swordfish

Hey wait - don't pull me into this urination contest.....

Only real rock fans will understand this......

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/21/business/volkswagen-racist-ad-instagram/index.html London (CNN Business)Volkswagen has apologized for posting a racist video promoting its new Golf 8 on the company's official Instagram page. The video clip has been withdrawn but not before it was re-posted elsewhere on social media. It showed an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist or Little Settler. "We posted a racist advertising video on Volkswagen's Instagram channel," the VW brand's head of sales and marketing Jürgen Stackmann and group head of diversity Elke Heitmüller said in an apology posted on social media. "We understand the public outrage at this. Because we're horrified, too," they added. "On behalf of Volkswagen AG, we apologize to the public at large for this film. And we apologize in particular to those who feel personally hurt by the racist content because of their own history." A screen grab of the advert. Volkswagen has withdrawn the video, but it was re-posted elsewhere on social media. Volkswagen (VLKAF) apologized in a separate statement and said that, given its own history, "it does not tolerate any form of racism, xenophobia or discrimination." The company was founded in 1937 under the Nazi regime and used slave labor from concentration camps to build vehicles in its early years. It is now the world's biggest automaker, delivering nearly 11 million vehicles in 2019. The group makes cars under the VW, Audi, Skoda, Seat and Porsche brands. Stackmann and Heitmüller described the video as an "insult to every decent person." "We're ashamed of it and cannot explain how it came about. All the more reason for us to make sure we clear this up. And we will make the results and consequences of the investigation public," they added. Last year, VW apologized after CEO Herbert Diess used the expression "Ebit macht frei," or "Ebit sets you free," at a management event. Ebit is short for earnings before interest and tax and is a measure of company profits. The phrase sounds similar to "Arbeit macht frei," which was inscribed on the gates of Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In 2017, a commercial equating women to used cars angered consumers in China and forced an apology from Audi. The advert, which only aired in China, was produced by the used car division of Volkswagen's joint venture in China. It too was withdrawn. A small ad on Instgram.....Was this a sign of the racist origins of VW raising it's head, a marketing mistake, or a marketing ploy to get VW in the headlines.....

Thanks Bobref. Can you expound on your statement I highlighted? Do you think the questions raised are novel or the judge's "activism"?

So Indiana is now moving to phase 3. On Friday. It should have been Friday all along - originally it was this coming Monday......Memorial Day......So Campgrounds were planning on being closed during a weekend where many of them make 50% of their annual revenue.......Today many campground owners are literally buried in phone calls from people RE-reserving sites they had to cancel......and scrambling to ready the parks fro a huge opener.......SF is glad the Governor pulled the trigger for this weekend, but, Again - Should have been Friday all along......

Yet nobody wants to answer this question!!!??? Again - IMHO - this judge should be tossed from the bench for this. Am I wrong? Legal Beagles?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/michael-flynns-attorneys-appeal-court-order-that-allows-outside-groups-retired-federal-judge-to-argue-against-tossing-guilty-plea/2020/05/19/9e8e014c-99dc-11ea-a282-386f56d579e6_story.html Michael Flynn’s attorneys asked an appeals court on Tuesday to order a federal judge to dismiss the conviction of President Trump’s former national security adviser. Flynn’s lawyers also asked the appeals court in Washington to reverse the judge’s order allowing outside groups and a retired federal judge to argue against the Justice Department’s request to toss the case. U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan last week paused Flynn’s case to hear from interested parties and appointed former New York federal judge John Gleeson to argue against the government request. Sullivan also asked Gleeson to examine whether the former three-star general may have committed perjury while pleading guilty to lying about his pre-inauguration contacts with Russia’s ambassador. In a 44-page filing to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Flynn’s lawyers accused Sullivan of bias and acting at “loggerheads” with recent Supreme Court precedent. Sidney Powell and Flynn’s other attorneys also asked that the case be reassigned for any future proceedings. “The egregious Government misconduct, and the three-year abuse of General Flynn and his family, cry out for ending this ordeal immediately and permanently,” Powell wrote. “The district judge’s orders reveal his plan to continue the case indefinitely, rubbing salt in General Flynn’s open wound from the Government’s misconduct and threatening him with criminal contempt.” The Justice Department on May 7 moved to toss out the guilty plea of the highest-ranking Trump adviser convicted in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation. The department concluded that Flynn should never have been interviewed by the FBI and therefore his lies concealing his Russian contacts were immaterial to any crime. Critics dispute the department’s move, saying it distorted facts and appeared to serve the president’s personal political interests by giving an aide impunity to lie to government investigators. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying in an FBI interview on Jan. 24, 2017, to conceal conversations with Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador at the time. The conversations involved talks before Trump took office about avoiding U.S. sanctions and other policies imposed late in Barack Obama’s administration after Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. In a declassified email released Tuesday by Senate Republicans, former national security adviser Susan E. Rice noted concern in Obama’s White House about the frequency of Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak and that the then-FBI director said sharing classified information with him could “potentially” be an issue. Obama emphasized that the handling of the Russia investigation should be done by the book, Rice wrote in a note to herself on Jan. 20, 2017, which was Inauguration Day. In their filing Tuesday, Flynn’s lawyers said prosecutors, not judges, have the authority to decide how to handle pending criminal charges. Judges, they said, may not “change the issues in the case by inviting or appointing” others to perform the executive branch’s duties to investigate or prosecute. “A district court cannot deny the Government’s motion to dismiss because the judge has ‘a disagreement with the prosecution’s exercise of charging authority,’ they said. “Nor should a court second-guess the Government’s ‘conclusion that additional prosecution or punishment would not serve the public interest.’” In asking that the case be reassigned, Flynn’s defense criticized Sullivan for suggesting at a December 2018 hearing that Flynn may have committed “treason,” before correcting himself, and for saying the former general had “sold [his] country out.” “This is an umpire who has decided to steal public attention from the players and focus it on himself,” Powell wrote. “He wants to pitch, bat, run bases, and play shortstop. In truth, he is way out in left field.” The filing also suggests that the retired judge Sullivan appointed is not impartial because of an opinion piece by Gleeson that appeared in The Washington Post. In the article, Gleeson questioned the Justice Department’s move to dismiss the case against Flynn and suggested that the court “assess the credibility of the department’s stated reasons for abruptly reversing course.” Flynn’s attorneys petitioned the appeals court for a writ of mandamus, used when no other relief is available, that requires a party to show “clear and indisputable” right to reverse error by a court. Meeting that high bar may be difficult because the judge has not made a decision yet on the Justice Department’s request, but has appointed a retired judge to advise him now that the government has decided to drop the case. In abandoning the nearly three-year-old case, the Justice Department cited recently uncovered FBI records showing that the bureau had decided to close a counterintelligence investigation of Flynn — dubbed Operation Razor — before learning of his December 2016 calls with Kislyak. The Justice Department also said the FBI knew from transcripts that the calls probably did not give rise to a crime by themselves and that FBI officials differed over how to handle or interpret his actions. Legal analysts and those involved in the case vigorously dispute the Justice Department’s claims as an attempt to please the president and attack his adversaries. Critics of Attorney General William P. Barr’s decision argued that the FBI had ample legitimate grounds to investigate Flynn’s lies, which went to the heart of the investigation into whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with Russia’s interference in the election. Flynn admitted under oath three times before two federal judges that he gave false statements to the FBI as well as to the White House. Federal law criminalizes lying in any matter under court, congressional or executive branch jurisdiction. Seriously, critics notwithstanding - in what what court of law can a judge (after both the prosecutor and the defendant BOTH determine to drop a case brought before it) determine he/she can exact prosecution on the defendant? Isn't a judge.....a judge? IMHO - This guy needs to be thrown off the bench.

Come on - back in the day we had the NLC thread pumped up by now. In fact many of the guys were already giving their projections for the season by now!! 😂

Maybe they could ask the Girl Scouts to help?

https://www.chicksonright.com/blog/2020/05/19/nbc-news-reporting-barack-obama-will-not-attend-portrait-unveiling-until-trump-out-of-office/?fbclid=IwAR03_8wTWqlpcvA7gsHqQNSZKuCQfjbdYCVy0qFUR4LZl2rct2L_r0_RD3M Former President Barack Hussein Obama will reportedly forgo visiting the White House for the unveiling of his official White House portrait until Donald Trump is out office, according to NBC News. If that means waiting until 2025, that is what he will do. Obama has apparently had a change of heart since 2012, when he said this at George W. Bush’s unveiling: “We may have our differences politically, but the presidency transcends those differences.” Honestly, even if Obama were willing to attend, I should hope Trump would not host him. It appears increasingly likely that Obama was involved in spying on Trump and sabotaging him and his incoming administration on the basis of lies about Russian collusion. Talk about breaking traditions! I am more concerned with traditions on peaceful transfers of power than about portrait unveilings. BHO's true colors are coming out.

Yep - Orange Man Bad........No matter what.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/18/politics/donald-trump-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus/index.html (CNN)President Donald Trump claimed Monday he is taking daily doses of hydroxychloroquine, a drug he's long touted as a potential coronavirus cure even as medical experts and the US Food and Drug Administration question its efficacy and warn of potentially harmful side effects. Speaking at a meeting of restaurant executives, Trump said he began taking the antimalarial drug after consulting the White House doctor, though stopped short of saying his physician had actually recommended the drug. "A couple of weeks ago, I started taking it," Trump said. He later said he'd been taking it every day for a week and a half. The admission was a dramatic development in Trump's attempts to promote hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus, which began earlier in the outbreak and has been met with resistance from medical professionals. Because the drug is prescribed to treat malaria and other conditions, Trump has cast it as safe and suggested coronavirus patients have little to lose by trying it. But at least one study has shown the drug does not work against Covid-19 and could cause heart problems. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It follows a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that also showed the drug doesn't fight the virus. Even before these reports were published, the FDA and the National Institutes of Health issued warnings about using the drug for coronavirus patients. Trump said he hadn't been exposed, and that he started taking the drug because he had heard from frontline responders who sent him letters saying they were taking it preventatively. "Here's my evidence: I get a lot of positive calls about it," Trump said. Asked if the White House doctor recommended he begin taking hydroxychloroquine, Trump demurred. "I asked him what do you think, he said, 'Well if you'd like it,' " the President told reporters. The President's physician, Navy Cmdr. Sean Conley, alluded in a memo released Monday night to Trump's personal valet testing positive two weeks ago for coronavirus. While Conley didn't say directly that Trump started taking hydroxychloroquine in response to the valet testing positive, the timing mentioned by Trump and the positive test match up. "After numerous discussions, he and I had regarding the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks," Conley wrote, adding that Trump has taken multiple tests for coronavirus -- all negative -- and remains symptom free. While Trump admitted he doesn't know if the drug works, he claimed "if it doesn't, you're not going to get sick and die." The FDA has warned against the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat the novel coronavirus and said they should only be used in hospitals or clinical trials because they can kill or cause serious side effects. These include serious heart rhythm problems in Covid-19 patients treated with the drugs, especially when they are combined with the antibiotic azithromycin or other medications that can affect the heart. Trump has a common form of heart disease, based on the results of his physical. In an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" on Monday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the unproven nature of the drug and its questioned effectiveness in treating Covid-19 worried her. "As far as the President is concerned, he's our President and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and in his, shall we say, weight group, that is ... morbidly obese, they say. So I think it's not a good idea," Pelosi said. Trump does not qualify as morbidly obese based on the results of his physical. Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat or prevent malaria and to treat autoimmune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Trump began promoting it two months ago as coronavirus began spreading to every part of the country, setting in motion stay-at-home orders and shutting down the economy. He was encouraged by certain allies in conservative media, who also hailed the drug as a potential solution to the growing crisis. But even some of Trump's closest medical advisers expressed caution, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who voiced skepticism about touting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus before it could be adequately tested. Recently, a US Health and Human Services whistleblower alleged he came under pressure from political leadership at HHS to make hydroxychloroquine widely available after Trump repeatedly proclaimed its potential benefits during his daily White House briefing So the President is taking a medicine that he and his doctor have determined is right for him to take. He didn't "announce" it. It came up in his meeting with the restaurant industry representatives. Now it has exploded since the Speaker of the House (who also doesn't have an M.D. after her name) along with the rest of the left wing doesn't think he should be taking it...... https://www.mediaite.com/tv/nancy-pelosi-not-a-good-idea-for-morbidly-obese-trump-to-take-hydroxychloroquine/ Speaker Nancy Pelosi remarked upon President Donald Trump’s personal health in criticizing his announcement that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine. Pelosi joined Anderson Cooper on CNN Monday night, hours after the president’s comments, and offered a rather direct answer. “He’s our president and I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group and his, shall we say, weight group — morbidly obese, they say,” Pelosi said. “I think it’s not a good idea,” she added. Now we are supposed to think she cares about the President......? Now she is spreading a LIE about the President. He ISN'T morbidly obese. The doctor said that..... First of all, this drug has been around for a long time with FDA approval, (who also approved it's use for this virus under a doctor's supervision) and any prescribed medicine is between the patient and the doctor.

SF, seeing no one has started an NLC thread for 2020 yet....(what's wrong with you new guys?) .....is going to start one with pics from the new Northridge Sports complex getting closer to completion. These pics are supposed to wind up in the Elkhart Truth.

👌 O-Tay...

Really......Not one? Wondering where you got your 99.95% stat from.......😁

Jason Spriggs - Concord Class of 2011 / IU.......Now with Chicago Bears after 4 years with the Packers......

Love that GIF

How SF felt this weekend at Lowes when I saw another shopper without a mask......

SF wonders if Howe, Gonzo, Irish, Trojan had nothing better to do on a beautiful Saturday then sit on this thread and post over 4 pages of something that had NOTHING to do with the current President......So here was the discussion from Friday afternoon........