NASCAR Dads Seem To Be Really Sensitive About Politics...
Nick Gillespie | July 9, 2008, 10:37am
...or maybe it's just the owners of NASCAR. From Politics:
Voters should not expect to see either John McCain or Barack Obama making appearances at NASCAR events in Daytona Beach Florida, or a dozen other speedways across the country before Election Day. According to officials from the International Speedway Corporation (ISC), which owns the Daytona International Speedway, as well as major facilities in both candidates' home states of Arizona and Illinois, the company is implementing a firm policy that prohibits political candidates from campaigning in any capacity at their racing events.
Politics was informed of the policy after a credentialing request had been denied to cover an unofficial appearance in Daytona by Libertarian Party presidential nominee, Bob Barr. ISC officials explained that credentialing a political reporter would, in their view, constitute the facilitation of a campaign event, in sharp violation of their policy.
The officials declined to provide details of the policy, and offered only a vague explanation of when the policy had gone into effect. But they expressed a belief that fans attending events at their speedways are sensitive to what might be construed as intrusive political activity.
Needless to say, that policy wasn't in place earlier this year when motoring enthusiast Rudy Giuliani campaigned at the Daytona Speedway. More here.
So fans attending events might not want to be burdened by politicians showing up (and who can blame them?), but it's worth remembering that NASCAR and racetrack owners (and others involved in stadiums, arenas, and what-have-you) are never shy about getting public subsidies for their venues. Even when the venue is a NASCAR museum.
Robert | July 9, 2008, 3:06pm | #
I would have thought (American) football would take the prize for most impenetrable rules.
It's certainly in the running, and not only because the game itself, i.e. the
substance of the rules, is complicated. It's also because some of the governing bodies of the game, especially the NFL, have at times used especially impenetrable ways to
express the rules. 30 years ago the National Federation of State High School Associations used to be the model of clarity when it came to football rules -- a result of a long and careful process of editing and maintenance for clear content with years of changes -- but they got away from that, unfortunately. Canadian Football, especially the CFL, had among other things the problem of vagueness and lack of specs (albeit with some redundancy), while the NFL managed to be overly wordy and yet unclear and sometimes contradictory.
However, the absolute worst by far I'd ever seen was a few years ago when the Independent Women's Football League first came out with their own rule book. It was unusable.
Part of the complication is that there are so many different governing bodies with their own versions of the game -- tackle, touch, 11 a side, 12 a side, 6 a side, 8 a side, even 9s, indoors, various levels of play, etc. And the game is complicated enough that changes in the rules are frequent, and sometimes contradictions creep in as conforming changes fail to be made elsewhere in the rules.
By contrast, Rugby Union and Rugby League have managed to keep the rules fairly consistent and relatively clear. Sometimes they've left a lot to be inferred, but it could usually be inferred unambiguously. They still have plenty of faults, of course.
It's hard to write rules for a complicated game played by humans (rather than computer characters) under open conditions (rather than on a game board or with cards or other equipment that can assume only a limited number of states) that have the effect you intend and are unambiguous. Even harder to make its provisions easy to look up in various situations. For violations of the rules, it's also hard to come up with remedies that don't distort the game too badly. Baseball's fairly simple until you get into appeal plays.
