Pirate's Cove

And the team went immediately into groveling mode

(CBS St. Louis) A photo of St. Louis Cardinals mascot Fredbird holding a “police lives matter” sign was posted to a police association Facebook page before the team asked that it be taken down.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports sports website Deadspin took aim at the mascot last week after the photo was posted to the St. Louis Police Officers Association Facebook page.

Deadspin titled the post: “Your Racist Uncle Will Love This Picture Of The Cardinals’ Mascot.”

Cardinals spokesman Ron Watermon says the photo was taken at Busch Stadium after a couple asked Fredbird for a photo. Watermon says Fredbird didn’t know what was on the sign and when the team learned it was on the association website, the team asked for the photo to come down.

Anyone think the police lost a bit of caring about the Cardinals?

“A man and a woman stopped Fredbird to request a quick photograph. While the man was taking the picture, the woman standing next to Fredbird asked him to hold up the sign. Fredbird was unaware of the content of the sign,” Watermon explained to the Post-Dispatch.

I wonder what would have happened had the sign said “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”? Oh, right, that happened with the St. Louis Rams, where players came out on to the field before a game. Even thought there had been tons of evidence released at the time showing that the Hands Up Don’t Shoot meme was based on lies, and that Michael Brown was the aggressor. Here’s what the unhinged, and Very Pale Skinned Tom Ley, writes at Deadspin

(Here’s where some of you are going to say, “What, police lives don’t matter?” To which all we can say is, “Cut the shit.” Of course police lives matter, but used as a direct retort to the non-controversial idea that black lives matter, the phrase is an at best crypto-racist way of dismissing legitimate anger about police violence in black communities.)

Got that? It’s raaaaacist.

Meanwhile

(Baltimore Sun) As Aaron Bryant walked along North Avenue on the night of Freddie Gray’s funeral, his photographer’s eye noted how the rising flames framed the “waves of police in riot gear” and the wall of ministers calling for calm.

Instinctively, the Baltimore man says, he began mentally cataloging the most evocative “visual cues” around him. He knew they would help inform his work chronicling the moment as a photography curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History & Culture, now under construction on the National Mall in Washington.

Later, when colleague Tulani Salahu-Din looked at an image Bryant had snapped of a burning car on North Avenue, her eyes immediately zeroed in on a single object: the overturned bar stool in the front seat that had been used to smash the car’s windshield.

In the bar stool, Salahu-Din saw an item the museum “might be able to salvage” in the days or months after the unrest, to help tell the human story of the clashes as part of a future exhibit.

“What did it mean to the person who threw it?” asked Salahu-Din, 55, a content development and three-dimensional object collection specialist at the museum. “What did it mean to the shopkeeper who lost it?”

That’s right, they’re looking to use pictures and objects from riots in a display at a Smithsonian museum, which celebrates Black life. They actually want a bar stool used to damage a Baltimore police cruiser, which was then set on fire, a bar stool stolen from a Baltimore business which was damaged during the riots. Hey, maybe they can include people looting toilet paper and feminine hygiene products, too. They think this is a positive thing, highlighting riots in the Black Baltimore community. I would think this would be a negative display, but these employees apparently think this is a positive.

Crossed at Right Wing News.