It's actually sunny with blue skies trying to emerge over at CL's Ybor City offices this morning – a little tease of hope before the next onslaught?
With stormy weather being the dominant story in Tampa Bay yesterday, Times reporter Rick Danielson posed the question to some high ranking officials – could a storm/hurricane like what has hit the region stop the RNC from happening, at least for a day?
The story quotes Mayor Bob Buckhorn and Host Committee CEO Ken Jones as scoffing at the notion, but with all due respect to those esteemed gentlemen, it's ain't their call.
As Danielson does note in his story, the decision to postpone or cancel the RNC would be up to the Republican Party and its organizers, but contrary to the headline ("Debby wouldn't halt RNC"), in fact a hurricane did cancel one day of the 2008 RNC, a hurricane over a thousand miles away.
That was Hurricane Gustav, which threatened to nail Texas, not Minnesota, on the eve of the 2008 RNC. In retrospect, that seems sort of crazy. But in fact, it was all about perception, as the Bush administration, fairly or not, was condemned for seeming to be indifferent to the plight of New Orleans residents after Hurricane Katrina hit exactly three years earlier. The sensitivity factor played a huge part of why the R's canceled the first day of the 2008 convention (even though Gustav was a bit of a bust, actually).
It also proved that you don't need four days for a political convention (In fact, the Dems have already canceled the first day of their 4-day party this summer).
Speaking of the convention, there will be an outrageously huge party that the RNC Host Committee is putting together in St. Petersburg the Sunday night before the main event begins.
The City of Tampa introduced new technology that will keep local residents on top of things like road closures in downtown in the event of bad weather or the upcoming RNC…
It ain't gay marriage, but at least same-sex couples (and their straight counterparts) can now register as domestic partners in Gulfport and Tampa.
And over the weekend dozens of self-confessed geeks were holed up inside a Tampa Hyatt Regency boardroom in the city's first official "Hackathon" that may deliver a new web/mobile application to aid city residents.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2012.
