Beginning Thursday, leaders from the world’s largest economic nations are meeting at the G-20 Summit to focus on the ongoing global economic and financial crisis.

Since the summit is being held in the United States, President Obama was able to decide what city would host the event. In May, it was announced that the summit would be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This was certainly an odd choice. There has been only one other non-capital city to host the event (Montreal, 2000). And Pittsburgh is, well, Pittsburgh.

So why Pittsburgh? There has been much speculation about the reason for the choice. But the administration quieted the speculation on Wednesday when it outlined its decision process.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that the choice began with the graphic design firm commissioned to create the logo for the event. The concept sought to combine the city name and year with the name of the summit – G-20.

It was decided that the most effective way to do this would be to have the words broken up into two lines. The first would have the name of the city. The second would say, “Summit 2009″ with the “20″ in the year accentuated with a different color to make it stand out. To make this work, a city needed to be chosen that had the letter “G” near the end of its name that would be highlighted with the “20.”

Frank Leon, Obama’s newly appointed Marketing Czar, began compiling a list of U.S. cities whose names would fit with the logo concept. The list was narrowed down to four: Chicago, Birmingham, Anchorage, and Pittsburgh.

The Administration decided against Chicago so as not to give the appearance of showing favortism to the President’s home state of Illinois. Birmingham was rumored to have been ruled out because it is in the South, which everyone knows is full of racists who oppose everything the President does. The official reason given by the White House is that the “g” in Birmingham is not close enough to the end of the name. Anchorage was crossed off the list out of fear that they might run into former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

This left Pittsburgh. Obama has said that it was ironically fitting to hold the summit in Pittsburgh, since the pit of all the world’s problems lie in the United States, and through the years America has done a pitiful job of living up to her ideals and that our actions in the past have pitted nations against one another, rather than bringing countries together for the common good.

I.M. Cirius