Established in 2014 and published every Sunday, Tampa Bay Rants and Raves is a weekly airing of local and national news, sports and historical notes from a politically incorrect viewpoint.

First thing on our mind:

Okay, it’s been three weeks – time to stop the whining – and goodbye Ellen.

Leading off: Trump hits it out of the park

Within a space of hours, what had been the weakest part of the 2025 Trump team became the strongest. Matt Gaetz was frankly damaged goods. Trump’s pivoting to former Florida AG Pam Bondi was a grand slam. With Bondi at the helm, the days that started in the Obama administration, a weaponized Department of Justice (see Eric Holder and Loretta “let’s not prosecute Hillary” Lynch) will come to an end. Pam Bondi is a respected jurist who will clean up an awful Justice Department that has been an American embarrassment for the past 15 years.

Tampa Bay, politics and notes:

Related to our lead article, quoting our friend TL echoed by so many others, “Why didn’t he pick her in the first place?”

President-Elect Trump is still two months away from moving back into the oval office and already folks are discussing 2028. As it stands now, the GOP has a much stronger roster than the Democrats.

Idle thought: What an embarrassment it is to have Debbie Wasserman-Shultz as part of Florida’s congressional delegation. We’re guessing she’s not on the short list to replace Marco Rubio.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth you hear is from freeloaders who, under Trump, will now have to satisfy those student loans that so many other Americans justifiably paid off.

Numbers of the week: 9 percent – the amount of educational funding that comes from the federal government. 90 percent, the percentage of educational regulations that comes from the feds.

Goodbye to Helene, Milton and friends. The 2024 Hurricane season ends this coming Saturday.

One of those little known facts is the food that is most often stolen is cheese. But the theft earlier this month in London of 22 tons of cheese by a phony wholesaler is beyond the pale. Value of the cheese is $390,000. Scotland Yard is still investigating.

Someone younger than us (which includes most of the free world) shared “Things you might remember if you’re older than dirt.” We thought we’d share a few of them moving ahead beginning with Black Jack and Teaberry gum. We personally were a Teaberry fan.

From the 5:05 Newsletter: My goal for the rest of this Thanksgiving weekend is to move just enough so no one thinks I’m dead.

This week in 1972 (Nov. 29): Pong, the first commercially successful video game, is released by Atari, no doubt a hot Christmas seller.

Sports, media and other notes:

We know it’s a complex matter, but watching the Pinellas and St. Pete councils twisting, turning and spinning over the Rays leads us to believe we need to elect better people next time.

This year’s MLB MVP voting sets a bad precedent. We have no argument with AL MVP Aaron Judge, but a guy in the NL who spends over 90 percent of the game on the bench, no matter how talented, is not the league’s most valuable player.

Speaking of awards, this baseball nugget – the White Sox’ Early Wynn was 99 days short of his 40^th birthday when he won his first Cy Young Award in 1959 making him the oldest first time winner.

It boggles the mind how much $340 million could enhance education at USF, rather than being spent on a team that wins approximately four out of every ten games including 4-5 this year.

That juggernaut USF team remained at #102 in The Athletic 134 last week. They are one spot ahead of FSU. Others: Miami (14); Gators (54); UCF (67); FIU (114) and FAU fell to 128 and axed Coach Tom Herman – one of three coaches to fall last weekend.

Factoid: the waiting list for Green Bay Packers’ season tickets numbers 140,000. Every Packer game has been sold out since 1960.

Passing by a school at dismissal time recently, we decided if we could hold just one patent, it would be the backpack.

She was one-half of one of Clearwater’s most charming couples. Marilyn Chesnut passed away last week at age 93. She and her late husband Tommy were just a pleasure to know.

One last thing: A venerable aircraft

You see them in flight around the bay area, flying out of the Coast Guard Air Station at St. Pete-Clearwater Airport. They flew your humble blogger all over Southeast Asia back in the early ‘70s. Even then, some of those rugged C-130s were 15 years old. They first went into service in 1956! Now, brand new C-130s (the C-130J) are going to be constructed by Lockheed Martin. The new aircraft will expand NOAA’s hurricane hunter fleet replacing the Lockheed Orion craft that have been flying into storms since the early seventies. The time-tested C-130 joins the Douglas C-47 (or DC-3) and the Boeing B-52 as the three longest serving aircraft in U.S. military history.

NEXT UP: Focus group holiday favorites; Red kettles; PanAm

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