"Pimp my casino" That's the attention-grabbing headline on an op-ed piece decrying -- sometimes disingenuously -- the Don Barden debacle in Pittsburgh. The writer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Sally Kalson, is clearly as anti-gambling as you can get, and probably wouldn't be placated even if Steve Wynn was building Encore East out there.

However, it's worth skipping down to paragraphs 13-15, where Kalson does a nicely concise job of enumerating the various public and private entitites who have hooked themselves up to Barden's promised IV drip of dollars. They're on the hook all right, and now they can't do much more than cheerlead for the struggling project, even as Barden proposes a shriveled version of what he promised, thanks to having underbudgeted the project by as much as 42%. (There's no gambling addict quite like a govermental agency, jonesing for cash.)

Heck, Barden's even got Gov. Ed Rendell carrying water for him now, as the nebulous cast of investors continues to change. And somehow every one turns out to have a finger in a pie in another Keystone State casino. Is Apollo Management (co-owner, Harrah's Chester) out of the picture? Not to worry, here comes Neil Bluhm (lead investor in SugarHouse) and defintely maybe perhaps even Lubert-Adler Partners (who've got a piece of a racino in King of Prussia, Pa.) will get into this circus.

So while Pennsylvania's casino-ownership laws were set up in a such a way that you could control one casino and own a minority share of another, here you could potentially have three casinos -- maybe even more, as the Barden clown car disgorges yet more surprises -- with interlocking ownership, dominated by a couple of "george" donors to the Democratic Party.

Rendell's right about one thing: Don Barden's kept his house of cards erect long past the point where any number of things (not least his manifest contempt for the Pittsburgh city-planning process) should have blown it over long ago. Unless you count a riverboat in Gary, Ind., Barden's never built a casino from the ground up and his inexperience is showing. But through a mix of sheer gall and good old American persistence, he looks certain to keep muddling along.

As for Rendell's closing remarks: "I'm not concerned about whether there's an amphitheater there the day the casino opens. Long term, it would be nice to have it, but I'm more interested in getting the casino up and running." Crass? No question. Refreshingly honest? That, too.