The Tampa Tribune's lead editorial this morning highlight's HART's upcoming first MetroRapid line that had a groundbreaking ceremony on Monday. The editorial notes that Tampa recently ranked 5th in the nation for traffic congestion, stating, "This region cannot afford to wait years for another tax-for-rail campaign before making improvements."
But that begs the question, less than two years after the transit tax went down to defeat in Hillsborough County, when will it be revived again? Well, if you heard Hillsborough MPO Ray Chiarmonte discuss his findings from recent focus groups on the subject, it won't be anytime soon.
Another day, another round of Republicans named to speak in Tampa at the RNC. The new list includes two Hispanic up-and-comers. With Mitt Romney's dismal polling numbers in this key demographic, Republicans obviously want to show that they are Latino-friendly at their confab later this month.
Florida Democrats are beside themselves with glee over the announcement that Rick Scott will speaking in Tampa at the RNC. Yesterday one of their leaders issued a memo extolling the virtues of Scott speaking in support of Mitt Romney. It is true that despite the numerous appearances Mittens has made in Florida over the past couple of years, none of them has been with the state's governor.
Speaking of the convention, the Host Committee distributed a list of all the different types of businesses that are being patronized by the committee for the convention. Unfortunately, there were no names of the businesses, nor any info on how much they were actually making for their involvement.
For progressives who have little enthusiasm for voting a second time for Barack Obama, there's always the Green Party. This year the ticket is led by Dr. Jill Stein. Her running mate is Philadelphia activist Cheri Honkala, who will be appearing in Tampa later this week.
