth, or roll their eyes. Anonymous commenters there routinely take shots at local newspapers: Tribune-Review staffers are routinely derided as "Trib-Kiddies" doing the bidding of publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, while favorite Post-Gazette targets include TV critic Rob Owen, columnist Samantha Bennett and editor David Shribman. (I've taken a drubbing or two over there myself.) Some reporters, like the P-G's Dennis Roddy, have occasionally been moved to post replies -- responses that have generally also been met with derision. 

From what I can tell, the site used to attact more attention than it does now: It generally delivers more sniping than scoops. But there used to be a bit of speculation about who created the site in the first place: The blog's host is also anonymous. (And in legal filings, Roebuck complains that previous attempts to get information from the site did not receive a response.)

So I've got a feeling that no matter how the lawsuit proceeds, there'll be a few local journos smiling about how it's playing out so far.

UPDATE (3/11): A short time ago, I spoke with John Newborg, the attorney representing Roebuck in this suit. While this is a libel action (Roebuck is challenging her termination in another case, Newborg says) the lawyer wanted to make clear that he wasn't trying to dispense with the First Amendment. Roebuck's health history and employment status at the paper are "purely private," he told me. He added that he wouldn't have taken on the case had she been, say, a politician trying to squelch dissent. 

I asked Newborg to respond to the Tribune-Review's argument -- that even if the person who posted the comment is a Trib employee, the post was made by his or her own volition, rather than as part of official job duties.

"We're investigating the role that management plays on the site and in responding to the comments," he replied.  

I was drawn by the concept alone: a musical collaboration between a Senegalese griot singer who plays a traditional, 21-stringed kora, and a German-born jazz trumpeter.

Cissoko dons traditional robes for the performance, but not counting the video projection that accompanied one song, that was the lone adornment on the suddenly large- and bare-looking Istanbul stage. It was just the unassuming Goetze, hair slicked back, two trumpets (one muted) at the ready, and Cissoko, both seated.

The most intriguing presence might have been that of the kora. Its body was half a large gourd, the open face covered by calfskin, its neck about a yard long. Cissoko played it on his lap, the neck straight up, making it hard to see his face. He held it with three fingers of each hand grasping each of two small posts extending parallel to the neck from the body. He played the 21 unfretted strings with his thumbs and index fingers. 

The sound was beautiful, a high and clear cascade of notes, pretty close to Goetze's description of "African harp-lute." Most of the songs were traditional or in that style, Goetze complementing with smoky riffs. It was as mellow as it was deeply felt. Rusted Root's Colter Harper, who's traveled and studied music in Africa, sat in for two numbers on electric guitar.

The show (organized by CP contributor Manny Theiner) had come together late, perhaps accounting for the fact that only about 50 people showed up for the Pittsburgh stop on the duo's first world tour. (Their local visit, which included an interview on WYEP, was sandwiched between gigs in State College and Washington, D.C.'s Twins Jazz.)

The two met at a European jazz festival and have been collaborating for a while, though in some ways they're still getting to know each other: Goetze struggled at times to translate Cissoko's French, and needed help from an African-born man in the audience. But their partnership has already birthed an album, Sira (on Obliq Sound). And they're fundraising for a documentary about Cissoko, titled The Griot, whose progress you can track at www.griotmovie.com.

In case you missed the band's CD release show last Friday, we're offering you another chance to hear Nik Westman & the Central Plains, featured in the current issue of City Paper. "Elements of country, folk and indie rock weave in and out, resulting in a blend of songs that sounds impressively familiar but, in the final analysis, original," writes contributor Mike Shanley (read full article).

Today's free mp3 download is "First Breath," a twangy, loping track from the group's new self-titled CD.

Photo: Hugh Twyman

This will be the first weekend since 1936 that the Squirrel Hill Theater (the one on Forward) won't be an option for moviegoers. The theater closed this week; its third-generation owner, Richard Stern, announced on Wednesday that the revenue just wasn't there.

Admittedly, the Squirrel Hill was never the best place in town to catch a movie; even the Stern-owned Manor, up Murray, always seemed more welcoming. (In the way of most neighborhood moviehouses, both were originally one-screen palaces, later subdivided to compete in the multiplex age.)

Even after it was renovated a decade ago, the place always felt a little on the dog-eared side. Some of the screening rooms were too small for the screens they contained. And then there were the bowling balls thundering away overhead at adjacent Forward Lanes, audible in some screening rooms. Depending on your perspective, and probably what you were watching, the din either complemented or ruined the audio of whatever you were watching.

Still, the staff were always friendly, and the prices were reasonable. Moreover, for those who prefer to patronize local, independent merchants in real, live neighborhoods, rather than cineplex conglomerates in mall-land, the Squirrel Hill was one of the last options.

Pittsburgh, like every other city, was once awash in neighborhood theaters. Even when I moved here, in 1991, there were still a few, including the Rex, on the South Side (before it turned to live performance), and a second-run joint in Bloomfield. The Manor and Pittsburgh Filmmaker's Regent Square Theater are about the only full-time first-run places left.

Still, while the Squirrel Hill's closure reduces our options about where we can see movies, it probably doesn't greatly affect what we can see. The theater did program some artier fare: The last thing I saw there, for instance, was Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was one of my favorite movies of 2009, and the Squirrel Hill was at that point the lone first-run theater in town still screening it. But most of the time, you could find most of the same movies over the hill at the Waterfront.

It would be easy to blame the theater's demise on the Waterfront, or the rise of Netflix, and those no doubt played a part. (Though Netflix surely has done more damage to Pittsburgh's home-video landscape, which used to boast several indie outlets alongside a couple chains, but now seems to be down to just Dreaming Ant and a lone Blockbuster.)

But as the article in yesterday's Post-Gazette points out, numerous big vacancies in Squirrel Hill's business district can't have helped traffic at the theater: Poli's, around the corner, closed a few years back, and up the street the Panera and the big Barnes & Noble closed in just the past six months.

Ironically, for months now, many Pittsburghers had already thought the Squirrel Hill doomed because of a large planned commercial real-estate project on its block that would have displaced it. That project has yet to come to fruition; according to the P-G, neighborhood leaders say it's moribund. But the theater is lost anyway, and the local movie landscape is that poorer for it.

I've sort of put off writing about the latest round of Quinnipiac University polling, because the narrative is pretty firmly established.

Once again, it turns out that for the most part, voters have no idea who the candidates for statewide office are. Yes, state Attorney General Tom Corbett will be the Republican nominee ... and yes he leads the Democratic field ... which, yes, is currently led by our very own Dan Onorato. 

But if I were a political consultant, I'd be calling up "undecided" and seeing if there's a spot on that campaign team. 

Briefly: three out of five voters say they don't know who they want to vote for in the Democratic primary. Among those who have some vague clue, Dan Onorato leads with a less-than-overwhelming 16 points. But right now, the match-up in November looks the same no matter who the Democratic nominee is. Whether Tom Corbett is facing Onorato, state Auditor General Jack Wagner, or Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Hoeffel, Corbett wins by almost exactly the same margin: By about 42 percent to 30 percent, give or take a point.

"The Democratic candidates for Governor are almost invisible men as far as the voters are concerned," Pollster Peter Brown says. "[A]t this point they are so closely bunched together and such mystery men ... that any result is possible."

Somewhat amusingly, the Onorato camp looked at Brown's numbers and came to a different conclusion. In an e-mail to supporters, his campaign boasts that "a Quinnipiac poll confirmed [Onorato's momentum], finding Dan to be the undisputed front-runner for Governor."

Uh-huh. 

On the Senate side, Quinnipiac has found that incumbent Democrat Arlen Specter is currently up on his Republican challenger, Pat Toomey, 49-42. He leads Democratic challenger Joe Sestak 53-29. That's good for Specter -- earlier polls showed him tied or trailing with Toomey. But this race too is a question mark, because no one knows these guys either. Nearly three-quarters of voters don't know enough about Sestak to have an opinion; nearly two-thirds say the same about Toomey. 

And Specter can't get complacent: By a 52 - 38 percent margin, voters say Specter doesn't deserve another Senate term. Also, the poll suggests that Specter's challengers benefit the more people learn about them: "Among Democrats who have some opinion of both Specter and Sestak, Sestak leads 54 - 37 percent."

If true, that would lend support to my long-stated belief that Sestak has the bigger upside, because he appeals to the liberal base, and because people already know all they're going to know about Specter. But the hour grows late. The percentage of voters who say they haven't heard enough about Sestak is statistically the same today -- 74 percent -- as it was in a poll conducted back in May of 2009 -- 76 percent. What ought to worry Sestak isn't the current crop of numbers; it's the lack of movement.

And while I'll admit that this is anecodtal evidence at best, some inertia may have set in even at places like DailyKos, the liberal Web site whose founder was an early adopter where Sestak is concerned. For example, Bill Halter, who just launched a Sestak-style challenge of Arkansas Democrat Blanche Lincoln, has garnered 73 articles on the site in just the past few days. Sestak has earned 113 in the past year.

There is at least one amusing note in the Quinnipiac poll, though. Pollsters asked Pennsylvanians whether they trust federal government to do the right thing: only 11 percent of voters said they trusted it to do so either most or almost all the time. Thirty-five percent said it "hardly ever" can be trusted. Amusingly enough, even the politicians in Harrisburg do better: 18 percent voters say Harrisburg can be relied on to do the right thing most or almost all the time, while only 21 percent are jaded enough to say state government can "hardly ever" be trusted.

We're all used to polls that show Congress is less popular than lawyers, people who kick puppies, or even journalists. But to be compared to state politicians and be found wanting? That's a new low.

So, you couldn't get enough of my wonkery on councilor Ricky Burgess' efforts to overhaul city council's use of CDBG money, could you? Back for more already. 

Well, I've got the cure for what ails you: a closer look at an alternate funding formula based on my last thrilling post. 

The background: As fans of long-winded internet screeds know, city council gets $675,000 a year in federal Community Development Block Grant money. That money, which is to be spent on community needs, is divided up evenly among the 9 city councilors, who each get $75,000. 

Burgess advocates changing that system. City councilors should get money proportional to their districts' needs, he says. He'd base the allocation on how many economically distressed census blocks they have in their district.

Earlier this week, I pointed out that the population in census blocks varies widely: If the goal is to help poor people, I argued, Burgess should base his formula not on the number of census blocks, but on the number of people living inside them. 

Well, Burgess' office went ahead and compiled some stats using my approach instead. And the result? If Burgess incorporated my criticism of the Burgess Plan, the biggest winner would be ... Ricky Burgess.

But of course, listening to me is always a mixed bag. As it turns out, another winner under the Potter scenario would be Bill Peduto, a Burgess rival.  

Here's the district-by-district breakdown, as calculated by Burgess' office. Column "A" is the council district number. Column "B" is how much money each district would get under Burgess' original, block-based, formula. Column "C" is how much the district would get under my popluation-based formula. The last column shows the change between Burgess' plan and mine.

(Note: Sharp-eyed observers will note that the numbers in Column B -- the ones spelling out Burgess' original plan -- have changed from earlier this week. That's because Burgess' staff, after taking another look at the data, had to adjust the number of census blocks under consideration.) 

As you can see, the big winners under my approach would be districts 8 and 9 -- those represented by Peduto and Burgess. Allocations to Peduto's district would be more than twice what he'd get under Burgess' plan.

Well, I'm a uniter, not a divider. (Though either formula would give Peduto well below the $75,000 he has under the status quo.)

Why the big improvement for Peduto? Burgess' numbers suggest that Peduto's CDBG-eligible areas have much higher population densities -- and more people per census block means more money for the council district. Burgess's hard-luck neighborhoods are also more densely populated: In fact, he'd get more money than any other district under the new approach. (Under his original proposal, he'd finish third.) 

The funny thing is that the specific concern of my earlier blog post was with districts 2 and 4 -- the south-of-the-rivers neighborhoods represented by Theresa Kail-Smith and Natalia Rudiak. My approach does nothing to help either of them, and actually puts an additional hurt on Smith's constituents.

There's a lesson in there somewhere about unintended consequences, I'm sure. 

Which brings me to a final thought. This whole discussion presumes that councilors only give money to organizations within their district. That's the whole premise of the Burgess plan, right? If councilors get money in proportion to the needs within their district, they ought to spend that money on their district's needs. 

In practice, though, councilors sometimes do give to deserving groups that lie outside their district, and there's no rule against doing so. If Burgess is going to tie allocations so closely to the district's plight, maybe there should be. On the other hand, when councilors do focus only on their own backyards, it isn't always necessarily a good thing. 

Fair warning: This is going to be a LONG damn post about the reforms city councilor Ricky Burgess plans to propose in council today. It's a little about the reforms, and a bit about Burgess too, and what makes him tick. But whatever else it is, it's long. 

You can speed things along by checking out Rich Lord's exigesis on Burgess' proposals here. But for those who never tire of my deathless prose, I'll note that Burgess' proposal is in three parts: 

Part the first: Burgess wants to change the way council allocates federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funding. Currently, each councilor gets $75,000 to spend in his or her district, usually by making grants to community-development groups and other neighborhood bulwarks. But since CDBG money is intended to help economically distressed communities, Burgess argues, council districts should get the same amount of money only if they have the same concentrations of economic distress. I'm going to focus on this proposal in a minute, but I'll note the other two planks for the record.

Part the second: When councilors spend their CDBG money, Burgess wants to make sure they can't make grants of any less than $5,000. On the surface, requiring councilors to hand out larger sums of money sounds like a pretty counterintuitive reform. But Burgess says that making a grant has the same administrative overhead no matter how large it is. Making fewer contributions of larger amounts, he argues, is a more efficient use of funds. 

And while Burgess didn't say so, one could argue that it's easier for good-government types to track grants if they are fewer in number, and larger in amount. If you've ever pored over campaign-contribution data, you know you'd much rather see a politician getting one contribution of $5,000, rather than 10 of $500. (Still, you'll notice that nobody's proposing a reform that sets a minimum contribution limit ...)

Part the third: Burgess wants to ensure the city doesn't use CDBG funds as "offsets." Even when the city does use CDBG money in poor districts, Burgess worries that doing so does free the city up to use its own money in less impoverished neighborhoods elsewhere in the city.

That may not sound like a bad thing. But Burgess contends that the city should be dividing its own money up evenly between the neighborhoods -- and that federal money should be used in poor communities only.

Tea Partiers take note: What Burgess is talking about here amounts to a redistribution of wealth, with poor areas getting extra cash while the rest of the city tries to get by on allocations from a cash-strapped city budget. I'm actually not sure this is at all workable, but Burgess contends that it's only fair. Poor communities have often been overlooked when it comes to receiving city services, he says, so it's time to make up the difference.

Really, that part of Burgess' proposal deserves a whole separate blog post. For now, I want to focus on the first part of his idea -- dividing council's discretionary CDBG money according to a different formula. 

*****

Currently, city council gets $675,000 in CDBG money to spend in the nine districts. The money is divided equally, so each councilor gets $75,000 to spend on community needs.

Burgess would divide the money differently, allocating it to each district according to how many economically distressed census blocks it contains.

A census block, for those who aren't hopeless geeks, is a subdivision of a census tract mapped out by the Census Bureau. There are more than 7,700 such blocks in the city. Burgess crunched some numbers and found that more than 4,400 of those blocks meet CDBG standards for economic distress. He calls these "CD-eligible" blocks.

So Burgess took council's $675,000 and divided it by 4,400 to figure out the average number of dollars each CD-eligible block should get. That works out to a bit more than $150 per census block. To figure out what each city councilor gets to spend, then, he multiplied that amount by the number of CD-eligible blocks in each district. 

How would the districts fare under the formula? Burgess' office provided a chart, showing what he believes the breakdown for all 9 districts would be. I'll reprint the relevant portion of it here, with the caveat that these are Burgess' numbers -- I haven't checked them: 

As you can see, under the Burgess proposal, the council districts of Daniel Lavelle (district 6), Bruce Kraus (3), Burgess himself (9), Darlene Harris (1) and Patrick Dowd (7) would all be better off under the proposal -- i.e. they'd be getting more than the $75,000 they currently receive. The districts of Theresa Kail Smith (2), Doug Shields (5), Bill Peduto (8) and Natalia Rudiak (4) would all be worse off. 

Let's address some basic poltical concerns, because we're bloggers and that's what we do. To some extent, the winners and losers of Burgess' proposal break down along factional lines. Take this past January's vote for President -- widely seen as an indication of where the political fault lines on council are. Of the four councilors who'd be worse off under Burgess' proposal, three voted for Darlene Harris for council president (Peduto, Shields and Rudiak). In doing so, they thwarted Smith -- the candidate favored by Burgess and Mayor Luke Ravenstahl.

But of course Smith herself would be a loser under Burgess' proposal -- while Harris would be a winner. And Bruce Kraus -- who backed Harris -- would benefit from this proposal almost as much as Lavelle did. So the political impact here is murky. 

But Burgess sometimes does sound like he's trying to settle scores. When I talked with him about the proposal, he said that "Council talks about being data-driven all the time. Let's show that we're serious about that." Does that sound like a councilor throwing the gauntlet down at the feet of, say, Bill Peduto -- who prides himself on data-driven policy? A bit, yeah. And no doubt it will play into existing suspicions about Burgess' motivations regarding the living wage. Some see that issue, too, as a sort of political jujitsu -- using the rhetoric of Peduto and his allies to force them places they don't want to go. 

*****

But even assuming Burgess is looking to stick it to Peduto, that may have more to do with personal conviction than political strategy.

For one thing, Burgess sets great store by consistency. More than once, he's referred me to discussions we had during his 2007 campaign, arguing that what you see today is what voters knew they were getting years ago. And he is rigorous in demanding similar consistency from his colleagues.

For another, Burgess sees economic justice as a moral issue -- and arguably a much more pressing one than some discussed in city hall.

If you are going to support a prevailing wage bill to improve workers' lives -- a reform Peduto supported -- Burgess is going to ask why you don't back a living wage that could help workers even more. Especially if the beneficiaries of that more sweeping measure include struggling workers in his own district. Similarly, if you are going to demand a data-driven approach to snow removal, Burgess is going to expect a similar approach to poverty reduction. 

In any case, Burgess' proposals deserve to be discussed on their merits. Unequal distribution of resources is an age-old problem. During last year's mayoral campaign, for example, there was some chatter about the fact that some neighborhoods -- like Homewood, which is in Burgess' district -- were getting hand-me-down trashcans emblazoned with the names of other neighborhoods.

So let's put aside the politics here and talk about the policy.

I'll admit that I have a hard time getting my head around a proposal that grants Peduto and Shields -- whose districts include some of the most prosperous are in the city -- more money than Natalia Rudiak's district 4.

Granted, Shields' district includes long-suffering communities like Hazelwood and Greenfield along with Squirrel Hill: His district may have higher highs and lower lows than Rudiak's, which tends toward a narrower range of working-class communities. But I covered Rudiak's race last year, and there was palpable resentment of the way the city's southern neighborhoods feel ignored by the city. Smith's District 2 next door -- another loser under Burgess' plan -- has similar grievances. 

And my inner liberal cringes at the friction that seems likely between working-class whites and poor blacks, when neither group gets the resources it needs. I feel like I've seen that movie before. 

And at least one thing strikes me as potentially problematic with Burgess' methodology. He's using census blocks as the basic unit here, but population can vary widely from one block to the next. (For example, I picked out a randomly selected portion of Beechview, and found blocks ranging from a couple dozen people to nearly 150.)

According to Burgess' chart, for example, district 6 has 857 CD-eligible blocks, whereas district 4 only has 82. Does that mean district 6 has 10 times as many poor people? Not necessarily, if some of the 82 blocks in District 4 are more densely populated. 

I'm not sure how that would affect the district-by-district breakdown of allocations. This is really Chris Briem's area of expertise, and as he pointed out just yesterday -- a new Census is being carried out this year. So the demographics of those blocks will soon be changing.

I've had a back and forth with Burgess' office about this question; among other things, they argue that drilling down further into the data opens up different cans of worms. (For example, the number of households in economic distress within a census block can vary widely as well.) At any rate, Burgess may or may not be trying to make the fur fly in council. But that seems a likely outcome either way. 

Even so, it beats a discussion of licensing cats.