Last Call For NC Goes Down The Crapper, Con't

Looks like the NBA has finally pulled the plug on the 2017 All-Star Game in Charlotte over Pat McCrory's bigoted bathroom bill.

Without any movement by state legislators in North Carolina to change newly enacted laws targeted at the LGBT community, the NBA is pulling the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte, league sources told The Vertical. 

The NBA is focused on the New Orleans’ Smoothie King Center as the host for All-Star Weekend and the All-Star Game on Feb. 19, league sources told The Vertical. 

For now, there are still other cities trying to lure the All-Star Game, sources said. 

A formal announcement on the NBA’s withdrawal out of Charlotte is expected as soon as this week, league sources said Thursday. 

NBA commissioner Adam Silver had threatened to move All-Star Weekend out of Charlotte unless a discriminatory North Carolina law aimed at the state’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community was changed – and time to do so has run out because of the logistics and planning the NBA needs to run its marquee midseason event, league sources said. 

The issue is centered on North Carolina’s House Bill 2, a law that mandates transgender people use public restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificates. The law also omits LGBT people from North Carolina’s anti-discrimination protections, forbids local governments from widening LGBT protections and excludes all forms of workplace discrimination lawsuits from North Carolina state courts. 

Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan had been counting on All-Star Weekend as a signature event for his franchise, and the economic impact of losing the All-Star Game for the franchise and region promises to be dramatic.

Dramatic, you say?  Yeah, try tens of millions of dollars.  So guess what, North Carolina? Republicans just cost you a crapload of money and made you look like bigoted assholes in front of America.

The good news is you can fix it in November.

Trump Cards, Con't.

It's important to remember that while Trump certainly wanted the press over a fight with Ted Cruz (because to hell with what his own running mate has to say) it's what wasn't said on the convention floor that we should be paying attention to.  First of all, Trump more or less announced the end of US military participation in NATO if he's elected president.

In his strongest remarks to date on the future of the western military alliance, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said the U.S. would only defend NATO members attacked by Russia after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, the billionaire cast doubt on whether he would automatically extend the security guarantees that give the 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization the assurance that they have U.S. military support in the event of an attack. He specifically referred to the small Baltic states which share borders with Russia.
Trump’s comments deepen his criticism of NATO after he called it“obsolete” in April during campaigning for the nomination. They come less than two weeks after the NATO summit in Warsaw agreed to enhance deployment of forces in Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia as a deterrent following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin is overseeing the biggest Russian military buildup at its western border since the collapse of communism. The Kremlin is spending 20 trillion rubles ($314 billion) on an ambitious defense upgrade through 2020, while NATO’s plans involve rotating four battalions through the region.

“The geopolitical situation is worrying, we see how the Kremlin is trying to
increase its sphere of influence,” Inara Murniece, speaker of Latvia’s parliament, said in a Latvian television interview Thursday. “We will have to speak about security a lot no matter who is the next U.S. president.” 

Hey Baltic states, sure would be a shame if Vladimir Putin came in and ransacked the joint, but we're not going to help you unless...what?  They pay up?  We're shaking down Latvia and Estonia, or throwing them to the tender mercies of Moscow?  If Putin decided to bring the thunder down on these countries, there's not a hell of a lot we could do about it militarily anyway, but the the point is Putin would pay a price, or should.  Trump's basically saying "Oh well, who cares, right?"

And we could have a nice, long, unpleasant conversation about Trump's financial ties to Putin, too, and how basically every foreign policy wonk out there is screaming that Trump is a mad man who will absolutely give Putin everything he wants, including turning America's back on the Baltics should Vlad and several hundred tanks come knocking.

"OK," you're saying, "but that makes Trump a non-interventionist, and frankly Bush and Obama have gotten us into way too many foreign entanglements over the last 15 years.  Let Europe defend NATO." Sure, we've got our own problems here in America.  Seems enticing on foreign policy, until you remember Trump's awful domestic policy.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering nominating Oklahoma oil and gas mogul Harold Hamm as energy secretary if elected to the White House on Nov. 8, according to four sources close to Trump's campaign.

The chief executive of Continental Resources would be the first U.S. energy secretary drawn directly from the oil and gas industry since the cabinet position was created in 1977, a move that would jolt environmental advocates but bolster Trump's pro-drilling energy platform.

Dan Eberhart, an oil investor and Republican financier, said he had been told by officials in Trump's campaign that Hamm, who has been an informal advisor to Trump on energy policy since at least May, was "the leading contender" for the position.

Eberhart said he had discussed the possible appointment with top donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this week, where Trump was formally nominated as the party's candidate in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

Three other sources close to the Trump campaign confirmed Trump was considering Hamm for the post. One of the sources said he first heard that Hamm was a contender from Trump officials on Sunday. None of the sources was aware of who else Trump may be considering for the job.

Representatives for Trump and Hamm did not respond to a request for comment.

Addressing the convention on Wednesday night, Hamm called for expanded drilling and said too much environmental regulation threatened to limit U.S. oil production and increase the country's dependence on Middle Eastern oil producers.

"Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded," Hamm told the cheering crowd. "Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk."

Yeah, so Trump is going to make the CEO of the country's biggest fracking company his energy secretary. It's almost comical except this is real folks, he would literally turn over US energy policy to the fracking industry to conduct.  Amazing.

Deadly real.  Serving up the Baltics to Putin and our environment to the frackers?  Gosh, Trump seems like a great guy.

No difference between him and Hillary after all.

Clinton Derangement Syndrome 2.0, Con't

Hey guys, I know Donald Trump sure is amusing and Cleveland's RNC convention is an utter nightmare of a dark comedy and all.  Meanwhile, the GOP continues to openly call for the execution of their political opponents.

An adviser to Donald Trump on veterans issues said on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton should be put in a firing line and shot for treason. 

New Hampshire state representative Al Baldasaro, who is also a Trump delegate from the state and has appeared with Trump at campaign events, made the comments on the Jeff Kuhner Show. 

“I’m a veteran that went to Desert Shield, Desert Storm. I’m also a father who sent a son to war, to Iraq, as a Marine Corps helicopter avionics technician. Hillary Clinton to me is the Jane Fonda of the Vietnam,” he said. “She is a disgrace for the lies that she told those mothers about their children that got killed over there in Benghazi. She dropped the ball on over 400 emails requesting back up security. Something’s wrong there.” 

“This whole thing disgusts me, Hillary Clinton should be put in the firing line and shot for treason,” he added. 

Baldasaro has spoken at several Trump events, introducing Trump multiple times, including at an event in late May where he admonished the media for focusing on questions over Trump’s donations to veteran’s charities. 

He later added in the radio interview that Clinton was a “piece of garbage.”

So again, how long before somebody tries to take Baldasaro (again a sitting Republican lawmaker and Trump supporter) up on his idea?

Can you imagine the unholy fecal hurricane if anyone in the Democratic party said this about Donald Trump? It would be front-page national news for months.

Republicans want to murder Hillary Clinton?  Meh, who cares, right?

StupidiNews!

• Republican convention delegates booed Sen. Ted Cruz off the stage after he refused to formally endorse Donald Trump last night in Cleveland.
• The 5th Circuit has struck down parts of Texas's voter ID law, saying the state's strict photo ID requirements violate the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchises black and Latino voters.
• An international tribunal has rejected Moscow's appeal to reinstate Russian track and field athletes over doping, paving the way for a possible total ban on Russian athletes in Rio.
• Economic forecasters are officially predicting a UK recession based on the country's Brexit vote, economists have sharply cut British growth predictions for the rest of the year.
• Tesla Motors chief Elon Musk says the company's "master plan" is to become America's leading sustainable energy company as well as having self-driving cars.

Last Call For The Clinton Veepstakes

CNN is reporting that Hillary Clinton will announce her running mate this weekend in Florida ahead of the Democratic National Convention next week in Philly, and again the smart money seems to be on Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine.

Hillary Clinton is spending two days at home in New York, finalizing her decision for a running mate, before formally introducing her Democratic ticket during a weekend campaign swing in Florida, according to several Democrats familiar with the search. 

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have emerged as leading contenders after a rigorous vetting process, Democrats close to the selection believe, but they are not the only two prospects still in contention. 

"The conventional wisdom in this case seems likely to be right," one Democrat close to Clinton told CNN, believing Kaine has the upper hand but cautioning that Clinton could still deliver a surprise. 

Clinton has not made her final decision, an aide said, or if she has, she has not disclosed it. Even the small universe of advisers working on the selection process, who are making plans to help on the announcement, are not certain who she will choose. 

She has consulted many people for thoughts and advice, including President Barack Obama, who is close to Kaine and Vilsack, who serves in his Cabinet. 

The deliberations, led by campaign chairman John Podesta, have been extraordinarily private -- a striking contrast to those of Donald Trump. But Democrats say former President Bill Clinton also has been involved in discussions and is impressed by Kaine, who has the support of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally. 

"He gets a say, but doesn't have a vote on this," one Clinton friend said of the former president.

Well, if both Big Dog and Terry McAuliffe are involved in advising Hillary on the selection process, I'd put money down on Kaine too.  McAuliffe is of course going to push a US Senator from his own state, and he's known the Clintons for decades. I don't buy Tom Vilsack for a second, either.  He's about as exciting as bringing tapioca pudding to a bachelor party.  Neither does Al Giordano:

I'm sticking with my view that today will bring the "head fake" on the VP pick & tomorrow will bring "the tell."

— Al Giordano (@AlGiordano) July 20, 2016

Kaine's positions are definitely better now than the Blue Dog nonsense he was spouting eight years ago, so it looks like he's learned from his mistakes in 2008.

The question is what Kaine brings to the ticket, and the answer is really "Well, he doesn't hurt anything."  My real problem with him is that he was DNC chair before Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and basically walked right into the buzzsaw that was the 2010 midterms, largely responsible for the Democrats getting the stuffing beat out of them at the congressional and state level.  Why Clinton would trust his political skills after that famous "shellacking" I have no clue.

Back in June I said not to worry about Kaine when it was clear that Clinton was field-testing Liz Warren and at least talking to people like Sherrod Brown. But now that Clinton's choice is imminent, it seems Kaine may be the choice after all.

I suppose "It could be worse, she could pick Debbie Wasserman Schultz" is something of a consolation prize, but not by much.  We'll see if Clinton does surprise us, after all President Obama did with Joe Biden, and it turned out he was pretty good at the job.

But she's not Obama (which is kind of the problem.) C'est la vie.

Donald Trump In "The Purge"

Now that Donald Trump is the official GOP nominee for President, his transition team is hitting the ground running so that it can tackle the toughest problems facing America should Trump be elected, and apparently at the top of the list is a mass purge of Obama appointees (and other political enemies) to the federal government, led by transition team head Chris Christie.

If he wins the presidency, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump would seek to purge the federal government of officials appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama and could ask Congress to pass legislation making it easier to fire public workers, Trump ally, Chris Christie, said on Tuesday.

Christie, who is governor of New Jersey and leads Trump's White House transition team, said the campaign was drawing up a list of federal government employees to fire if Trump defeats Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 presidential election.

“As you know from his other career, Donald likes to fire people,” Christie told a closed-door meeting with dozens of donors at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, according to an audio recording obtained by Reuters and two participants in the meeting.

Christie was referring to Trump's starring role in the long-running television show "The Apprentice," where his catch-phrase was "You're fired!"

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump's transition advisers fear that Obama may convert these appointees to civil servants, who have more job security than officials who have been politically appointed. This would allow officials to keep their jobs in a new, possibly Republican, administration, Christie said.

“It’s called burrowing," Christie said. "You take them from the political appointee side into the civil service side, in order to try to set up ... roadblocks for your successor, kind of like when all the Clinton people took all the Ws off the keyboard when George Bush was coming into the White House.” 

And of course a newly incoming administration is going to change personnel, but not even Dubya went this far this fast, announcing that a mass purge was a top priority the day Dubya was officially nominated.  Most people at least have the grace to draw up an enemies list after they get elected, but not our Donald!

Oh, and Christie mentioned that Congress needs to pass legislation for Trump to sign that will get rid of civil service protections making government employees easier to purge and that the agency Trump's going after first will be the EPA.

So yeah, probably no difference between Trump and Clinton.

Pokemon Blue, Pokemon Redline

Yet another case of tech classism/lack of diversity when it comes to crowd sourcing: Pokemon Go has some real issues with where your local neighborhood's points of interest are if you don't live in the right part of town.

Within days of the launch of “Pokémon Go,” the new augmented reality game that uses phone cameras and GPS to show the classic '90s ‘pocket monsters’ in real environments, a number of sites and museums started complaining that they were not appropriate places to catch 'em all. Formerly public sites turned private were also reported as being marked as "pokéstops" or "gyms." 

Some areas had the opposite problem: no pokéstops at all. Some social media users observed that their small town and rural neighborhoods lacked any pokéstops, though urban areas had plenty. 

Based on the popular Pokémon franchise of cartoons, trading cards, and Gameboy games from the 1990s, in which characters caught and battled with adorable monsters, the game uses the GPS in players’ phones to place them in a virtual space that matches the real world. In that virtual space, there are set locations for items and battling, and Pokémon appear in random locations; when encountering a pokémon, the game uses the phone’s camera to show the pokémon as if in the real environment. The player then can throw “pokéballs” to catch the pokémon; pokéballs are collected at “pokéstop” locations, and then players can use the Pokémon to battle at gyms. Without pokéstops, the only way to acquire pokéballs is to pay real money in the in-game shop. 

In some areas where most residents are minorities, Twitter users noted pokéstops are hard to find. Kendra James, a writer at Racialicious, noted that the mostly-black city of Irvington, New Jersey has "no stops on all of its main roads, despite... several monuments/locations of note," compared to Maplewood, a nearby majority-white town which she perceived to have many more.

Niantic, the company that made the game, does not publish pokéstop locations, but the locations of pokéstops and gyms are taken from the locations of "portals" in Niantic's previous augmented-reality GPS-based game, Ingress. And Ingress's portals, while not available as an exportable list, are viewable on a world map, making it possible to compare city demographics to the distribution of Ingress portals.

Ahh, but it gets really noticeable in places like Detroit.

The starkest case is Detroit, where the city's borders can basically be drawn from a map of the area's Ingress portals. The city proper, which is defined by the red line in the map below left, was 83 percent black as of the last census in 2010, and has very few portals, except for downtown. The same is true of the mostly black area northwest of the city. The majority white suburbs and enclave, on the other hand, have plenty of portals. The slider below shows a map of portals on the Ingress map on the left anda demographic map of Detroit on the right.

So yeah, Pokemon Go is a mess when it comes to diversity, just like the entire rest of the tech industry.  Crowdsourcing locations only works if the population can get over the barriers to entry, and the one for Pokemon Go (and Niantic's Ingress app before it) is actually pretty high.

This kind of thing can be fixed, but only if Niantic makes an effort to do so.  Somehow, I don't think they will.  It may end up being the non-tech world of retail and fast food that helps to resolve this: Pokestops will be placed where retail and fast food giants are like McDonald's, Starbucks and Wal-Mart as they want to cash in on the craze.

We'll see how that works, but I don't expect Niantic to start looking at their own maps and how they can fix the obvious redlining issues without somebody paying them big bucks to do so.

Read more here: http://www.bnd.com/news/nation-world/national/article89562297.html#storylink=cp

StupidiNews!

• Famed television and movie producer and director Garry Marshall has died at  81, he created "Happy Days" and "Mork and Mindy" as well as directing movies like  "Pretty Woman".
• A federal judge has blocked Wisconsin's photo ID voting restrictions, allowing people to vote in November if they sign an affidavit.
• Republicans formally nominated Donald Trump for president last night, Trump's son Donald Jr. put Trump over the top with votes from the delegation of his home state of New York.
• Consumer giant Unilever has bought start-up Dollar Shave Club for $1 billion in a direct challenge to Procter & Gamble's Gillette brands.
• The EPA finds that Americans love trucks and SUVs too much for the country to reach President Obama's goal of 54.5 miles per gallon fuel efficiency standards by 2025.

The Whitewashing Of History

It's one thing to constantly put up the Republican party's dog whistle Southern Strategy racism, but it's quite another to have a Republican Congressman go on television and pitch actual white supremacy arguments during the party convention. And of course, it's Iowa Republican Steve King making an ass of himself and his state again.

Appearing on MSNBC Monday evening, King was part of a panel of four people discussing the Republican National Convention. Esquire’s Charles Pierce, one of King’s co-panelists, commented on the dominance of “loud, unhappy, dissatisfied white people” at the RNC. King objected not so much to Pierce’s factual premise as to the notion that the monochromatic nature of the GOP is a bug.

“This whole ‘white people business’ though does get a little tired,” King declared. “I’d ask you to go back through history,” he added, “and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people your talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

Holy hell.  He actually said this.

When host Chris Hayes asked King to clarify whether the congressman was asserting that no race contributed more to society than white people, King made a slight rhetorical shift, claiming instead that “western civilization” that is “rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world” is the greatest contributor to civilization.

And I mean this, guys, he actually said this.




So....yeah.  White people made the "greatest contribution" to the planet.  I'm sure that's news to Africa, The Americas and Asia, with civilizations around millennia before Europe was settled.  What the hell did the Egyptians, Babylonians, Mayans, Songhai, Aztecs, and Chinese ever do for the world, anyway?  Probably nothing as good as Hot Pockets and TV, man.

Asshole.

And yet this guy is a sitting congressman, spouting white nationalist garbage on TV.  This is your modern GOP, guys.  Own up to the racism, or do something to stop it.

It's Just A Piece Of Paper, Right?

John Nichols at The Nation reminds us that not only are Trump's ridiculous plans for the nation after his election obscenely unfeasible and heartlessly immoral, they are also strictly unconstitutional in just about every aspect.  Trump's stated platform (which is now the GOP's stated platform in many cases) is a massive violation of multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights.

As Republican Party “constitutionalists” prepare to nominate authoritarian billionaire Donald Trump for the presidency this week in Cleveland, the American Civil Liberties union has determined that the candidate’s proposals would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution. 

It is not news that Trump has, during the course of his campaign for the GOP nomination, put himself at odds with basic premises of a Bill of Rights that defends a free press, guarantees freedom of religion, and guards against torture and abuses of privacy. But when his proposals are pulled together—as the ACLU has done in a new analysis of the Republican candidate’s public statements and policy positions—the extent to which Trump would shred the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular is breathtaking. 

“Taken together, his policies and positions, if put into place, would violate the Constitution and federal and international law,” says Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, which reviewed the candidate’s agenda and determined that “Trump’s proposals would violate the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution.” 

Trump has from the start of his campaign sparked controversy with statements, actions, and proposals that disregard the First Amendment. He and his aides have created blacklists of journalists, and the candidate has expressed an interest in rewriting libel laws in order to intimidate, punish, and potentially silence critics of powerful individuals and interests. Trump has, as well, proposed schemes to discriminate against Muslims and to spy on mosques and neighborhoods where Muslims live—with steady disregard for the amendment’s guarantee of protection for America’s diverse religious communities. 

But that’s just the beginning of Trump’s assaults on the Constitution.Trump has encouraged the use of torture and blatantly disregardedprivacy protections that have been enshrined in the founding document since the 18th century. He has attacked the basic premises of a constitutionally defined separation of powers, with rhetorical assaults on individual jurists and the federal judiciary so extreme that House Speaker Paul Ryan described one such attack as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He has proposed instituting religious tests. He has shown open and consistent disregard for the promise that all Americans will receive equal protection under the law. 

“If implemented, Donald Trump’s proposed policies will spark a constitutional and legal challenge that would require all hands on deck at the ACLU,” says Romero. “The ACLU and its more than 300 attorneys in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., stand ready to challenge and impede implementation of his unlawful proposals, should he attempt to see them through.” 

It should never come to that.

I'm glad the ACLU stands ready to fight the GOP on this, but the simple fact of the matter is they are now the party of blatantly racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic fascism, and nominating Donald Trump will cement that for a generation.  Trump never should have gotten this far, but here he is, about to be nominated as the presidential candidate of a major political party, because that party has enabled hatred and bigotry in a desperate attempt to consolidate political power.

In the short term it has been wildly successful at the state and local government level, all but wiping out the Democratic party in the South and most of the Midwest, leaving isolated pockets of resistance between the coasts.

In the long term, we're going to see that fall apart.  But there's still quite a bit of damage that the GOP can do in its death throes, and the reactionary election of Trump is still not out of the question.

StupidiNews!

• Parts of Melania Trump's speech at the opening night of the GOP Convention appear to have directly plagiarized Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech.
• A federal judge has thrown out parts of Bill Cosby's lawsuit against his accusers for allegedly violating a settlement agreement over Cosby's sexual assault charges.
• A tourist bus in Taiwan crashed and burst into flames, killing all 26 people aboard, including 24 Chinese tourists, officials are still investigating the cause of the crash and fire.
• North Korea has once again fired a round of ballistic missile tests into the sea, drawing condemnation ahead of what Seoul says might be an upcoming North Korean nuclear test.
• A former St. Louis Cardinals executive has received 46 months in prison for guessing the password to their rival Houston Astros' online scouting database in 2013.

Last Call For Feeding The Rough Beast

Something of a Monday Long Read this evening when you get a chance, but it's a good one nonetheless: BuzzFeed senior political writer McKay Coppins details Donald Trump feeding off the people who dislike him, and how his upcoming nomaination as GOP presidential candidate is almost certainly a product of Trump's drive to exact petty vengeance against slights both real and perceived, making him the perfect candidate for the Republican party in 2016.

Donald Trump stood on a debate stage in downtown Detroit, surrounded by haters he was determined to dispatch: Liddle Marco to his right, Lyin’ Ted to his left, Megyn Kelly at the moderator’s table straight ahead, and — somewhere out there, in a darkened living room 1,500 miles away — me.

About 30 minutes into the debate, Kelly asked Trump to respond to a recent BuzzFeed News report about his position on immigration. 

“First of all, BuzzFeed?” Trump said, waving an index finger in the air. “They were the ones that said under no circumstances will I run for president — and were they wrong.” My phone lit up with a frenzied flurry of tweets, texts, and emails, each one carrying variations of the same message: This is all your fault. 

Trump was referring to a profile I’d written two years earlier in which I chronicled a couple of days spent inside the billionaire’s bubble and confidently concluded that his long-stated presidential aspirations were a sham. He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication — often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day — denouncing me as a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility.” 

Breitbart published an “EXCLUSIVE” with Trump and his employees claiming I’d boorishly harassed various women during my brief stay at his Palm Beach estate Mar-a-Lago. (“I don’t know how to say it — he was looking at me like I was yummy,” complained one hostess named “Bianka Pop.”) There were a lot of things about Trump’s wrathful, wounded reaction that seemed weird at the time, but in retrospect, the weirdest was that it never really ended; for two years, Trump continued to rant about how I’m a scumbag or a loser or “just another phony guy.” 

Trump’s performative character assassination led to plenty of teasing from friends and colleagues about how I had inadvertently goaded Trump into running. But as his campaign gained traction, the tone started to curdle into something more…hostile. Once, after discussing Trump’s latest outrage on cable news, the host grumbled to me, “Won’t it be great when Donald Trump becomes president because you wrote a fucking BuzzFeed article daring him to run? I mean, won’t that be fucking fantastic?” I mentioned to former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett that Trump’s candidacy had me yearning for a new beat. “So, wait a second, you get all of us into this, and now you decide it’s beneath you?” he demanded. “No, you stay ‘til it’s fucking over. The whole thing. You stay here with the rest of us until it’s done.” 

It’s not done yet. As Trump completed his conquest of the Republican Party this year, I contemplated my supposed role in the imminent fall of the republic — retracing my steps; poring over old notes, interviews, and biographies; talking to dozens of people. What had most struck me during my two days with Trump was his sad struggle to extract even an ounce of respect from a political establishment that plainly viewed him as a sideshow. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that he’d felt this way for virtually his entire life — face pressed up against the window, longing for an invitation, burning with resentment, plotting his revenge. 

I had landed on a long and esteemed list of haters and losers — spanning decades, stretching from Wharton to Wall Street to the Oval Office — who have ridiculed him, rejected him, dismissed him, mocked him, sneered at him, humiliated him — and, now, propelled him all the way to the Republican presidential nomination, with just one hater left standing between him and the nuclear launch codes. 

What have we done?

I find it very interesting that a media outlet is considering its role in creating the Rough Beast slouching its way towards Cleveland at all, much less the more specific charge of enabling Trump's rise through not taking him seriously as a threat to the nation until it was far, far too late.  Sure, it was extremely easy to dismiss Trump as a clown in 2012, but he learned from his mistakes, and he learned from his detractors as well.

I'm glad that Coppins realized what the problem was, but the question remains, political media: what have you done?

Trump Cards, Con't

While the focus this week in politics is on the RNC convention in Cleveland, it's important to note just how many people the Republican presumptive nominee has alienated through his racist, hateful rhetoric so far, the the point where it may not be possible for Trump to win.  Trump is at best in the single digits among black voters, but he's also doing nearly as badly among Latino voters.

Donald Trump remains overwhelmingly unpopular with Latinos, a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll shows, with only about one in seven Latino voters say they support the presumptive GOP nominee.

A whopping 76 percent of the 300 Latino registered voters in the poll said they back Hillary Clinton in a head-to-head race, while just 14 percent said they back Trump.

What's more, 82 percent of Latino voters say they have an unfavorable view of Trump, while just 11 percent view him positively.

Yeah, Trump is in the teens with Latino voters.  That sound you hear is the RNC having a heart attack because they know they've just lost North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia for sure if those numbers remain true.  Support that low from Latino voters could put other states in play too like Arizona, and could even have some effect in Texas if Trump keeps this up.

Latinos, a fast-growing bloc of voters nationwide, have supported Democrats by significant margins in recent elections. But Trump's low level of support with the group is unprecedented.

Mitt Romney won 27 percent of Latinos in 2012; John McCain - a champion of immigration reform - garnered 31 percent support; and George W. Bush won around 40 percent in his re-election effort in 2004.

Combining this with Clinton winning the college-educated white vote, something the Democrats haven't done since Eisenhower and a group that Romney won by 14 points in 2012, and the coming wipeout of Trump is going to be legendary.

If the voters show up, that is.

The First Month's Agenda

As Hillary Clinton will speak at today's final day of the NAACP national conference here in Cincinnati, a preview of what she has to say came from a video appearance at the Netroots Nation 2016 conference on Saturday in St. Louis, where she laid out her plan for the first 30 days at the White House:

Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, made the announcement in a video for the annual Netroots Nation progressive conference.

"Today I’m announcing that in my first 30 days as president, I will propose a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and give the American people — all of us — the chance to reclaim our democracy," she said.

"I will also appoint Supreme Court justices who understand that this decision was a disaster for our democracy. And I will fight for other progressive reforms, including small-dollar matching and disclosure requirements."

In a statement, Clinton also pledged to "promote SEC rulemaking requiring publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending to their shareholders" and to sign an "executive order requiring federal government contractors to fully disclose all political spending."

Campaign finance reform is all well and good, but this is what got my attention.

Clinton also called for criminal justice reform, laying out two additional proposals for turning "talk into action," especially in the wake of recent deaths of black men shot by police.

"First, as president I’ll bring law enforcement and communities together to develop national guidelines on the use of force," Clinton said. "Second, I will target $1 billion in my first budget to take on implicit bias, which remains a problem across our society and even in the best of our police departments."

It's a start, and only a start, but getting that start is necessary.  I'm hoping there's a lot more to Clinton's CJ reform proposals, and the voter registration proposals she is expected to talk about in Cincinnati today, but again, any changes to the Voting Rights Act or to criminal justice and mandatory minimum sentencing depends on the makeup of Congress next January.

If the GOP still controls the House, all bets are off.

StupidiNews!

• French police have arrested an Albanian couple in connection with last week's truck attack that killed 84, meanwhile US officials have confirmed a third American was killed in Nice.
• Venezuelans are once again flooding into neighboring Colombia to buy food and other essentials as border crossings re-opened this weekend amid Venezuela's ongoing shortages.
• Chinese labor groups collaborated with a US worker's rights organization before striking against Wal-Mart in China, Reuters has learned.
• The European Union is looking to possibly force new British PM Theresa May's hand over Brexit by suspending Britain's EU voting rights in the European Parliament. 
• Starbucks is following the lead of McDonald's and other retailers that provide public Wi-Fi at stores by blocking porn websites that family consumer groups see as a public health crisis.