Fore!

We now know where the mayor was during the City Council hearing on the promotion of three controversial police officers--he was playing golf:

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl played at a celebrity golf tournament rather than face more than 100 women angered by the promotions of three police officers linked to accusations of domestic violence or disturbances in their pasts.

"I can confirm that he was there both days," said Nancy Angus, director of the Mario Lemieux Foundation, which organizes the annual Mario Lemieux Celebrity Tournament.

"He played as an amateur. He didn't play as a celebrity," Angus said Tuesday. ...

"Some are attempting to unfairly criticize me for attending a charitable event while a public hearing was being held on the 28th. This smacks of crass politics and yellow journalism and disappoints me greatly," Ravenstahl said in a statement last night.

"What's astonishing is that if he was really trying to raise money for charity, he was trying to hide it from people by not answering the question," said Jeanne Clark, a member of the Squirrel Hill chapter of the National Organization for Women, which petitioned to have City Council hold the hearing.

Why did the mayor refuse to reveal his whereabouts? Clearly, he knew that it would be embarrassing, particularly since he was recently outed as a hard-core Tiger Woods groupie. (Exactly how much time does this guy spend at work, anyway?)

Leave aside what this incident says about the mayor's character or maturity. It was just plain dumb to stonewall the media about why he skipped the hearing. This town has two daily newspapers, an alternative weekly, three television stations and numerous bloggers. Did he really think no one was going to find out what he was doing? This story might have died a week ago, even if bad feelings had lingered over the promotions of three officers with histories of domestic disturbances. But the mayor's dissembling kept it alive.

The mayor is an amateur in more ways than one, it appears.