How troubled are these economic times? Here's a bit of anecdotal evidence. My father-in-law -- who co-owns a pair of Steelers season tickets -- could barely sell his tix to yesterday's Steelers-Chargers playoff game.

The fact that I couldn't buy them doesn't signify much: Journalists are supposed to be struggling. But the Tribune-Review is reporting similar hardships for scalpers around town. 

With all due respect to rosy economic reports from The New York Times and resident numbers guru Chris Briem, Steelers playoffs tickets ought to be as sure an investment as government bonds. If you were looking for cause to panic -- stuff your cash in the mattress, fill up the bathtub with drinking water, and bar the door -- you may have just found it. 

More than 75 intrepid souls attended today's Schenley Plaza rally on behalf of equal rights for the LGBT community. Happily, a large tent kept out a cold rain, though it also resulted in speeches being punctuated with occasional avalanches of snow from the sloping roof.

We have video highlights from the rally here. (UPDATE: And a more in-depth treatment of the protest here.) This is sort of a placeholder post to see if I can beat Sue Kerr to being the first one to post. (I'm at a disadvantage in that, true to alt-weekly form, I took the bus from the rally to the office, which necessitated 20 mintues of standing in the rain.)

Anyway, the usual crowd of progressive politicans were on hand, with their presentations livened up by an on-her-game Gab Bonesso and the head of the newly created Pittsburgh chapter of Dykes on Bikes. As for news, there were a couple tidbits: 

-- City Councilor Bruce Kraus announced plans to introduce a council resolution expressing support for the county's proposed anti-discrimination ordinance, which would establish legal protections for lgbt residents and other minority groups. Kraus says the measure, which Kraus will introduce early next week, already has support from 7 city councilors, and that he hopes to make it unanimous. 

-- City Controller Mike Lamb, who has been a vocal supporter of city-county consolidation, says that unless the county's anti-discrimination measure DOES pass, he will oppose further attempts to consolidate city and county services. As controller, Lamb's ability to do act on this position is limited. (And by limited I mean "non-existent.") But he was backed up on this position by City Council President Doug Shields -- who has long been wary of consolidation.

Also attending the rally -- and this is not necessarily an exhaustive list -- were: state Reps. Dan Frankel and Chelsa Wagner; city councilor Bill Peduto; county councilor Amanda Green (sponsor of the county's ordinance) and county council president Rich Fitzgerald; Presbyterian minister Janet Edwards, who has presided over a same-sex marriage ceremony; city council district 2 (EDIT: that's district 4 -- the cold obviously numbed my brain) candidate-to-be Natalia Rudiak, potential GOP mayoral candiadate Kevin Acklin, and a slew of equal-rights groups.

Not to mention a handful of CP staffers gradually losing sensation in their extremities.

UPDATE: Ha! I won!

Also, it might be worth noting two people who WEREN'T there ... Mayor Luke Ravenstahl and Dan Onorato. (Though Bonesso, acting as emcee for the day, DID try to leave a message for him at work.)

It seems our old pal Arlen Specter is taking shots at Eric Holder, Barack Obama's choice as attorney general. Specter has previously expressed doubts about Holder, who was involved in the messy Marc Rich pardon in the final days of the Clinton era. But on the Senate floor, Specter kicked it up a notch, arguing 

After our recent experience with Attorney General Gonzales, it is imperative that the Attorney General undertake and effectuate that responsibility of independence. Mr. Gonzales left office accused of politicizing the Justice Department, failing to restrain Executive overreaching, and being less than forthcoming with Congress ... I am convinced that many of Attorney General Gonzales' missteps were caused by his eagerness to please the White House.

As Talking Points Memo notes, comparing Holder to Gonzales is hitting below the belt. But perhaps this all says a lot more about Specter than anyone else. 

As the Rustbelt Intellectual observes, Specter "has carefully crafted a public persona as an 'independent' and 'moderate' Republican, while voting far more often than not to hold the Republican party line." 

Specter often does get lumped in with moderate Republicans like Olympia Snowe, largely because of his pro-choice stance. But Specter's voting record has shown that he is far to the right of Snowe and (now-departed) Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee.

In recent years, Specter has repeatedly pronounced grave Constitutional doubts about Bush Adminstration initiatives like warrantless wiretapping -- but he always ends up caving. The end result, if any, is that citizens get the vague, and entirely false, sense that someone in Congress is doing some due diligence on what the executive branch is up to. Obviously, that isn't the case -- or it wouldn't be possible to use names like "Alberto Gonzalez" as epithets. (Epithets Specter is using against DEMOCRATS, no less.) 

And who can forget the fact that, by demonizing Anita Hill, he helped put ensure the Supreme Court appointment of Clarence Thomas -- arguably the biggest floater on the bench today?

Maybe Specter's objections to Holder will be just another in a long line of head-fakes. It's already clear that he'll be facing spirited opposition from arch-conservative Pat Toomey in 2010 ... maybe this is a sign that Specter plans to tack to the right prior to the election -- again.

Conservatives have long groused that Specter does this sort of thing every time the election cycle rolls his way. But maybe it's time for moderates and liberals to get pissed off as well. Philadelphia-area moderates have long been Specter's base of support ... but Philly went hard for Obama in November. How much patience will they have for Specter throwing up roadblocks against Obama's cabinet choices?

In the long term, Specter's shenanigans could mean the Dems pick up a Senate seat in 2010. But in the short term, I find it troubling. It means that we can count on Republican obstructionism despite the scope of the Democratic win in 2008 -- and despite the crisis this country is in. I know Obama wants to play nice, but I'm pretty sure the GOP isn't interested in joining the game.

The New York Times provides us with our first "what's going on in Pittsburgh" story of the new year today. And guess what? We're avoiding the worst of the economic downturn ... in part because of our resistance to change --

The big local bank, PNC, was resolutely unadventurous during the housing frenzy.

-- and the fact that we never enjoyed the good times at their height:

One reason Pittsburgh looks better in the bust is because it never had a real estate boom.

But mostly we're avoiding the economic collapse because ours already happened. We deinudstrialized to a large extent a quarter-century ago -- and as it turns out, the Times argues, our timing couldn't have been better! 

Pittsburgh had the luxury of reshaping itself while the rest of the United States economy was relatively strong. Unemployed steel workers could leave for the booming Sun Belt, helping the city and region shrink to a more manageable size.

So that puts a chipper face on the age-old lament about Pittsburghers leaving: One reason we have such a low unemployment rate is that we exported a lot of the people who lost their jobs. There are plenty of unemployed Pittsburghers today, in other words -- they just live somewhere else now.

As the Times points out, though, today's autoworkers don't really have the choice of fleeing to some part of the country where times are better -- the economic downturn is much broader than it was when steel went down for the count. Detroit, then, may furnish us with an example of the path Pittsburgh didn't take 20 years ago -- i.e. what happens when all your unemployed people don't leave town. 

Of course, a lot of this stuff was foretold by resident internet genius Chris Briem.  (One of Briem's colleagues, Sabina Deitrick, is quoted in the Times piece -- a nice change from the usual suspects who get into these stories.) And just because I'm insecure enough to want to put my name in the same paragraph as Briem's, I'll note the Times piece dovetails with a column I recently wrote. I argued that Pittsburgh offers a vision for the future that, if not exactly hopeful, is at least less dire than a lot of other paths we might choose.

So next time you grumble about Pittsburghers and how slow they are to change ... consider the upside too. 

More to come soon in these parts, but as a quick little ping to your brain-parts: last month, the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones had this to say about Pittsburgh's Takeover UK. SFJ, whom I like as a writer but disagree with often enough, has pretty much the opposite take on them as compared with mine; I generally think TUK, while perhaps not radical innovators, make decent enough power-pop songs, but their name is kind of goofy.

And of course The Strokes ( or any other number of similar bands of 8-10 years ago) have had a lasting impact on a certain brand of bands in the late '00s. But SFJ pulls his trademark generalization based on summary evidence (while leaving things ambiguous enough such that he could defend himself if called on it) in implying that theirs is some creeping memetic influence inserting itself into the bulk of pop music today.

The big question for Dan Onorato's gubernatorial aspirations these days is: Can his strength as a politician outweigh his star-crossed record as an official?

As we all know, last week Onorato was dealt a setback in his efforts to use drink-tax revenue to pay for county public-works projects. Bar owners and other critics pointed out that the tax was supposed to pay to cover costs at the Port Authority, and Common Pleas Court Judge Judith Olsen agreed.  

"With today's injunction, Allegheny County now faces a $12 million hole in our 2009 operating budget," Onorato lamented in a statement issued last Friday. The following Monday, he held a press conference, wherein he announced he wouldn't challenge the ruling, and the county would find a way to muddle through financially. 

(Also, there's gonna be a Steelers rally! Look! Something shiny!)

But amusingly enough -- and less noted in the press -- Onorato had another bit of financial news to report on Monday. The folks at his campaign thoughtfully forwarded a PolitickerPA.com dispatch reporting that Onorato's campaign PAC had more than $4 million in cash on hand --

making him well positioned for a likely gubernatorial run in 2010. Onorato is considered by many to be the early frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to succeed Gov. Ed Rendell, the two-term Democrat who will leave office in two years. With campaign finance reports not due for another month, Onorato's PAC did not release many details of his fundraising, but did say he had raised about $2.2 million in 2008 and $1.3 million just since the November election. 

That sums up 2008 for Dan Onorato: He's been incredibly successful at raising money for himself, even as he's drawn fire for trying to raise money for the government he leads.

And the state Supreme Court hasn't even ruled on his property-tax freeze yet. If Onorato loses that suit, it means Allegheny County -- and every other county across the state -- may have to begin yearly tax reassessments. Which means communities across the state will have him to think when homeowners start getting increased tax bills.

My advice to Onorato ... keep raising those contributions. While you can. 

First Night is always part recap, part scouting session: stuff you missed all year plus early versions of what's to come. Some of the performers are predictably booked -- we seem likely to get Amish Monkeys and Pure Gold until that last, eternal ball drops on us -- but the First Night cross-section I saw during the first couple hours of the Cultural Trust's 14^th annual New Year's extravaganza did have some new wrinkles.

I liked WYEP's music showcase in that brick-walled, sixth-floor event space at 121 Seventh St. -- Good Night, States (whom it was my first chance to hear) played its first set of melodic pop-rock to a small but appreciative audience. Over at CAPA, people were taking swing-dance lessons in the black-box theater, and the new Creative Reuse Pittsburgh group awaited visitors to turn salvaged microfilm reels, flooring samples and garden hoses into decorations. Up Penn Avenue, a slightly surreal scene, as a couple dozen heavily jacketed and scarved folks took outdoor line-dancing lessons from a guy who stood on a low stage facing a blank wall. His dancing shadow was rather ominously cast on that wall, I thought; it looked like a square dance as filmed by David Lynch.

In a nearby storefront, I got a preview of a provocative in-progress work by local documentarian Chris Ivey (East of Liberty), this one (titled Starved) about the challenges faced here by black artists of the past and present.

Out on Ninth Street, on the stage set up between Penn and Liberty, the world's coldest reggae band (a.k.a. Wizdom) ran in place perking through Bob Marley's "Three Little Birds." On Liberty, ArtUp had jammed its borrowed storefront with live jazz, a video booth and photos and illustrations honoring Pittsburgh's labor heritage.

As with any festival, much of First Night's appeal is its transience, as a concatenation of unrepeatable little moments in unlikely places -- a parade, in fact, and one much like the night's own chilly procession up Penn, giant puppets, marching bands, fire trucks.

But a highlight was something you can still see for a little bit: In the storefront gallery at 709 Penn, visiting artist Amy Trompetter has installed a deeply moving tribute to Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist who defied death threats to report on the war in Chechnya and was murdered in 2006. Suspended from the gallery's ceiling are papier-mache horse heads, screaming a la "Guernica," while banners and murals fill the space with rampant soldiers, cowering victims ... and skyborne angels, rendered in a style suggesting Russian Orthodox iconography.

Attendance at First Night seemed a little thin to me, though maybe it was just because most of the 125 events took place indoors. In any case, the Cultural Trust claims 35,000 patrons showed. I hope that as many as possible saw Trompetter's work.

Post-Gazette columnist Ruth Ann Dailey has taken a buyout deal offered by management of the cash-strapped paper.

Dailey's fans need not despair entirely. For now, at least, she will continue to file her column on a freelance basis. (UPDATE: I'm told this assertion is a "bit premature.") But she has already cut down on her contributions to the paper: She recently announced the end of her weekly "Suburban Living" column, which ran along with an every-Monday column. And when combined with the simultaneous departure of P-G columnist Samantha Bennett, the number of female columnists in town is rapidly approaching zero.

At the P-G, the only regular female columnist is Sally Kalson, who has been writing every other week (and who recently announced she is undergoing chemotherapy). The Tribune-Review brings us Salena Zito, who focuses on politics. And your own City Paper brings you a weekly dose of Frances Sansig Monahan's riffs on local TV news. 

By comparison, the Trib's roster of regular columnists features at least nine regular contributors who are male. A half-dozen of the P-G's regular opinion contributors are male. (I'm not including sports commentators in these counts.)

CP isn't immune from the trend either. In the past year, we've cut the female-penned column "Revelations" alongside a column by John McIntire. These cuts, made to reflect tightening page counts, have left yours truly as CP's only regular columnist. And I'm just doing it in a desperate attempt to justify my salary. 

Bennett and Dailey took advantage of a recently expanded buyout offer made by P-G management. Insiders say the paper was trying to move as many staffers off the books as possible before year's end. Other staffers have taken the buyout as well: We'll provide names as we're able to confirm their departures.

On a personal note, I hate to see anyone leaving journalism, or losing a full-time paycheck. But I have special reason to hope we see Dailey's byline for some time to come. I disagreed with her far more often than not, and sometimes did so vocally on blogs and on that Off Q TV show no one except my dad watched. But if I often found Dailey aggravating, it was only because she was consistently more provocative, and a more interesting thinker, than other rightward columnists like Colin McNickle or the cartoonish Jack Kelly. 

My best wishes to Ms. Dailey, and to everyone who has left the P-G in recent days ... as well as to those who are sticking it out. I hope 2009 is a better year for you all. 

Deliciously bad TV broke out of the gate early in 2009, literally as the ball was dropping in Times Square.

Inexplicably, CNN booked its increasingly shape-shifting pretty boy Anderson Cooper (who went from fluff to hard news and seems to be cycling back to fluff again, recently taking swims with Michael Phelps) for a special AC 360 to usher in the New Year. In a move best described as "Bravo-style programming," the "news" channel paired the Silver Fox with comedienne Kathy Griffin, pretty much locking in the older-gay-men-at-home-on-the-couch demographic.

And didn't they make an awkward pair?! Like a fixed-up date. Griffin clearly came loaded for bear, with a batch of questions designed to trip up the much-speculated-about Cooper. Her queries about Gossip Girl and who he was wearing had AC collapsing in nervous fits of giggles, and eventually calling her "honey," like two BFFs sipping pink cocktails and commiserating over worthless men.

But their cringe-y pas-de-deux was the show's bright spot, amid some of the lamest "coverage" I've ever seen -- and this from a marquee cable channel. Even though Times Square emptied out totally at 12:03 a.m., the cameras kept rolling while Kathy & Andy struggled to keep up the façade of unbridled fun. Behind them, trash blew across the forlorn neon jungle like tumbleweeds through Silver City, and the only people visible were guys with ladders dismantling the set.

As befitting its status as a wide-ranging news org, CNN reached deep into its coffers and outlaid about $50 to bring viewers the festivities from: Key West (where a single camera was trapped in the back of the crowd providing indecipherable shots of a drag queen doing something); New Orleans (where the ground correspondent angrily described the crowd as "belligerent" and fled, first to an empty restaurant, and then to the safety of a second-story balcony); the sidewalk outside Shrek the Musical; a 5K "fun" run in NYC (where the correspondent huffed through reporting exactly nothing and the only other joggers seemed to be furries -- two lobsters and a rabbit); Las Vegas (where a demented Coolio -- remind me again ...? -- rattled off greetings to his 29 kids); the fuzzed-out Grand Canyon ("sent from my BlackBerry," I think); and at 1 a.m., a badly edited round-up of sparkly things dropping in various Central Time Zone hot spots.

But viewers -- hopefully mellowed by booze -- who sat through this TV turd in its totality, were well rewarded right before 1 a.m., when CNN dropped its own ball, and failed to cut away promptly from Times Square to a commercial.

Lucky for us that's exactly when Griffin -- irked by the few stragglers in the streets who were heckling her and AC -- leaned over the well-brought-up Mr. Cooper to shriek: "Shut up! You know what -- screw you! I'm working! Why don't you get a job, buddy? I don't go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth!"

Oh no, she's didn't! Oh yes, she did. YouTube sees all. Happy New Year, and God bless you, live TV -- don't ever change.