Quickies: Incredible Surprises Dept.

     As is well known, this year’s Republican National Convention will be held in Cleveland, Ohio. As is equally well known, the Huffington Post has its little ways. One of them is to blame everyone to the right of Karl Marx for any unfortunate event – even if it hasn’t happened yet:

     The city of Cleveland, which will host the Republican National Convention this July, will spend $1.5 million on an insurance broker to find a policy which covers potential lawsuits related to police conduct for the event, according to Cleveland.com. The website is calling it “protest insurance” — although more technically it’s known as law enforcement professional liability insurance.

     “There’s such a huge range of things that can happen when you have that many people with so many different viewpoints together in a city,” said Christine Link, the executive director of the Ohio ACLU. She noted Cleveland is expecting between 50,000 and 75,000 extra people in its downtown area during the upcoming convention.

     This convention is no run-of-the-mill event, either. Currently, no GOP primary candidate has secured enough delegates to sail through the nomination process, and there is such resistance to Donald Trump’s candidacy within the party that there’s lots of talk about a potential contested convention. That means not only will there be the protesters you normally see at any political event, but there could be protesters from separate factions of the Republican Party itself....

     “Nerves are on edge because of the possibility of a contested convention,” Robert Hartwig, the president of the Insurance Information Institute, told The Huffington Post. “It could cause tempers to flare on the parts of various parties. Any good risk management program is now contemplating that possibility.”

     So it would be Republicans fomenting violence? That’s doubtful, to say the least. It’s rather more likely that, should violence ensue, it would be precipitated by the Left: Black Lives Matter, Occupy, some of Bill Ayers’s admirers, or any of the many fringe loonies who’ve suggested that Trump, Cruz, or others deserve to die.

     Mind you, violence might not ensue. But just in case, the Huffington Post wants its readers to know that it will be the fault of the GOP. Imagine that. Say, where's the Democrat National Convention being held? Philadelphia, isn’t it? Where the Knockout Game is played by so many enthusiastic young’uns? Do you suppose Philly is bracing for convention-related violence? Or would it be so lost in the routine pattern of the City of Brotherly Love that the authorities would fail to notice?