A weekly look at the Tampa Bay area and national politics from a conservative viewpoint – plus a helping of sports and lifestyle items. Warning: not everything printed here should be taken at face value!

Editor’s Note: We are late getting on line this week due to some technical glitch that we would not be able to understand. But thanks to the team that put this site together (See Rants 5/25/14) we are back up and running. Kudos guys!

Tampa would win with any of several candidates

With less than a month to go, Tampa’s mayoral race is blessed with several very qualified candidates, former Police Chief Jane Castor, long time transportation savant Ed Turanchik, Dick Greco, Jr. and businessman David Straz, Jr. to name just four. Castor is the presumed leader if for no other reason than she is the only female in a crowded contest. Each of the male candidates’ strategy needs to be keeping Castor from a fifty plus one percent total in the primary thereby forcing a more balanced one on one contest in April. Regardless of who emerges from the March 5 primary, the city of Tampa is fortunate to have such a strong field of candidates to choose from.

Great Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

1. Related to our lead article, we’re not a Tampa resident but if we were, David Straz’ promise to eliminate red light cameras would win our vote. Study after study has shown the cameras don’t reduce accidents but they do increase revenues.

2. Elizabeth Warren has announced plans to run for the Presidency in 2020. It will give the country a chance at having its first Native American President, oh wait…

3. Florida now has a Director of Cannabis. Have you ever in your life been prouder to be a Floridian?

4. Speaking of things that are addictive, we mentioned this last year and it bears repeating. It’s Girl Scout cookie season and even if you’re watching the calories and carbs, you can help out by buying a few boxes and donating them to our troops or locally-based Pinellas Hope.

5. You’ve lived in the bay area a long time if you remember when there were not one, but three afternoon newspapers – the Sun, Independent and The Tampa Times.

Sports, the media and other stuff:

6. The somewhat bizarre firing of Channel 10’s Reginald Roundtree has led him to speak out with among other things “I made that station what it is”. What it is and has always been is last or next to last in evening news ratings – not an indictment of Roundtree but the fact since the station signed on the air in the mid-sixties.

7. If you’re over 40 and want a good four-minute laugh google teens and rotary phone.

8. So what is the difference between players in the 60s holding for more money and Harper, Machado and company taking forever to sign?

9. Recent article in MLB Rumors dealt with expansion with the author opining expansion would not happen until the stadium issues in Oakland and here are resolved. He further stated the feeling among observers is that Oakland will find a stadium site somewhere in the Frisco Bay area while the Rays would move elsewhere – a little different take than the Kool Aid we get from the local media.

10. June Hurley Young, the host of Tampa Bay’s Romper Room from 1965 to 1980 passed away last week at age 87.

Bruce Williams, a radio legend

Sometime in the early 1980s driving in to our own early morning radio gig, we were tuned to one of our competitors and for the first time heard Bruce Williams’ syndicated radio show. Our first thought was “Who is this guy and why is he wasting his time on the radio?” We had never heard a person with more business street smarts than Bruce Williams. Fast forward to the late 1990s and we are co-hosting an economic development summit, and we have the opportunity to check off a major bucket list item by finally meeting this guy and introducing him to a crowd of several hundred folks, some of whom, had never heard his pearls of wisdom on the radio. By the end of the day, the uneducated became educated about street level business. Bruce’s syndicated radio show spanned three decades– a few broadcast from a hospital bed just a couple weeks after a near fatal airplane crash (pilot error by his own admission) and the last years from his home in New Port Richey. In our mind, he was America’s greatest radio talk show host. Sadly, in the segment above (Sports, Media etc.) we originally had wished him a happy birthday which would have been February 18. Bruce was 86.

Next week: Beer league baseball; bridge tokens and specialty tags

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