Florida State Seminoles

[eCat]

you think this helps Nascar?

[aTm]

It's also very weird right now because of the virus. Normally a driver would be working with his team in the garage, and getting practice laps in the car, etc, signing shit for fans, meeting with sponsors, fans with passes would be in the garage area, etc. If this was discovered normally, the whole team would probably all know and discuss it right there in the garage.

Right now there is no on track practice, there is no qualifying, the drivers and everybody else except the crew are banned from the garage. The drivers, including Bubba Wallace are never in the garage unless they have to drive the car there during the race after an accident. The drivers basically show up to the race track (no friends or family at the track either), get in the car their teams have prepared without them and race. Bubba Wallace was never in the garage to see or find anything and anything he was told was likely just a phone call.

[aTm]

you think this helps Nascar?

NASCAR has its own set of motives. They are not involved with what Bubba Wallace or Richard Petty Motorsports does except to get involved with punishing him if they do something wrong. NASCAR is like the MLB commissioners office and Richard Petty Motorsports is more like a franchise like the Reds. In terms of PR, the Reds do whatever to make themselves look good to their fans to make money. Richard Petty Motorsports and Bubba Wallace, on the other hand, does not have to worry directly about fans, its the racetracks and NASCAR that need that. What RPM and Bubba are concerned with is the sponsors. Bubba Wallace is essentially a walking advertisement, and yes any time he is in the news it helps them appease the companies that have paid or will in the future pay to get their logos splashed on his firesuit and his car.

Obviously they wouldnt directly want to get involved in a revealed "hoax" that caused a backlash, but you can easily get into that if you aren't being told everything you need to know about whats actually going on.

[aTm]

For the same reason, a smart person would also take a cynical edge to the big display made by all the drivers before the race the other day. Sure, all of the drivers probably did have good personal intentions, but at the end of the day, it was really 30+ guys all emblazoned in corporate colors and logos all making that big gesture. It may as well have been a PC post directly from the social media accounts of Busch Beer, FedEx, Miller Lite, Shell, etc.

[eCat]

I don't keep up with Nascar but I will be interested to see how this plays out the rest of the season

Wallace has zero wins/zero pole positions and has finished twice in the top 5 since his rookie season.

Is he Danica Patrick or a serious driver?

[hedge]

Damn, who knew that aTm was the Batman of NASCAR??

[hedge]

"and yes any time he is in the news it helps them appease the companies that have paid or will in the future pay to get their logos splashed on his firesuit and his car."

When I first read that, I thought it said "fruitsuit"...

[eCat]

After the shootings in the past few days near the Capitol Hill anti-police protest zone, the call went out, paradoxically, for the help of the one thing the protest is most arguing against.

“Our movement should demand and insist that the Seattle Police fully investigate this attack and be held accountable to bring the killer(s) to justice,” said Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant in a statement. One paragraph later she re-upped her demand, however, to “defund” these same police.

It wasn’t just Sawant with the suddenly mixed message. City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda noted in a Monday meeting that “we want to make sure that firefighters and EMT have access to do their jobs and help those that need it.”

That seems noncontroversial — except how do we think ambulances get access to often volatile crime scenes? Who typically does that work of securing shooting scenes, so that aid workers can move in?

Even the protesters, who in a statement said they took two shooting victims to the hospital because Seattle police and fire were too slow in getting there, seemed to tacitly acknowledge the limits of a “no-cop” zone.

“We as safety teams are peacekeepers, not police,” read the unsigned statement from the CHOP, or Capitol Hill Organized Protest. “We do not want to be homicide detectives, or CSI, or accessories to this murder.”

This is the irony of CHOP, a few-block occupation of Capitol Hill formed in protest of structural and overt racial bias in police enforcement. The protest has a beautiful spirit, by day anyway, of a mass teach-in and self-governing colony seeking to reimagine a city without militarized, domineering police. Its core demands are simple enough to be printed on the street blockades. “1. Defund SPD by 50% Now. 2. Fund Black communities. 3. Free all protesters.”

But now with three shootings in the past three nights in the immediate vicinity, the CHOP has ended up demonstrating the reverse of its no-cop Utopian goal. It turns out we still need those homicide detectives and the CSI and probably much of whatever else was going on in that boarded-up East Precinct.

“We can police ourselves!” a man was still insisting in one of the CHOP’s intersections on Tuesday when I stopped by.

“The hell we can,” a woman responded under her breath. We were listening to the mother of Lorenzo Anderson, the young man who was slain nearby Sunday morning, express her anguish about the delayed medical response during a livestream show broadcast from a sidewalk in the CHOP zone on Converge Media.

So what happens now? With the CHOP no one seems to know. Some protesters I spoke to Tuesday seemed resigned to eventually leaving, while others said they were just as willing to man the barricades as when the zone first went up.

The bitterness at the police, too, is palpable, with legitimate anger at how Chief Carmen Best and some of her underlings have at times peddled false or misleading information to shape perceptions of what’s going on in the area.

But with the police, the takeaway from the last few days ought to be that the city can’t just defund them. There have to be ways to restructure what they do and how they do it — to turn them into “guardians of the public, not warriors seeking to dominate criminals through toughness,” as the former police chief of Camden, New Jersey, put it recently.

But such reforms are likely to end up costing more money, not less. As they ultimately did when Camden scrapped its police and started over to do more community-minded policing.

“As far as the change that has taken place, the number one difference is resources,” the current Camden chief said recently. “Cops count and police matter, so by almost doubling the amount of officers on the street that has given us a much larger footprint to focus on community engagement and creating a dialogue with residents that has been missing for decades in the city.”

Hard to see how any of that squares with “defund the police.”

The alternative — slashing the Seattle police budget back 20 years, from $400 million to $200 million as Sawant and protesters have suggested — has been tried elsewhere before, with horrendous results. The Washington Post detailed Tuesday how Vallejo, California, did this, and it only escalated friction as strapped officers were constantly in “triage mode” and angry citizens would call for help and the cops often wouldn’t come.

The best ideas to soften the Ramboed-up force — such as by embedding social workers or mental-health specialists with patrol officers — are going to cost more as well.

“Restructure the police” admittedly isn’t as pulse-pounding as “cops are obsolete” or “abolish cops now” or any of the other messages in the CHOP. But the CHOP itself has become exhibit A for how much those slogans are a fantasy.

[eCat]

Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police are examples of slogans that take on their own meaning.

For example, if Black Lives Matter was called "End Police Brutality", I don't think there would be counter protesters saying "End All Brutality" or some variations. The slogan would invite dialog and focus the discussion - not discourse.

The same with Defund the Police. It invokes a response that is highly resistive from many instead of pushing for common ground. A slogan of limiting police responsibilities I'm sure wouldn't be as catchy but it would attract a larger audience.

[aTm]

I don't keep up with Nascar but I will be interested to see how this plays out the rest of the season

Wallace has zero wins/zero pole positions and has finished twice in the top 5 since his rookie season.

Is he Danica Patrick or a serious driver?

Wallace has won in the lower series but Richard Petty Motorsports is not a serious contender to win races except to get lucky at Daytona or Talladega where equipment and engineering of the cars is not the biggest factor (they could also win road course races, but would likely need a better road course specialist driver than Bubba). IMO Bubba Wallace will likely never get a shot with one of the powerhouse teams (which Danica Patrick did because of her sponsor backing)

[eCat]

in other news...

A federal appeals court Wednesday ordered a judge to grant the Justice Department its request to drop charges against former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a petition by Flynn's attorneys to intervene in the case after a district court judge asked an outside counsel to argue against the department's request.

Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents in a 2017 interview related to the federal Russia-2016 Trump campaign collusion probe. However, his attorneys withdrew their client's plea earlier this year, following the release of declassified documents suggesting that the agents broke with protocol in the White House interview. Attorney General William Barr asked the court in May to allow it to have the case dismissed.

[Jungle Rat]

Wow. Just wow. Did they find any other nooses in the other garages? Nope. Kinda weird. Get your facts straight.

[hedge]

I don't keep up with Nascar but I will be interested to see how this plays out the rest of the season

Wallace has zero wins/zero pole positions and has finished twice in the top 5 since his rookie season.

Is he Danica Patrick or a serious driver?

Wallace has won in the lower series but Richard Petty Motorsports is not a serious contender to win races except to get lucky at Daytona or Talladega where equipment and engineering of the cars is not the biggest factor (they could also win road course races, but would likely need a better road course specialist driver than Bubba). IMO Bubba Wallace will likely never get a shot with one of the powerhouse teams (which Danica Patrick did because of her sponsor backing)

What about Durl Waltrip?

[hedge]

"A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals approved a petition by Flynn's attorneys to intervene in the case after a district court judge asked an outside counsel to argue against the department's request."

Two of them are Trump appointees...

[hedge]

"Wow. Just wow. Did they find any other nooses in the other garages? Nope. Kinda weird. Get your facts straight."

Actually, they did...

[Jungle Rat]

2016? You gotta do better.

[hedge]

[eCat]

now they are tearing down statues of anti-slavery heroes. These people don't have an ideaology, they just want chaos

-------------------------------------------------------

Gov. Tony Evers said Wednesday he was prepared to activate the National Guard to protect state properties after protesters outside the Wisconsin Capitol tore down statues commemorating an abolitionist and women's rights and threw a Molotov cocktail into a government building during a night of violence that also included an attack on a state senator.

The violence from a group of between 200 and 300 people broke out Tuesday night as crowds protested the arrest of a Black man who shouted at restaurant customers through a megaphone while carrying a baseball bat.

Officers inside the Capitol used pepper spray to repel protesters who were trying to gain entry into the historic center of state government, Madison police said.

Evers who toured the damage outside the Capitol on Wednesday.

“What happened in Madison last night presented a stark contrast from the peaceful protests we have seen across our state in recent weeks, including significant damage to state property," Evers said in a statement.

The violence unfolded in a city long known as a liberal bastion with a long history of protest, dating back to student-led demonstrations on the University of Wisconsin campus in the 1960s. About 100,000 people protested in 2011 over anger related to anti-union proposals from then-Gov. Scott Walker. Smaller protests are almost a weekly, and sometimes daily, fixture at the Capitol on a host of issues.

It also exposed simmering anger over the 2015 shooting by police of a 19-year-old Black man by an officer who was eventually cleared and remains on the force. That shooting has been referenced by protesters in recent weeks.

The violence started Tuesday after Madison police arrested a protester who came to a restaurant across the street from the Capitol with a bat on his shoulder. Video released by Madison police shows the man, Devenore Johnson, talking through a megaphone while walking around the restaurant’s outdoor patio. He walks inside and paces through the restaurant with the bat on his shoulder, saying he’s “disturbing” the restaurant and talking about God and the police before walking out.

On another video released by police, as many as five officers can be seen taking Johnson to the sidewalk and carrying him to a police squad car after he resisted arrest. Police said the man briefly escaped from the squad car before being tackled.

Johnson was charged in 2015 with being a passenger in a stolen car, resisting an officer and theft, according to online court records. He pleaded guilty to being a passenger and was sentenced to probation. The following year he was charged with being a party to armed robbery and theft. Under a plea deal, he was sentenced to probation after pleading guilty to theft.

Police said on Tuesday night a group of 200 to 300 people gathered and entered a private condominium building where they surrounded a tow truck, forcing the driver to abandon it. The crowd broke windows in multiple buildings, threw a Molotov cocktail into the city-county building and brought down the statues on the grounds of the Capitol.

Protesters chanting for Johnson's release also broke glass at the Tommy Thompson Center, named for the former Republican governor, and smashed windows and lights at the Capitol. Early Wednesday, police in riot gear worked to clear a crowd of about 100 people that remained in the area.

One of the statues toppled, decapitated and dragged into a lake about a half-mile away was of Civil War Col. Hans Christian Heg. He was an anti-slavery activist and leader of an anti-slave catcher militia in Wisconsin who fought for the Union and died from injuries suffered during the Battle of Chickamauga.

The base of the Heg statue was defaced with graffiti Wednesday morning that read “Fire Matt Kenny,” a reference to a white Madison police officer who shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson, a Black man, in 2015. Kenny said Robinson had attacked him and he feared he would take his gun. Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne, who is Black, cleared Kenny of any criminal wrongdoing and he remains a Madison officer.

The other statue taken down represents Wisconsin’s motto of “Forward.” The statue had been vandalized in past protests with paint thrown on it and graffiti spray-painted on and around it.

“Forward” was first installed 125 years ago but replaced with a bronze replica in 1998. It sat prominently outside the Capitol, facing the University of Wisconsin campus and the street lined with bars, restaurants and small businesses. That corridor has been the target of much of the vandalism since the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis after a white police officer used his knee to pin the handcuffed Black man’s neck, even after Floyd stopped moving.

The destruction followed similar unrest nationwide following Floyd’s death, but in other cities statues of Confederate soldiers and other symbols of slavery were destroyed.

Democratic state Sen. Tim Carpenter was assaulted after taking a cellphone video of protesters.

“Punched/kicked in the head, neck, ribs,” Carpenter tweeted around 4 a.m. “Maybe concussion, socked in left eye is little blurry, sore neck & ribs. 8-10 people attacked me. Innocent people are going to get killed. Capitol locked- stuck in office.Stop violence nowPlz!”

Carpenter told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "I don’t know what happened ... all I did was stop and take a picture ... and the next thing I’m getting five-six punches, getting kicked in the head."

Protester Ebony Anderson-Carter told the Wisconsin State Journal that the destruction was spurred in part by state and local officials ignoring calls for change. The Forward and Heg statues stand for good causes, she said, but their display creates a “false representation of what this city is,” she said.

[Jungle Rat]

Fuck those black people? Right e?

[bluetick]

Meanwhile, https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Today saw the single largest new-cases day in the U.S. 36,000+

Also, V.P. Pence, titular head of the Corona Virus Task Force, met with GOP Senators today and implored them to focus on the positives of the crisis, and downplay the negatives.