Not only voters get inundated with political messages around election time -- so do 5 year olds, especially if they're related to newspaper reporters.

My daughter Lily knows the mayoral candidates from the articles spread out on the dining room table every morning and from the campaign lit that pours through our mail slot every afternoon. Today she did portraits of the four Democrats in the Pittsburgh race:

Mailer hijinx continue . . .

Up is down and down is up when it comes to Allegheny County's judicial candidates. Candidates are allowed to cross-file on both the Democratic and Republican ballots which can lead to shenanigans when they're searching for extra votes across party lines (in a bid to get both the Dem and GOP nominations, all but assuring them a win in November).

As usual, North Pittsburgh Politics has the goods. First up is Jennifer Satler. Satler is a Democrat and has the endorsement of the county's Democratic committee but in an effort to collect Republican votes she issued a mailer (above) that pictures her with U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Upper St. Clair, and says "Republicans Agree: Jennifer Satler For Judge." Murphy has not endorsed her however -- his only public judicial backing has been for Republican Bill Ward from neighboring Mt. Lebanon, according to the congressman's chief aide Susan Mosychuk.

Photos in the mailer show they were taken at Rosedale Tech in Kennedy Township, a job training center with a special emphasis in training vets. It's in Murphy's 18th District and he commonly speaks on military/vets issues -- Satler is on the board of the Keystone Veterans Assistance Foundation. One can imagine the uniformed soldiers in the bottom left of the mailpiece won't be thrilled to see themselves pictured in political material.

Speaking of Ward . . . he too is in the confusing mailer crowd.You can't be much more Republican than Ward (he was Tom Corbett's chief of staff before the guv nominated him for an open judge seat), but in a flip of Satler's move he is lately claiming to be a Democrat. And not just any Democrat: "THE NUMBER ONE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE." Not sure what that means, as even in the official poll position of those on the Democratic ballot he's at number 7, right about in the middle.

Lots of election time fun & games happening today, largely with flyers/mailers. Let's start with a handout from Pittsburgh City Council District 4 candidate Johnny Lee, who's trying to oust incumbent Natalia Rudiak.

Lee's team has been handing out flyers prominently featuring a headline from the Post-Gazette . . . 21 years ago, on his high-school basketball team. It also uses the word "endorsement."

Suburban editions of the Feb. 27, 1992 P-G ran a Q&A with the then Seton-LaSalle basketball couch headlined "Postman delivers the wins at Seton" -- when the second half of the story jumped two pages later the hed was "Postman John Lee delivers the wins at Seton-LaSalle." (See for yourself on pages 30 and 32 of this Google archive of the story.)

Under the PG quote the flyer also says "Endorsed Democrat for City Council."

The Rudiak camp complains that this infers the endorsement of P-G editorial board, which rather went to the incumbent. The endorsement Lee has is from the Democratic Committee, which Rudiak didn't compete for. The back of the Lee flyer (below) contains the full P-G quote and notes it's about his success with the basketball team.