Last Call For Sour Grapes

Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver is outright accusing the Democratic National Committee and chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz of fraud in the 2016 Democratic primary process, demanding that "someone" be "held accountable" for the information contained in the leak of DNC emails stolen by Russian hackers and released by WikiLeaks.

Weaver said the emails showed misconduct at the highest level of the staff within the party and that he believed there would be more emails leaked, which would "reinforce" that the party had "its fingers on the scale."

"Everybody is disappointed that much of what we felt was happening at the DNC was in fact happening, that you had in this case a clear example of the DNC taking sides and looking to place negative information into the political process.

"We have an electoral process. The DNC, by its charter, is required to be neutral among the candidates. Clearly it was not," Weaver said, responding for the first time to the growing controversy. "We had obviously pointed that out in a number of instances prior to this, and these emails just bear that out."

Another member of Sanders' staff, Rania Batrice put it this way: "Everything our fans have been saying -- and they were beaten down for and called conspiracy theorists -- and now it's in black and white."

I've been asked to comment on this by Sanders supporters here, and my response is this:

Are you serious?

Are we seriously going to let Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump play Sanders supporters like the idiots you are here over this non-story?  Leave it Trump and the Russians to actually make me have to defend Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a person whose resignation I've called for on numerous occasions as DNC chair, when it's painfully clear Weaver is more than happy to take a bit from this poison apple in order to try to give Putin his preferred candidate in November.

Let me be absolute about this: this was an operation by the Russians to steal email from the Democrats in order to sow discord, and a purposeful leak in order to try to wreck the DNC convention.  The timing was 100% on purpose here, and if you can't see how ridiculously obvious this is, I can't help you.

Christ.

The Gunmerican Disease Spreads

Friday saw yet another mass shooting, this time in Munich, Germany. Nine people were killed in a McDonald's near a shopping center by what looks like an 18-year-old obsessed with mass shootings. Plenty of those in the news, yes?

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in Munich was obsessed with mass shootings but had no known links to the Islamic State group, German police say.

Written material on such attacks was found in his room. Munich's police chief spoke of links to the massacre by Norway's Anders Behring Breivik.

The gunman, who had dual German-Iranian nationality, later killed himself.

His name has not been officially released but he is being named locally as David Sonboly.

He had a 9mm Glock pistol and 300 bullets in his rucksack.

Police do not yet know how the weapon was acquired, but said he had no permit for it and the serial number had been obliterated.

They are investigating whether he may have lured his victims through a Facebook invitation to the McDonald's restaurant where he launched his attack on Friday evening.

 He ended up injuring 27 more, some critically, including kids.

The disease is spreading around the world, it seems.

Voted Off The Island

So apparently Virginia's Supreme Court has no problem taking the right to vote away from thousands of people.

The Supreme Court of Virginia on Friday struck down Gov. Terry McAuliffe's sweeping executive order that restored voting rights to more than 206,000 Virginia felons.

In a 4-3 ruling, the court declared McAuliffe's order unconstitutional, saying it amounts to a unilateral rewrite and suspension of the state's policy of lifetime disenfranchisement for felons.

The court ordered the Virginia Department of Elections to "cancel the registration of all felons who have been invalidly registered" under McAuliffe's April 22 executive order and subsequent orders. As of this week, 11,662 felons had registered to vote under McAuliffe's orders. The court gave a cancellation deadline of Aug. 25.

"Never before have any of the prior 71 Virginia Governors issued a clemency order of any kind — including pardons, reprieves, commutations, and restoration orders — to a class of unnamed felons without regard for the nature of the crimes or any other individual circumstances relevant to the request," Chief Justice Donald W. Lemons wrote in the majority opinion.

"To be sure, no Governor of this Commonwealth, until now, has even suggested that such a power exists. And the only Governors who have seriously considered the question concluded that no such power exists."

The ruling is a potentially fatal blow to an executive action that could have been a highlight of McAuliffe's gubernatorial legacy.

"He spent 90 days bragging about this being the high point of his governorship," said Del. Robert B. Bell, R-Albemarle, who's running for attorney general in 2017. "And the court made it very clear that he acted unconstitutionally."

Governors have no unilateral right of clemency?  Well, okay then.

Maybe it's because the majority of the people getting back their right to vote under McAuliffe's executive order are black?  Just going to put that out there.

Virginia has always kinda had a problem with that.

Last Call For Kaine Do Attitude

So I read way too much into the Tim Kaine as a smokescreen theory, turns out he really is Clinton's VP pick and I should have taken the stories at face value.

Kaine, from Virginia, would give Clinton a running mate with wide governing experience but picking the self-described "boring" senator could anger progressive groups hoping for a more liberal choice.

Kaine had a clear edge over two other candidates among the final contenders: Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a Democratic source with knowledge of the discussions said.

Clinton's campaign declined to comment.

Clinton is expected to announce her running mate through a text message or Twitter, possibly as early as Friday when she has two afternoon events scheduled in Florida. NBC News said she would make the announcement on Friday.

That text message came out around 8:15 PM this evening confirming Kaine as the pick and on social media.

I'm thrilled to announce my running mate, @TimKaine, a man who's devoted his life to fighting for others. -H pic.twitter.com/lTVyfztE5Z

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 23, 2016

So, no surprises, no guesswork, Kaine was always the choice apparently and had been the top contender for weeks.  

Well, here we go.

Bailing Out Of The Zeppelin

In blue state areas where The Party Of Trump might not be able to win without more than just "working class" white voters, at least some Republicans see the writing on the wall when it comes to what Trump will do to the GOP brand in November and well beyond.

The vice chairman of the Washington, D.C., GOP party plans to resign from his post and vote for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in November, the longtime Republican operative told The Daily Beast. Gary Teal, a delegate at the Republican convention, said he had already told fellow delegates that he will resign. 

“If I’m not going to vote for the nominee, then I have to resign my position,” Teal said. “I’m prepared to do that.” Three additional delegates from Washington, D.C., joined Teal to announce their support for the libertarian candidate. Justin Dillon, Kris Hammond, and Peter Lee—who were wearing #NeverTrump buttons—spoke to The Daily Beast in the hallway of Quicken Loans Arena, just minutes after Donald Trump finished his keynote speech on Thursday night. 

“The RNC has bungled this nomination process by having bad rules,” Teal said, referring to a controversy over nominating rules that caused chaos on the convention floor Monday. “And now at this convention, they’ve sacrificed integrity in favor of unity.” 

In a CNN poll released last week, Johnson polled at 13 percent against the field of Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Republicans jumping ship for the Libertarians?  The more the merrier.  It's nice to see that people who really do see their party as coming apart are willing to leave.

Trump Cards, Con't

Donald Trump's acceptance speech was one for the history books, under "Prime examples of American infamy".  It was a terrifying speech in the clinical sense of the word, it was meant to terrify people into voting for him lest they suffer the consequences of not doing so, and it was meant to terrify those voting against him and reminding them, as Steve M says, that Donald Trump can very well win this thing in November.

It isn't just that Trump's speech successfully tapped into the anxieties of many Americans -- it's that the entire convention did, in between all the things that were so fascinating to political insiders. And while the four days of speeches, up to and including Trump's own, didn't provide solutions beyond "Donald Trump will magically fix everything because he's all-powerful," they did offer up a scapegoat for all the world's ills: Hillary Clinton, the worst person in the world.

I'm not supposed to worry about this because the presidential electoral is supposedly etched in stone: Yes, older whites always vote Republican, and whites are a majority, but they're a dwindling majority; Barack Obama built a coalition that can't lose a presidential election anymore. But Obama's coalition never stopped liking him; his approval/disapproval numbers always hovered within a few points of 50-50, and those who approved of him really admired him. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has a 40%/58% favorable/unfavorable rating right now, according to the average at Huffington Post's Pollster. To win in November, she needs the votes of a lot of people who simply don't like her and don't trust her. So why are we so certain the Obama coalition will turn out for her?

In the Obama years, we've seen dogma-driven Republicans expand their near-monopoly on white people's votes from the South to supposedly blue parts of the North -- see the governors' mansions in Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. I know -- they won because the Democrats' presidential electorate doen't show up in off years. But which electorate will show up for Hillary Clinton if she doesn't get her disapproval ratings down?

The answer to those questions was provided by Trump himself in one of his ad-libbed parts of his speech when he promised to end Muslim immigration into the United States:

"We don't want them in our country!"

He was speaking about Muslims.  But you can apply that to any group of Americans not sufficiently Trump-approved.  That phrase doesn't just describe the Trump campaign, but the entire Republican party.  Every single person planning to vote for Donald Trump in November (and that's going to be at least sixty million of your friends, neighbors and co-workers, guys) has a "them" that they want out of "our" country.

Put that on a bumper sticker.  Hell, I'm sure people will.  But that's what Donald Trump represents, and that's what the people voting for him want.  It doesn't matter that some of the people supporting Trump are the very people other Trump supporters want America to be rid of permanently.

It's to stop this man that the Obama coalition will turn out.

If we don't, well, we end up the "them" in this equation, now don't we?

StupidiNews!

• FOX News head Roger Ailes has left the network after sexual harassment claims by multiple women, chairman Rupert Murdoch will serve as the network's acting CEO.
• Philadelphia's largest police union is blasting Hillary Clinton for allowing Black Lives Matter activists to speak at the Democratic Convention next week, but no police officers.
• Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is appealing his conviction on genocide charges by an international tribunal, saying the court was biased against Serbs.
• The United States wastes 50 million tons of food worth $160 billion each year, but a new survey finds few Americans are willing to change their behavior.
• A Dutch company wants No Man's Sky creator Hello Games to pay up for using a patented "superformula" that designs the game's many planets and moons.

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.