Nigel Farage To Address RNC In Cleveland

Sorry for a link to stale news (announced 2 days ago).

I think it will be an interesting litmus test for Americans. The man is articulate.

As far as I know, Farage has never warmed to Trump.

Cleveland officers will not be charged in Tamir Rice's death.

CNN: "No indictment in Tamir Rice case, prosecutor says"

Rice was holding a pellet gun when he was shot. It was "reasonable" to believe that the officer who killed the boy was facing a threat, (prosecutor) McGinty said.

The officer was in training outside a Cleveland recreation center in November 2014. The shooting sparked controversy given Tamir's age and the fact that he had a gun that resembled a handgun.

A witness called 911, reporting there was "a guy with a pistol," adding that the weapon was "probably" fake.

Information that the gun the caller saw was probably not real and that the person holding it appeared to be a juvenile was not conveyed to Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, according to recordings that law enforcement released.

Cleveland likely site for 2016 Republican convention

"The announcement of Cleveland as the recommended site for the 2016 convention came on Tuesday. Assuming the party apparatus ratifies the choice—and everybody seems to think it will—the problem won't be the choice of city per se. The issue will be the state and the debate about Obamacare and Medicaid that's played out there for the last year-and-a-half.

Under the Affordable Care Act, states can make Medicaid available to anybody whose household income is less than 133 percent of the poverty line, which for a family of three works out to about $31,700 a year. It's how Obamcare's architects envisioned the poorest people without insurance would get coverage under the new law. But conservative state officials have resisted taking that step, arguing that the expansion would place too great a burden on state treasuries, build on a flawed model for insurance, prop up a big government program, and so on.

Conservative Republicans in Ohio were among them and, because they control the state legislature, they were able to block expansion for a while. But one Ohio Republican [Gov. John Kasich] saw things differently. While a bona fide conservative who opposed Obamacare, he figured that Medicaid expansion was still a good deal for his state. He knew that hundreds of thousands uninsured residents would eventually get coverage and the federal government would be picking up most of the additional cost, thereby infusing billions of dollars into the state economy. This Republican also realized that most of that money would go directly to hospitals and health care providers, whose growth had been a major factor in Ohio’s recovery from the recession. And this Republican understood that Medicaid expansion had strong support from Ohio’s business community. 

...Here's the problem for Republicans. Whether or not they intend to make Obamacare a central focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, they’re going to talk about it at their convention. The conservative base would have it no other way. But if Kasich wins reelection this year, then the host state governor, a well-regarded conservative and model Republican in almost every other respect, will also be the state’s most outspoken and eloquent spokesman for why the right’s absolutist opposition to the Medicaid expansion is so wrong."

TNR

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What is the logic behind the RNC's choice of Cleveland? I suppose the benefit of Ohio's status as a swing state outweighs what appears as rewarding Gov. Kasich for bucking his state's Republican legislature. 

United Airlines to drop Cleveland hub

"United Airlines’ (UAL) decision to quit its Cleveland hub this spring—Hopkins International doesn’t rock, apparently—isn’t the first time a major city has lost its bragging rights as an airline base, and it won’t be the last.

Memphis and, to a lesser extent, Cincinnati, have both lost their hub status since Delta Air Lines (DAL) absorbed Northwest and rationalized its network, cutting financially underperforming flights. A similar story played out at Hopkins, a former Continental hub inherited in United’s 2010 merger that hasn’t been profitable for a decade, according to a recent memo (PDF) sent to Cleveland workers by United Chief Executive Officer Jeff Smisek.

A successful hub needs two main ingredients: a large metropolitan area and a dominant position by an airline. Think of Atlanta and Delta, or Houston and United. With the newly minted American Airlines (AAL) behemoth working on its own megamerger with US Airways, other lesser hub cities would be right to grow nervous.

American is run by a core group of executives from US Airways, which dropped Pittsburgh as a base after its long-ago merger with America West Airlines. Highest atop the proverbial wall of worry is Phoenix, a US Airways hub that finds itself at a geographic and competitive disadvantage within the airline’s new network. Geographically, it’s between Dallas/Fort Worth—American’s home airport, and one where it dominates both financially and operationally—and Los Angeles, a huge market that could, under American, become a true hub for the first time."

Bloomberg Businessweek
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Has  anyone been affected by this type of airline change-up, for good or for ill?

Suburban Frost Bite

Cody Jarrett recommended this Frost poem. I had never read it but it triggered a personal memory.

A Brook In The City 

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run --
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under,
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep. 

~Robert Frost