Author: opinionstogo

Kenny Rogers’ Incident Symptomatic of Times

Much has been made of that videotaped tirade of Texas Rangers’ pitcher Kenny Rogers in which he shoved two cameramen – one of whom was hospitalized briefly. Rogers was subsequently suspended for 20 games and fined $50,000 by Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig – subject to an appeal by the players’ union. The perfunctory apology has already been made, although Rogers is still not ready for his close-up.

You’d think no one had seen it coming. The wonder is that it isn’t a daily occurrence. Boorish behavior is. So is the uneasy proximity that is the odd, often testy mix of players and media.

Not unlike most disagreements and controversies, this one has two sides.

Both the players and media are at fault – although more blame obviously should be showered on the shover than on the shovee.

Free-agency leverage and television riches have spawned the era of the obscenely rich, obsequiously pampered professional athlete/entertainer. And too many of these individuals – especially in football and basketball – have been fawned over, lionized and enabled by a sports-celebrity culture since high school.

For many, it’s hardly a reach to become self-important and insufferable – yet forced to interact with those who lead such inglorious lives. Lives that necessarily entail queuing up for clichéd quote crumbs as if the interviewee were somebody truly important. It’s not a dynamic that begets respect.

Where else in America’s societal strata would you find such an empathy-challenged, combustible pairing as players and media? Those making seven and eight-figure annual salaries being chronicled and judged by those who don’t come close? Being criticized by those who never played well, if at all, the game they now over-cover – up close and too personal.

For their part, the media have never been more ubiquitous or intrusive. From beat reporters and in-your-face photographers to freelancers and the myriad of cable-outlet hucksters. Players, albeit rich and famous, are commodities – and somebody’s 24-7 target.

But it’s much more than the media’s sheer quantity and pervasiveness. In a bygone era, it was not unusual for local scribes to earn the moniker of “homer” — and sports departments of daily newspapers the sobriquet of “toy departments.” Now, everything is fair, so to speak, game. On the field, off the field — in the locker room, in a night club, in a courtroom, at large.

Imagine the Babe Ruth coverage by modern saturation standards.

But the media — whether probing, provoking or prying, whether astute, stupid or sycophantic – are an integral part of the business of the games athletes play for pay. Like them or not, the media are a continuous loop of constant free publicity. Game stories, sidebars, commentary, statistics, standings, odds, point spreads, injury reports. Daily, around-the-clock coverage that promotes the games, the leagues, the franchises and the players. The sort of gratis ink other industries can only salivate over.

What professional baseball, basketball and football players should do is look to NASCAR for guidance. To wit: Never take your fan base for granted. Remember that being overpaid does not make you bigger than your sport. And your sport would not be in a position to overpay you were it not for media, sponsors and fans.

NASCAR drivers know that it takes more than skilled driving and a talented crew to separate them from garden variety gear heads with lots of speeding tickets.

In addition to his anger management classes, Kenny Rogers should be made to take notes on NASCAR and at least act like he realizes how lucky he is.

Live 8 to Live Tyrant

No one would question that there’s no place on the planet in more need of humanitarian help than Africa, notably the sub-Sahara part of the continent where nearly 5 million children die annually before age 5. Thus the motivation for the recent Live 8 concerts staged worldwide.

But the agenda of the Make Poverty History organizers was necessarily political: to pressure the major industrial nations (G-8) into doing more for impoverished Africa. As in Third World debt relief and a quantum leap in aid.

That was understandable, because the G-8s represent world wherewithal. But the G-8s also symbolize an approach that has had more than its share of discrediting. It’s the macro version of something Americans are all too familiar with: throwing money at a problem.

It can only make a difference where there’s accountability. Where corruption doesn’t reign. Tragically, Africa is the hell hole for such criteria. It needs tough love – not a subsidy.

So, here’s a suggestion for Bob Geldoff, Bono, Sting and Co. Before putting the arm on the G-8s and guilt-tripping the West on what Africa is owed by relatively prosperous countries, try putting the squeeze on Africa to do more for Africa. To do more for its 300 million sub-Saharans who survive on less than $1 a day, to do more for its 37 million children under 5 who are underweight. Call it Live Tyrant. Or Boogie Against Bureaucracy. Or Caterwaul Against Corruption.

If anything is to be accomplished other than salved consciences, it will have to occur in a context where unelected despots and endemic corruption no longer prevail. If it’s appropriate to forgive billions in debt and to pledge $50 billion in annual aid by 2010 (from $25 billion), is it not proper to demand that pains be taken to ensure that such help go to those who are actually starving — and not to politically corrupt fat cats dining at the public trough?

While lacking the cachet of G-8 hectoring, Live Tyrant is an event – and a movement — whose time is long overdue. Certainly better than Madonna calling on the assemblage to “start a revolution.”

Thanks. Just what Africa needs.

No “People’s Right To Know” Everything

This much we know for sure. Long after the news cycle has discarded Time magazine’s Matt Cooper and the New York Times’ Judith Miller, the constitutional andethical controversy over journalists and their confidential sources will remain. As will several principles.

The first — and foremost — has been articulated countless times, most recently by Time itself: “

Rove: Politically Astute To Politically Stupid

Karl Rove unequivocally deserves his reputation as king maker/political Svengali.

It’s been evident since he helped George W. Bush upset Ann Richards for governor of Texas. We’ve seen it through two Bush presidential elections. He’s the acknowledged architect of Red State America.

We’ve even seen him cherry pick Mel Martinez, the Cuban Pedro Pan-turned- White House-harlot, to take back Bob Graham’s senate seat for the GOP.

He is the Republican most responsible for harnessing the pulpit populism of the evangelical and cultural right into pragmatic, political power: from pro-life to anti-Saddam.

He panders with a Midas touch.

Until now. From politically astute to politically stupid in a sound bite.

That’s the upshot of Rove’s flippant – but surely calculated – recent comments lambasting liberals for what, he asserted, was a less-than-robust reaction to 9/11.

Conservatives, said Rove, “saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war. Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.”

Granted, this red-meat rhetoric wasn’t tossed to a Quaker peace rally – but the New York state Conservative Party in a venue not far from Ground Zero. And, yes, liberals might just revel in being the antithesis of a take-no-prisoners approach to defending the homeland. And, yes, it does follow earlier flaps caused by the truculent remarks of Democratic Chairman Howard Dean, who railed at Republicans’ ostensible distaste for an “honest day’s work,” and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin’s repellent comparison of the Guantanamo prison to Nazi camps and Soviet gulags.

But Rove is supposed to know better. It’s what he does. It’s all he does.

Always on his agenda: sucking up to and energizing the converted – without a tradeoff. You can’t lose what you’ve already written off. But there are conservative Democrats and independents – politically endangered species, to be sure – who can still determine close elections. It’s not smart to alienate those still listening in an increasingly polarized polity.

If there’s a place for such acerbic sass, it’s a political primary where only true believers really matter. Where you can get away with characterizing non-conservatives as part of a MoveOn.orgy. But the days of presidential primaries are as much in Rove’s past as in Bush’s.

When Rove speaks, which is usually through others, he speaks for the White House and a president who once said he wanted to be a “uniter,” not a “divider.”

The need has never been more acute for this country to be united. War will do that. But, arguably, the chasm of divisiveness only broadens. And this Rovean cheap shot only widens it farther.

Rove also did a disservice to the war effort, per se, with his comment that “Liberals saw what happened to us, and said, ‘We must understand our enemies.'”

Counterproductive political bombast is not the same as a dangerously misleading spin on the war against terrorism. It’s disingenuously simplistic to say “they hate us because they hate freedom” and our way of life. That’s now a Bush Administration mantra.

They disrespect our democratic ideals and castigate our celebrity culture – but not enough to warrant atrocities. What they truly hate – as only Islamaniacs can hate – is our foreign policy – from Israel as de facto 51st state to corrupt, autocratic sheikdoms in bed with the U.S. We are not obligated, of course, to sign off on Osama bin Laden’s grievance list, but we ignore the real terrorist underpinnings and motivations at our own peril.

The Deans and Durbins help neither their country – nor their party – with their ill-considered, ill-tempered barbs.

Ditto for Rove, who should know the difference between being a George Bush surrogate and emulating Steve Spurrier slumming with the boosters.

So much for the Midas touch. However, a Midas muffler might be appropriate.

Too Tall An Order For Downtown?

For those of us who have been around a while, downtown Tampa has been for too long a plywood monument to urban abandonment. A ground-level eyesore with an office building skyline. A Potemkin embarrassment in the post Kress, Maas, Woolworth, Newberry era.

Not that there haven’t been periodic, serious efforts to get downtown off the dime. In fact, we still have a bunch of heralded revitalization plans on shelves – or in time capsules — somewhere.

But as we’re seeing, Tampa is no longer an aberration in the national trend of urban infill. Channelside is morphing in front of our eyes and downtown – finally – is on residential developers’ radar. Including the forlorn stretch that has been North Franklin Street for the last generation.

That’s why it was puzzling to see that recent vote of city council that looked askance at a rezoning request by the Doran Jason Group. The 3-3 deadlock, in effect a “no” vote with a rider to “try again,” reflected concern over height and density, notably the former.

The Coral Gables developer wants to build a 975-unit condominium complex. It plans to save the historic Kress Building as well as the facades of the Woolworth and Newberry department store buildings. The scenario calls for condo towers of 24 and 27 stories behind the facades as well as a 44-story tower on an adjacent block. Units would sell for $130,000 to $300,000.

The tie vote forces the developer, whose interest is presumably unwavering, to make revisions, at least one result of which will surely be fewer units in the most affordable range. That’s an outcome at variance with a key downtown priority.

The dissenting voters, Linda Saul-Sena, Kevin White and Rose Ferlita, come from a good place. They are not rubber stamps – and height and proportion are hardly irrelevant. And Franklin Street is not exactly Park Avenue or Michigan Avenue. But, hey, Donald Trump is here, and his riverfront tower will be taller than Doran Jason’s big unit.

But more to the point, North Franklin and the rest of downtown desperately need what Doran Jason wants to provide. AFFORDABLE housing. And a jumpstart of critical mass – with more residents than investors – helps ensure that the city’s core won’t long remain an express lane from the interstate to South Tampa.

The reality of downtown land values and the charge to keep prices reasonable puts a pragmatic onus on any developer to make the numbers work. The most practicable place to go for any major city’s downtown is – up.

Council member John Dingfelder had it about right. “Downtown is downtown. Buildings should be tall.”

In short, he’s correct. No one is asking Tampa to sell its proportional soul, just be a common-sense public partner on this one.

Diligence Still Due

That fatal shooting at Tampa International Airport is another grim reminder of an all too familiar subplot.

Think back to Ruskin’s Sarah Michelle Lunde, who was strangled a couple of months back. The suspect is a registered sex offender and convicted rapist. He was familiar with the family and their residence, because he had dated the teen’s mother.

Last week a mother of three was gunned down at TIA by an ex-boyfriend. The shooter had been living with the victim until about five months prior. The man was a serial stalker and had served five years in prison – and three on probation – for unlawful restraint, violating a protective order and kidnapping.

Fortunately none of the children witnessed the slaying or were harmed by the assailant/ex-live-in boyfriend. Unfortunately, they were not a good enough reason for their mother to have exercised even minimal judgment on who she brought home.

Gay-Display Vote Still Mystifies

Here’s the part I don’t get about that vote. You know the one.

It wasn’t just Ronda Storms. Media-seducing, yahoo-pandering, red-meat rhetoric still only gets you one vote.

Hers was one of five Hillsborough County Commission votes in favor of adopting a policy that prohibits the county from “acknowledging, promoting or participating in gay pride recognition and events, little g, little p.” Only Kathy Castor, who has to answer to her constituents, her conscience and her mother, voted the other way.

For the record, Brian Blair, Jim Norman, Tom Scott and Mark Sharpe supported Storms the way the Jordanaires used to back up Elvis. Ken Hagan wasn’t there. On a subsequent vote – stipulating that the policy can only be repealed by a (5-2) super majority — Hagan joined the majority in a 6-1 vote with Castor again the lone dissenter.

The obvious legal and public relations ramifications should have been foreseen – if not the sense – and perception — of right and wrong. Mayor Pam Iorio, who wasted no time distancing the city from the ham-handed policy and its Storms trooper rhetoric, probably preferred another fire house photo-op to “Take Back Tampa: The Sequel.”

Actually, there’s another part I don’t get either. It is equating acknowledgement with promotion.

In a society with constitutional qualms about displaying the Ten Commandments in public venues, “promotion” will always lend itself to contextual and legal parsing. As it should.

But “acknowledgement?”

Gays and lesbians – and their lifestyle and attendant pride – don’t exist in a vacuum or a closet. Or only in incorporated Hillsborough. They are an integral part of every community’s fabric. This one is no exception. An acknowledgement is little more than a nod to reality. What they don’t deserve is an official, demeaning cheap shot that deigns to speak for more than a half-dozen small-minded commissioners.

One final point. Topical Storms Ronda is, in a perverse way, good at what she does. She’s smart; she’s calculated; she’s never sound-bite challenged; and she knows which visceral hot buttons to push. She can pervert populism with the best.

On the county’s new gay pride policy, she got what she wanted. It will play well to the usual “us vs. them” (Big U, little t) suspects that she patently panders to.

But that still doesn’t explain – much less justify — those other votes. The other commissioners, at least, should have known better. Shame on them. Big S, little t.

Hanoi-ing Comparison: Vietnam And Cuba

Last week was another slap in the face for all those still frustrated by this country’s failed, counter-productive and cruel economic embargo against Cuba. For all those who remain appalled that hard-line exile elements in South Florida still hold foreign-policy veto chips. The recent affront was occasioned by the White House welcome accorded Phan Van Khai, the prime minister of Vietnam.

Lest we ever forget, the Vietnam where 58,000 American GI’s died and thousands more were maimed. The Vietnam, which has a tainted human rights record and no free press, censors internet access and mocks religious freedom. The Vietnam that we’ve had formal diplomatic relations with for the last decade. The Vietnam that former President Bill Clinton visited in 2000.

And it’s the Vietnam that is buying four Boeing 787 airliners, valued at $500 million apiece, did more than $6.4 million in two-way trade with the U.S. last year and wants U.S. help in fighting HIV/AIDS and joining the World Trade Organization. Khai’s itinerary also included Boeing-based Seattle and the Redmond (WA) campus of Microsoft, which has an office in Vietnam.

Not only did President George W. Bush reiterate America’s position supporting Vietnam’s WTO application, but he accepted Khai’s invitation to visit Hanoi.

Vietnam, lest we forget, was once a key domino in America’s Cold War “containment” policy against Communism. That policy’s application in Southeast Asia brought down a president and proved tragically flawed.

Vietnam is a sovereign country and part of the global marketplace. We don’t have to like everything about it to do business with it. We fought an unnecessary war with it and shed a lot of blood over it.

We haven’t forgotten our fallen, but we’ve moved on. And we’ve learned. The Cold War is no more.

Except, of course, for that island atavism just south of Key West, where the learning curve long ago turned into a continuous loop.

The Agony And The Irony

Esteban Yan, call home. It’s that bad for the bedeviled Rays.

Lou Piniella won’t quit; he leaves too much money on the table. The Rays won’t fire him; they’d have to ante up. Barring a buy-out and a deal with another team, Lou, Stu Sternberg and Vince Naimoli are stuck with each other through next season. The Axis of Upheaval.

But here’s the real rub for Lou. He’s smart enough not to walk away from millions, but he’s proud enough to care that his reputation and legacy are taking a pounding.

His has been a solid managerial career with one World Series ring. He left Seattle with marginal-to-arguable Hall of Fame credentials. But these last 2 ½ seasons his winning percentage has plummeted, although there was consolation in taking the Rays from bad to slightly less bad. After this season, however, even that dubious standard will likely not be met.

There may be only one way for the 62-year-old manager with a Rays’ contract through 2006 to make a real run at the Hall. He needs to preside over a turn-around next season. Pipe-line prospects have to produce; management has to spend seriously and wisely on pitching; and Aubrey Huff has to stop playing like the second coming of Ben Grieve.

That’s how Lou gets into the Hall.

No, I don’t like his chances either.

RIP?

Some Floridians were willing to cut Jeb Bush some slack when he interfered in the Terri Schiavo case. They accorded him the benefit of his own religious doubts.

He has certainly ceded that moral high ground, however, in the aftermath of that autopsy report that exonerated Michael Schiavo from any mistreatment charges. With his cynical call for yet more “closure” – asking prosecutors to go back 15 years and review the circumstances of Terri Schiavo’s collapse – he has further aired his own arrogance.

Terri Schiavo, RIP. And, no, it doesn’t mean Review In Perpetuity.