The unique perspective and provocative opinions of Joe O’Neill
Begged Questions
Why is there a market for dead-on, gun-shaped cigarette lighters?
Why would anyone want a pet python?
Why would anyone license anyone (who’s not a herpetologist) to have a pet python?
Why wouldn’t you permit electric-cart shuttles in amenity-challenged, taxi-shunning, downtown Tampa?
Why, during turbulent economic times, wouldn’t a “Benevolent Association” recommend that its (Police) members accept a pay-raise freeze to help save the jobs of fellow city workers?
Why does Kevin White keep getting elected?
Why does it take a swine-flu scare to prompt the school board to do away with the educationally-indefensible policy of attendance-based exam exemptions?
Why would a high-caliber surgeon want a souvenir bullet?
Why would you quibble about Derek Jeter’s variance addition of two additional fence feet once you’ve established the reality of the largest home in the county (33,000 square feet) being shoe-horned into a residential neighborhood on Davis Islands?
Why wouldn’t parents of Casey Turner’s St. Pete fifth-graders feel creeped out that their kids’ 41-year-old “hip-hop redneck” teacher hosts bikini contests at a local bar and recently participated in CBS’ insipidly suggestive and obnoxious reality show, “Big Brother”?
Why wouldn’t a state (for example, this one) ban texting while driving?
Why would anyone listen to what the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement has to say about anything, including the sidewalk privatizing at downtown St. Petersburg’s BayWalk?
Why do otherwise responsible, intelligent conservatives not see through the shallow sham that is Sarah Palin?
Why is it that tort reform isn’t a bigger factor (than, say, the specious euthanasia or socialism scenarios) in the fractious, health-care-reform debate?
Why would anyone doubt that the only relevant criterion in Philadelphia for judging the loathsome, arrogant, obviously well-scripted Michael Vick is how the Eagles do this year?
Why don’t we focus more on all those prominent people who never needed a second chance because they never hurt anyone or anything in the first place?
Why bother putting a morals clause into a contract that includes “willful conduct that could objectively be determined to bring public disrepute or scandal” if you’re not going to apply it to the sleazy conduct of University of Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino?
Why would anyone read — let alone buy — the biography “Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs That Shocked the World”?
Why do so many yahoos have to “channel” the Founding Fathers to make the case about the right to buy assault weapons?
Why should the U.S., despite improved technology, even consider following the lead of Europe and lift the ban on in-flight cellphone calls — unless lawmakers and regulators actually want to add to the level of flying stress by imposing chronically inane cellphone conversations on captive audiences?
Why wouldn’t even New York Yankee fans be embarrassed by their Pinstripers, who could spend more the half a billion dollars on free agents this year but can’t ante up $42,000 for the standard Tampa Water Department fee for installing a bigger meter at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa?
Why does Mary Mulhern get grief for tapping into her city council discretionary fund to partly pay for her visit to Cuba in hopes of better positioning Tampa for inevitable trade opportunities, when a similar amount, if allocated for, say, an out-of-town “Best Municipal Practices For Recessionary Times” convention would not have drawn such scrutiny?
Why are those “Welcome to Tampa/City of Champions” signs still up when it’s been, well, a while and there’s not even an Arena Football League anymore?
Why would anyone entertain real hopes of USF’s football team finally finishing strong and winning big, pressure-packed Big East games down the stretch when Jim Leavitt, hardly the avatar of sideline decorum and play-calling composure, is still head coach?
Why would the International Olympic Committee back any sport (golf most recently) that doesn’t consider the Olympics as its ultimate forum and quintessential competition?
Why don’t more people, notably in the service sector, respond to “thank you” with “you’re welcome” – and not “no problem”? — unless, of course, there had been something problematic about doing their job.