For more than a century, bridges across the Ohio River have connected residents of Cincinnati to their neighbors in Kentucky. People on the Ohio side have long been accustomed to driving into Kentucky to fly in and out of the region's only international airport.

We've told this story in Governing before, but it makes the point so well that I hope you'll indulge my telling it one more time: There's a common pesticide called Atrazine that's used by farmers in many of the grain fields of the Midwest.

For governments, the hiring crunch for IT positions is far from over and is probably going to get much worse.

It's pretty straightforward. Those charged with investing public money have only four things to worry about: their fund's financial condition and cash flow; the state of the economy; what monetary and other regulators are up to; and how the markets are behaving, which is to say what other investors collectively are thinking about these same things and what they think will happen.

When critical mistakes are made in government agencies, the response is often predictable: Someone down the chain of command takes the fall, and the department moves on.