Religious Outrage Update

Where Danish cartoons left off, “South Park,” has brazenly chosen to proceed. And sacrilegious  humor — at the expense of the prophet Muhammad — apparently remains a capital offense.

This time a radical Muslim group has warned that SP producers could face the same gruesome fate as the murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. For an animated cartoon.

Every group, of course, has its radical elements. But where, we are again reminded, are the effigy-burnings and massive street demonstrations of outrage and, indeed, physical threats against those who continue to kill and maim the innocent in the name of jihad?

Surely sectarian satire isn’t a worst offense than murder, including suicide bombings and videotaped throat slashings.

Surely.

Rowdies Return

The Rowdies are back. And I still miss them.

Back in the day, the Tampa Bay Rowdies were synonymous with textbook marketing with a cast of young, friendly foreign soccer players who truly seemed to enjoy their ambassadorial roles in the Tampa of the mid-1970s. They put on clinics, turned up at birthday parties and hung out at Boneshakers in Hyde Park. They weren’t overpaid, and they never showed up on police blotters. And before there was a Lombardi Trophy or a Stanley Cup around here, there was a North American Soccer League Soccer Bowl championship in 1975.

That was then, this is not.

Quoteworthy

* “The idea that talk is cheap will be translated to: A lack of action will be very expensive. Once people in Hillsborough County are exposed to the options — what if we do this vs. what if we do nothing at all — the debate changes.” — Political strategist Adam Goodman, currently working on behalf of the pro-transit group Moving Hillsborough Forward.

* “I’m clearly not (backing rail) because I think it’s great for my political career.” — Hillsborough County Commission Mark Sharpe, who is up for re-election this year.

* “It would be a terrific location. I have a lot of friends here in Tampa, and I must admit it would be a lot of fun coming back at the Republican convention. Whether I’m in the mix or not is a different matter.” — Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

* “What we’re seeing with (Tampa Bay public company) corporate earnings is completely consistent with an economy emerging out of a severe and protracted recession.” — Sean Snaith, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Economic Competiveness.

* “Charlie Crist has shown time and again that he cannot be trusted in Washington to take on the Obama agenda because on issue after issue he actually supports that agenda.” — Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has endorsed Marco Rubio for the U.S. Senate.

* “The Republic Party like the Democratic Party goes through phases where it reidentifies itself. Right now this party is very conservative and there’s good reasons. I saw a bumper stick over this weekend that said, ‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.'” — Sen. George LeMieux.

* “The cost of stabilizing the financial system is likely to be significantly lower than previously expected.” — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

* “Investment banks such as Goldman Sachs were not simply market-makers, they were self-interested promoters of risky and complicated financial schemes that helped trigger the crisis. They bundled toxic mortgages into complex financial instruments, got the credit rating agencies to label them as AAA securities, and sold them to investors, magnifying and spreading risk throughout the financial system, and all too often betting against the instruments they sold and profiting at the expense of their clients.” — Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan.

* “To elect is a verb that does not apply in this case. Just confirm or ratify what has been decided by others.” — Internationally prominent, award-winning Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez on Cuba’s recent national elections.

* “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the American Indians. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.” — Professor Stephen Hawking.

Rowdies’ Retrospective: A Textbook Study

You can’t go home again.

Granted, Thomas Wolfe didn’t have the reincarnated Tampa Bay Rowdies in mind. And would that they could prove him wrong.

For now, behold the reborn Rowdies of the feisty but modest U.S. Soccer Federation Division II, a level below the established Major League Soccer.

Recall their antecedent.

The Rowdies, as a 1975 expansion franchise in the old North American Soccer League, were this area’s first professional sports franchise. They put the Tampa Bay region, which had a great airport, nice beaches, spring training baseball, Santo Trafficante and nothing else that outsiders seemed to notice, on the national sports map. Before there were the Bucs and classy, number one overall college draft choice Lee Roy Selmon (in 1976), there were the Rowdies and classy, number one overall college draft pick Farrukh Quarishi. Before there was a Bucs’ Super Bowl win (2003) and a Tampa Bay Lightning Stanley Cup (2004), there was a Rowdies’ Soccer Bowl championship (1975).

Flash back 35 years.

Back then, Mayor Richard Daly of Chicago had just won another term and Jack Nicklaus had just won another Masters. The U.S. ended its military involvement in Vietnam. Queen Elizabeth knighted Charlie Chaplin. “Jaws” won big at the box office. John Paul Stevens replaced the retiring William O. Douglas on the U.S. Supreme Court and Bill Poe had already taken over from Dick Greco as mayor of Tampa. The cost of mailing a first class letter went from 10 cents to 13 cents. Patty Hearst was caught. Jimmy Hoffa was missing. Francisco Franco was dead.

And the Rowdies were engaged in an intriguing experiment: debuting a relatively unfamiliar sport in a virgin pro market — but where the biggest competition was jai-alai, wrestling and greyhound racing. There was potential, especially among the young whose more tenuous ties to football, baseball and basketball permitted other options. But the approach had to be spot on.

It was.

The emphasis was on marketing. A combination of education and accessibility, plus a catchy fight song and bumper stickers that whimsically declared the Rowdies “a kick in the grass.” The onus was on the Rowdies to make the case for the sport known to the rest of the world as “football.” And they delivered. It was textbook, Marketing 101.

It was critically important that its players were seemingly sent from Central Casting. They were young, friendly and foreign  — mostly from the UK, but Iran and Morocco were represented too — with attitudes and accents that served them well as de facto ambassadors.  They put on clinics at schools, especially elementary and middle. They showed up at all kinds of functions — from civic celebrations to birthday parties. They gathered at Boneshakers in Hyde Park to down a few pints with their “Fannies.”

Nobody showed up on police blotters. Nobody talked “smack.” Nobody evidenced “swagger,” although Rodney Marsh could get clownish. Nobody thought community work was beneath them. Think Brad Richards and Derrick Brooks. Imagine a team of Mike Alstotts and Carlos Penas. That classy. Just not that rich.

That was then. This is not.

It’s still the Great Recession, and this area’s been hammered. There’s plenty of competition for those discretionary entertainment dollars. Soccer popularity at the youth league level still hasn’t translated into comparable success beyond that. No soccer game in the U.S., for example, gets as much coverage as the NFL draft, which isn’t even a game. Along with hockey, soccer still faces a tough slog for media credibility vis-a-vis the incumbent, football-baseball-basketball axis.

Back in the day, the Rowdies averaged nearly 30,000 fans one year. One Fourth of July, the Rowdies-New York Cosmos game drew more than 56,000 to old Tampa Stadium.

This latest Rowdie incarnation will play at Steinbrenner Field, which holds about 10,000. (The home opener is Saturday, 7:30 pm, May 8, against the Austin Aztex.) The Rowdies won their opener, 1-0, on the road against Crystal Palace Baltimore. Attendance was announced as 1,029.

No, this is not the return of the Rowdies as we once knew them. But if this latest iteration references the playbook from 1975, it has a chance to make a mark. The times have changed, but the script is still relevant. A well-promoted, family-oriented, reasonably-priced, entertaining product featuring athletes that fans can identify with has a shot.

Sure, the challenges are formidable, but when the original Rowdies debuted three and a half decades ago, there wasn’t even high school soccer around here. That’s all changed. Arguably, that — as well as the well-established youth soccer leagues for boys and girls — translates into meaningful demand.

No, you can’t go home again. But you can return to the basics.

Tenure And Common Sense

So much, thanks to Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto, for the top-down, heavy-handed Senate Bill 6. But the issues of teacher tenure, pay and overall accountability are still alive and, well, divisive and will return.

Whatever the form, here’s hoping that a Tallahassee consensus can rally around — or at least accept — a few fundamental principles. To wit:

*Tenure should change because teaching can’t be a sinecure for those who are not very good at teaching kids. Being boring, irrelevant and ineffective should be a fire-able offense.

*Any tenure and pay changes should be premised on teacher input — and not overly dependent on tests that are too vulnerable to variables that skew results.

*Let’s not evaluate teachers as if they were foremen responsible for the widget output of generic shift workers.  Schools aren’t learning factories. Indeed, many are de facto, one-stop social agencies for whoever and whatever comes coursing through their portals.

Tallahassee: A Skewed Priorities Update

Here we go again: The Florida Legislature’s annual exercise in avoiding necessary revisions in the state’s antiquated, revenue-raising formula. Once again, no one in Tallahassee wants to talk about taxing services, eliminating unjustified sales-tax exemptions or getting serious about taxing Internet retailers. 

In fact, if the House had its way, it would help balance the budget by redirecting more than $460 million from the state’s transportation trust fund. Now it’s compromised to a proposed raid of less than $200 million. That could still mean project delays for a state that is already transportation-challenged. And it would still  mean undermining one of the better job-generating catalysts at our disposal.

The bottom line: (mega-growth era) business as usual during times that are anything but.

Norman’s Taxing Rhetoric on Transit

The final public hearing on the transit-tax referendum will be next month. Then Hillsborough County Commissioners will officially vote on whether it should go on the November ballot. Until then, apparently,  Commissioner Jim Norman will rail on. He recently noted at a workshop that his fellow (majority) commissioners were “out of touch” and a “laughingstock” for even considering such a referendum during a down economy.

Let’s see if we have this straight.  Surely, the commissioner isn’t saying, in effect: “When in doubt, or certainly when in a recession, we can’t chance letting the people have a say where their taxes are involved. As for the region’s future economic viability and all that, we’ll have to let that ride for now. It’s no time to get all visionary. Let’s concentrate on worrying about the economy.”

Surely.

Oval Office Chops

President Obama just hosted the largest conference — leaders from 46 countries — in the United States since the gathering that founded the United Nations back in 1945. It was the nuclear summit, where the international community endorsed the president’s goal to cooperate in securing nuclear materials from terrorists.  No, it didn’t rebottle the nuclear genie, but it helped.

The previous week the president had met with Russian counterpart Dmitri Medvedev in Prague to sign a new arms control treaty that reduced the number of strategic warheads each side has deployed. He also announced an updated “Nuclear Posture Review” that is a key step toward a saner, more credible nuclear policy.

Meanwhile, Tea Party huckster and Fox celebrity Sarah Palin mocked his NPR as well as his bona fides, noting the “vast nuclear experience that (Obama) acquired as a community organizer.”

Put it this way. Who in their right mind would have wanted this embarrassingly ill-informed, platitude-spouting,  media hustler hosting a 47-nation nuclear summit and resetting critical geopolitical ties with Russia with the New START treaty? Probably not even John McCain.

And speaking of, thanks again, Senator McCain.  You could have, you know, lost with your dignity intact and the country unimperiled by a lightweight, divisive diva masquerading as a serious public figure.

Cuban-American Politics: Como Siempre

Florida Rep. David Rivera has upped the ante again on pandering politics. The Miami Republican who nearly succeeded in imposing exorbitant fees on travel agents booking flights to Cuba two years ago is back at it.

This time the man who hopes to replace Cuban hard-line U.S. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart in Congress has proposed an export gambit. He wants Florida to ban the distribution of its “certificate of free sale” on goods headed to Cuba. It’s not that much, but it’s symbolic. While “No certified ham croquettes for Cuba!” won’t become a memorable rallying cry, it will doubtless be politically helpful in a congressional district with lots of Cuban-Americans.  

By way of an explanation other than political self-interest, Rivera cites the federal government’s incongruous list of those countries it accuses of sponsoring terrorism. Cuba is still implausibly lumped in with the likes of Iran and Sudan.

Or maybe Rivera knows more than he can let on. Indeed, if Cuba does have ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, it sure in hell shouldn’t get certified croquettes from Florida.