#RNCinCLE, parody day 1

And parody I shall, from noting that some Robinson guy from Dick Dynasty is looking like a hippie while violating the US Flag Code with a flag headband, through noting that the screwed-over Trump University grads obviously failed to show up to fill the convention hall in Cleveland Monday night, to noting Charles is NOT in Charge.

Give it up for Scott Baio, folks!

That's all this convention is worth. Texans, if you saw the doofus pic of Lite Guv Danny Goeb wearing a Stetson, you know that.

I haven't even mentioned Steve King's racism and 'subgroups.' Or black wingnut sheriff David Clarke, who makes Tim Scott and Allen West look sane. Or Melania Trump's alleged plagiarism of Michelle Obama, an issue that itself can blow back up in an accuser's face. Besides, per Doug Henwood, if anything was plagiarized, it was all sterile cliche. But it still sucked.

Which gets back to the reality of Hillary Clinton not needing Green Party votes like mine. If she screws this up, she is today's Tom Dewey.

#Exxon head-fakes on a #carbontax, part two

Last week, I did a first blog post advising people, including Houston-area Green Party legislative candidate Joe McElligott, to be very skeptical of eXXXon's support for a carbon tax with a 100 percent rebate of that tax. I said that a full rebate would remove the necessary " bite" from a carbon tax, with noting that most places in the world with a carbon tax do NOT rebate it.

Well, I didn't even think of one angle, whihc probably is eXXXon's ultimate bank shot on this.

How the hell are you going to cut rebates, as nearly exactly as possible, for 320 million Americans? You imagine how massive a bureaucracy that would take?

I suspect eXXXon already HAS imagined just that, and envisions a full rebate as a black knight, lead anchor, or whatever. Something that would make a carbon tax prohibitively expensive.

Mainstream biz media, why don't you ask old Rex Tillerson about that, next time he talks up a carbon tax? Why don't you also ask him why his company continues to fund climate change denialist groups? That alone should tell you the carbon tax proposal it has on the floor is a head fake, a big biz move, or both.

Do #BlackLivesMatter, that deeply, to Dear Leader?

Obama at a presidential town hall on (racism and?) police and (black?) lives.
Rex/Shutterstock via The Guardian.

Both Cornel West and a Black Lives Matter leader, Patrice Cullors, have called out out Compromiser-in-Chief, Barack Obama, for not seeming to truly care about black lives taken by police.

Of the two, Cullors' is the more important read. While West technically gets all correct, most of it is old news, and old news filtered through the sour grapes of being dumb enough to endorse Obama in 2008 when Cynthia McKinney was there just waiting for such endorsements, and it was already clear Dear Leader was everything West belatedly recognizes.

Cullors is all fresh content and all entirely about Obama's town hall.

Well, West does have the fresh content that Obama didn't stop in Minneapolis, or Baton Rouge, La., cities of recent fatal shootings of blacks by police. That said, he doesn't know how right he is. Obama had no town hall after Dylann Roof killed more blacks in Charleston than Micah Johnson did police officers in Dallas.

Cullors, who was at the town hall last week?

A shorter version is that it was an extended video/photo op. Shock me.

I would disagree a bit with one "shot" by Cullors. Rather than call ABC the instigator and Obama a collaborator on this, I'd call both of them co-instigators. Obama could start to prove me wrong by getting federal law enforcement agencies to stop dumping gas on flames.

And whether it's more an inability to deal with conflict, people pleasing from a mother's multiple failed relationships along with his navigating multiple cultural worlds, or what, I don't know. But, contra Cornel West, this isn't close to new. Post-2004 Democratic National Convention, Democratic leaders in the Illinois State Senate teed up pro-police and "tough on crime" bills for Obama to sponsor.

That said, if Harvard's Roland G. Fryer Jr. is right (and I think he's more right than wrong), the shootings themselves aren't the issue, because there's actually, apparently, no racial discrepancy (allowing for racially different police stop rates). It's everything else, starting with the different stop rates, that needs addressing.

Update: No, sadly, Obama has NOT called for a Black Lives Matter memorial. Snopes debunks this.

The sus-PENCE is killing me!

Well, not really, but some portion of We the Political Junkies are waiting to see if Donald Trump has picked Indiana's quasi-Sarah Palin, Gov. Mike Pence, to be his running mate or not.

Meanwhile, a leading pundit of the MSM, speaking for many of his brethren I'm sure, ignores the possibility that in both the Veepstakes and the slowly dribbled list of alleged Republican National Convention speakers, the Donald has once again punked him and fellow media members for free publicity.

I have no doubt that's what's been happening, at least in part.

I also have no doubt that Balz's lecture in the second-last paragraph about what "a skilled candidate should allow" is all of three things bad. It's CYA, it's out of date in today's world, and it's plain wrong.

Update: Maybe I should cut Balz a bit of slack. The reason I, and you, actually or facetiously, felt the sus-PENCE is that the Donald reportedly was getting cold feet at the choice, allegedly made to conciliate the GOP establishment.

Black Arrestees Shot

A Harvard professor, while noting that African-Americans are more likely to be subjected to most varieties of police force than people of other racial or ethnic groups are, surprisingly, no more likely to be shot than other groups.

Several notes.

First, it's relatively rigorous, studying 10 major police departments in large-state California, Texas and Florida. (Full paper is here.)

It's also rigorous in that the professor, Roland G. Fryer Jr., while not a criminologist, is an economist, and thus used to crunching data.

Second, did I mention that Fryer is himself African-American?

He does, rightly, caveat his work:

Fryer emphasizes that the work is not the definitive analysis of police shootings, and that more data would be needed to understand the country as a whole. This work focused only on what happens once the police have stopped civilians, not on the risk of being stopped at all. Other research has shown that blacks are more likely to be stopped by the police.

But, it should not be rejected.

Many liberals around my age or older may remember 1996 as "the summer of black church burnings."

Except that it wasn't. That includes self-set fires; yes, black ministers in a couple of cases burned their own churches to "fire up" (pun highly intended) their own flocks. 

And 2015 wasn't, either.

Things like this are why I'm a skeptical left-liberal.

Back to Fryer, the youngest black to get tenure at Harvard.

In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white. Black and white civilians involved in police shootings were equally likely to have been carrying a weapon. Both results undercut the idea of racial bias in police use of lethal force.

That;s followed by this:

But police shootings are only part of the picture. What about situations in which an officer might be expected to fire, but doesn’t? 

To answer this, Mr. Fryer focused on one city, Houston. The Police Department there let the researchers look at reports not only for shootings but also for arrests when lethal force might have been justified. … 

Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black. This estimate was not precise, and firmer conclusions would require more data.

That doesn't mean there's not racism in policing. Indeed, all the other data in Fryer's information about use of force other than lethal shootings says there is. So too do differential arrest rates. 

Here's the bottom line:

Mr. Fryer wonders if the divide between lethal force — where he did not find racial disparities — and nonlethal force — where he did — might be related to costs. Officers face costs, legal and psychological, when they unnecessarily fire their guns. But excessive use of lesser force is rarely tracked or punished. “No officer has ever told me that putting their hands on inner-city youth is a life-changing event,” he said.

In the abstract, he adds:

We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings.

In other words, the scrutiny over firing a gun is a BIG deterrent. But without deterrents, seemingly racist actions go on with impunity.

How do we work to fix this? Body cameras will be much more important than dashcams, first. Second, federal sanction, not just state ones, for police departments having disabled or malfunctioning bodycams. Third, rotating police to new beats, along with using tools like Project Implicit and follow-ups. Fourth, as necessary, gathering more such data, then more people willing to sue, where feasible.

There's plenty of leads and work right there, on plenty of issues, and that just scratched the surface.

Update: Grits has several caveats. Assuming he's right that Fryer is working from a "rational actor" view of economics (I don't know), that itself would be second biggest issue. If he relied too much on officer self-reported behavior, that could be the biggest, but he actually addresses Grits there and says "no soap." Per my comment there, I don't think the male/female skew is an issue, though.

Grits, in a second follow, linked to this piece by guest commenter Michelle Phelps at sociologist Dan Hirschman's site. I'm not totally buying it.

"Getting stopped" is different than "getting shot." Yes, there’s greater likelihood of getting stopped means that you have more likelihood of getting shot **just because you're stopped more often.** BUT, that's not what Fryer was discussing AND he made that clear.

He clearly said that, simply comparing cases once they got to a point of shooting, there was no difference.

Per left-liberal commenter Doug Henwood, I think in some cases of critiques, we're seeing "white liberal guilt" partially at work. Take the evidence as it stands and deal with it from there.  And as a left-liberal of sorts myself, I "get" what Doug means.

Grits, in a response to comments of mine, has moderately pushed back. I've had my say, and I expect Fryer to take more flak, little follow-up to be done on his lines of research and findings, and thus, for a lot of police reform focus to look and focus too late in the police activity cycle.

A swoon at Troon? For whom?

So who wins The Open Championship and becomes The Champion Golfer of the World?

I am going to bet against Dustin Johnson just because it's so hard to win two majors in a row. Scratch Jason Day. Rory and Jordan don't impress right now.

Adam Scott is kind of trending, but he's not quite floating my boat.

Per him picking up some recent steam, looking to add a third major to his bag and cement a Hall of Fame invite many a year from now...

I am tagging Martin Kaymer. I think he's got good enough all-around driving skills to pull this off.