Hooray for Rob Rowen; thumbs down to Starbucks

Perhaps you saw the story on Bay News 9 or read Steve Otto’s column in the Tribune. Rob Rowen has been banned from a Dale Mabry Starbucks location because he confronted people who broke the law and parked illegally in a handicapped spot in front of the store. Starbucks calls this harassment; we call it a citizen doing the job that parking enforcement is supposed to do and seldom does. You see it all the time on Clearwater Beach, punks with Grandma’s handicapped sticker parking in a handicapped spot and then running off to the beach. We sincerely hope that Rob Rowen will find a replacement for his Starbucks fix – which is vastly overrated anyway. We also hope parking enforcement people will do a better job on both sides of the bay enforcing handicapped parking.

Around the bay:

1. A recent news item concerning a Confederate Stars and Bars flag flying over the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) building in Clearwater provoked two thoughts: (a) we’d wager that fifty per cent or more of the American population would not recognize the “nationality” of that flag and (b) it was mentioned that the UDC building was close to the new Clearwater monument which brought to mind that monument cost more than the entire UDC building and the grounds surrounding it.

2. Word on the street is that PSTA head Brad Miller is getting less than sterling performance reports from his board members. Word here is – what took them so long?

3. Someone in government, much wiser and smarter than me, told me years ago, you simply cannot build infrastructure to handle the once in every five years events like Tampa Bay’s incredible rains of the past two weeks. Actually, you can build such infrastructure at the expense of schools, public safety and other critical needs.

4. Item three reminds me of another person in government, again much wiser and smarter than me (which is a large data base), explained that the basic role of government is to bounce basketballs (leisure and arts), pick up garbage (public utilities) and catch bad guys (public safety). Hard to argue with that reasoning.

5. You’ve lived in Pinellas County for a long time if you remember the old fairgrounds and its county fairs in downtown Largo.  

The diamond, the media and other stuff:

6. Interesting to watch Slate’s Mark Stern and others try to take the moral high ground on Planned Parenthood’s selling of fetal tissue. Sorry folks, there just isn’t any moral high ground where abortion is concerned.

7. In a related note to our lead item and “borrowed” from the world famous 5:05 Newsletter: “Report: El Chapo’s escape tunnel had two Starbucks”.

8. Our rant of last week (RANTS August 2) about the state of baseball got us to thinking about pre-free agency. Could you imagine Al Kaline playing for the Boston Red Sox; Roberto Clemente for the Milwaukee Braves or Mickey Mantle patrolling center field in Comiskey Park? Nor can we.

9. For his cult following, Jon Stewart’s leaving the Daily Show was sad news of epic proportions. For the vast majority of the nation, it rated a collective yawn.

10. The Detroit Tigers are well on their way to becoming the next Philadelphia Phillies – an aging club with some bad contracts that will be hard to peddle. Verlander is toast, David Price is gone, they unwisely let Max Scherzer get away and Cabrera, Martinez and company aren’t getting any younger and GM Dave Dombrowski paid the price for the Tigers woes last week.

Rene Rivera, four former Rays achieve “worst” list

Now that Keith Olbermann’s show and its “Worst Persons in the Sports World” segment are gone, there are still plenty of other “worst” lists. Most recently, the site Point After named the worst player on each major league franchise. On the local nine, it was (no surprise) Rene Rivera hitting a hearty .176 at this writing. The catcher was picked up in an off season trade basically for Ryan Hanigan who is putting up slightly better numbers for the Bosox than Rivera and was a serviceable catcher in his days for the Rays. Not to be outdone, four former Rays are also on the list of “worsts” for their teams – reliever Burke Badenhop, currently stinking up the Red’s bullpen, Milwaukee flop Matt Garza, Jonny Gomes hitting a B.J. Upton-like .197 for the Braves and Matt Joyce doing equally badly for the Angels. B.J. Upton, surprisingly, did not make the list despite his .218 batting average. The Padre’s worst honor went to the more highly overrated Matt Kemp.