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.

A trip every pro-abortionist should have to take

Every grandstanding pro-abortionist, the disgusting Mike Bloomberg comes to mind first, should have to take a trip to the outskirts of Chicago. That is where a grisly discovery was made last week – some 2500 fetuses discarded by a now deceased butcher/abortionist named Ulrich Klopfer. The dead children were given a decent burial last week in Indiana where the murderer plied his trade. The story of this atrocity was buried inside our ultra-liberal local newspaper while garbage like Roger Stone’s sentencing and student activism take center stage on Page 1. Our moral compass is badly broken.

Great Tampa Bay, politics and stuff:

1. Breaking news – a special edition of the 5:05 Newsletter hit the internet this past week with this and other nuggets: France News: President Macron announced that France would not participate with the United States if it goes to war with Iran. A war without France's help would be like... well, World War II.

2. In a related note, McClatchy Papers which publish the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star among others has declared bankruptcy. An investment group is going to bail them out, but the writing is on the wall for the newspaper industry. Funny, the newspapers who are the healthiest are papers with a more moderate tone than the left of center Herald and her sister papers.

3. Three Florida cities that Northerners always butcher – Dunedin, Kissimmee and Wimauma.

4. Number of the Week: 93% - the percentage of traffic stops in the state of Kansas that are out of state plates. My, my, the United States has its own larger version of Waldo, Florida.

5. You’ve lived in Clearwater a long time if you remember the Sea-Orama on the second floor of the Clearwater Marina.

Sports, media and other stuff:

6. Noted sports author Roger Kahn passed away last week at age 92. He authored the cult favorite The Boys of Summer. But in our mind, his overall view of the New York baseball scene, The Era, was an even better book.

7. Spring games begin next weekend and Pinellas fans will get to see a few “name” clubs with the AL East champ Yanks visiting both the Phils and Blue Jays twice. The NL East champion Braves will make one visit to each park and the Red Sox also make an appearance in both Clearwater and Dunedin.

8. As spring training ramps up, it’s funny how things work out. The Mets, being the Mets, pass on Joe Girardi as their manager for Carlos Beltran and after the cheating mess, end up with a guy who looks like a desperation hire.

9. Idle thought: The black cloud over the Houston Astros probably will not go away until Jim Crane divests himself of the team. There is probably no smaller group in sports than those who believe he didn’t know what was going on.

10. Just how many NHL coaches have been fired this season? It seems like half the league has a new coach.

What in hell are they thinking?

Pardon the first ever use of bad language in a TBRR headline, but if you follow our thoughts on the National Pastime, you knew it was coming. Rob Manfred is suddenly making Clueless Bud Selig look like a genius by floating a trial balloon that would turn major league baseball’s successful playoff system into a version of the NBA and the NHL’s “come one, come all system” of playoffs. After years of tinkering, MLB finally got it right – putting a premium on winning your division – without automatically dismissing wild card entrants – see Nationals, Washington. But expanding the playoffs to virtually half the teams in the league and allowing teams to pick their opponent makes all those gimmicky football leagues that have come and gone seem downright sane. (For what it’s worth, more than three quarters of some 13,000 fans polled by Major League Baseball Trade Rumors voted thumbs down on the radical idea).

NEXT UP: Mark and Yogi; Felix; Spring training through the years

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