So-called progressives will pat themselves on the back for their wins on the platform (wins I pretty much endorse, BTW), and I am waiting to remind them that they’ve counted their chickens too early.
Five Thirty Eight takes a look at how 3rd Parties are currently influencing the Presidential polls.
Clinton loses 1 percentage point overall when 3rd parties (Gary Johnson, really,since Stein is included in even fewer polls) are included to the polling. It’s not much, and it is counerintuitive to me — I would think that Johnson/Weld would be getting a good look-over by the Dump Trump crowd. But still.
Well this is interesting: Cops can ignore Black Lives Matter protesters. They can’t ignore their insurers.
Civil rights activists have often claimed that police departments are unaccountable — a complaint that intensified after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. But if police leaders sometimes avoid political accountability, they still answer to their underwriters, which therefore have significant leverage over them.
If politicians wanted to, my research suggests, they could use that leverage to effect change. State insurance commissioners and regulators could lead the charge. How?
Small municipalities, such as Ferguson, are abundant in our country but pose a challenge for insurers’ loss-prevention programs. Because the premiums these municipalities pay are relatively small, it is often infeasible for insurers to discount rates enough to compensate for the expense of loss prevention. (This is why a property insurer that covers a skyscraper will send inspectors to the premises but my homeowner’s insurer will not.) It’s not economical for insurers to tailor their loss-prevention efforts or pay close enough attention to make small-town premiums accurately reflect their risk.
It is worth engaging with the entire argument here, but looking to insurance as a way to provide incentives for reform or better performance is an interesting idea. If that’s feasible, then I wonder if it isn’t feasible to start tying police raises to the department’s overall risk profile. That might be one way to provide an incentive for officers to be more proactive in addressing poor behavior by their colleagues.
Lots of Republicans are planning to stay home when their convention starts next week:
The decision underscores the dilemma confronting Republicans in being tied too closely to the top of the ticket — particularly incumbents from swing states worried that Trump’s divisive candidacy and Ted Cruz’s rigid brand of conservatism will doom their chances at keeping power in both chambers of Congress.
Quietly, some officials in the highest rungs of Republican leadership are advising their rank-and-file members to stay away from Cleveland. One top GOP party leader, who asked not to be named so they could discuss internal thinking, told CNN privately that he has advised his colleagues to hold campaign rallies and town halls in their home states during the time of the July convention. A senior Senate GOP leadership aide echoed that sentiment.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Schadenfraude.
And I am including this fake news story on the speaker list for the RNC convention as a way to bookmark the image that comes with it. We should use the top part next week when writing about the convention. If we are writing about the convention.
This is the story of an architect that was ripped off of his fees for designing a clubhouse for one of his courses. This is developer behavior — get your margins out of not paying the people who did their work on your job. This is certainly not good business and certainly not about protecting the “little guy”.
