Government

That Easy Prison Transport Advertisement

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That Easy Prison Transport Advertisement

I am kind of a sucker when it comes to clicking on scammy internet businesses. I like reading up about them, taking a little of their ad dollars and educating myself on how they work. As a big consumer of the news and podcasts, I’m particularly interested in products and services marketed to the poor and how they compare to what is available to us in the Middle Class.

A few weeks ago I started seeing advertising for Easy Prison Transport, a local business that uses old city school buses to transport loved ones without cars to state prisons for visitation hours. For $100, you can buy a ticket for a Saturday day trip to Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, 15 miles west of Plattsburgh or Bare Hill Correctional outside of Malone, a few miles south of the Canadian border. On Sundays they offer $60 trips to Greene Correctional in Coxsackie and Hudson Correctional just outside Hudson.

I am sure these services are mostly used by wives and children of the colored and poor who want to visit their loved ones every once in a rare while. $100 bucks isn’t that much money these days, but if you’re poor and making minimum wage it might be a whole day’s labor. You have to figure only the poorest of poor people use these services – most other people would probably just drive their cars to visit the prison.

It has to be quite a trip. The buses leave at 4:30 am and are old school buses that rumble through the Adirondacks to their destination, on buses packed with people of common cause. Must be some very somber discussion.

It’s a very scenic trip, the mountains scenery of the Adirondack Northway and the somewhat pungent farm country of the Lake Champlain flatlands of Plattsburgh and the vast timberlands and less rich farm and grazing country up around Dannemora and Massena. The rundown trailers and mobile homes, the junk cars and broke down tractors and goats and cows in rocky pastures.

To be sure, many of the people behind bars are there for serious reasons. Most of these prisons are maximum or at least medium security. The people behind bars are often convicted of very serious crimes that have others seriously injured and disfigured, often for life, or dead. Other people are behind bars long periods of time for much more dubious reasons – things totally legal in one state but banned in another – often for purposes of stroking a political ego. Laws on the possession of firearms and so called illicit drugs often fall into that category.

Why do people make this costly trip to prisons for visitation purposes? For a few hours sitting across plexiglass to talk into a phone but see the face of loved ones behind bars? Love. It has to be quite the trip.

Is the government monitoring me?

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The other day half jokingly I noted on Facebook I didn’t want to leave my truck parked in the city with the stuff I needed for camp on a ninety degree day – with the propane tank, fireworks, ammunition and even the second battery sitting in the heat potentially posing a fire or explosion risk. I apparently watch too many cartoons or take the printed propane and battery warnings too seriously but I’d be unhappy if my truck burned. That said I was even more concerned about the heat decimating the ice I had to keep food prematurely.

Some random person that follows my personal Facebook feed commented that, that’s the kind of thing that gets you put on the government’s terrorists watch list. About the same time, reading the news for work, I saw this article about the Buffalo FBI surveillance of domestic terrorists and mass shooting threats. They mentioned that they had a unit that surveilled people of interest. That said, I was pretty bemused by the whole thing, noting that at least I’m creating good paying government jobs and the federal government has some of the best paid jobs in the Capital Region.

I’m really not that worried about government surveillance. If there is somebody in the government who sits around reading my blog posts and tries to psychoanalysis them, I’m glad I’m helping to keep them employed. I hope they enjoy watching my camping videos, stories about Big Red, my maps, photos and other content I provide. That said, more likely, they’re just read by an automatic spider run by the government like a Google, processed into some kind of intelligence like millions of other pages but ultimately not that useful. With 325 million Americans to keep an eye on plus six billion other foreign actors I’m sure I’m not that much of a priority or interest.

Sure as a staunchly independent individual, a single guy, who likes spending weekends in the wilderness, owns a few guns, are part of several pepper and off grid Facebook groups, plead to a misdemeanor a decade and a half ago, who has some conservative and some liberal views, I’m probably not the lowest of priorities by law enforcement monitoring. But I’m also not the highest either, and there are a lot more dangerous people out there like White Nationalists, religious extremists, racists and other hate groups. I’m certainly none of those things and there is a lot bigger fish to go after then me.

I also am aware that law enforcement has a lot of restrictions on monitoring citizens. Most monitoring when it occurs is probably broad-based and occurs on a lot swath of population and is fully automated. They have to have reasonable suspension that a crime is likely to occur in the near future and can only monitor people in public places or public utterances without a court order obtained by a judge after showing probable cause of a crime. Because of the cost and time involved, only when they have compelling evidence are law enforcement likely to investigate.

I think the Supreme Court decision is wonderful news for the second amendment and gun rights in our country

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I think the Supreme Court decision is wonderful news for the second amendment and gun rights in our country ⚖

While the court decision is unlikely to have of an immediate impact on day to day life, it further expands upon the law of the second amendment. I’m heartened by the warm embrace by most Republicans and how many potential ways it could lead to a furtherance of rights with future court cases and state and federal legislation. It may prove in a few years to be just as revolutionary as many of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights cases, as the case law is implemented and promulgated by lower courts and agencies in the coming years. While so many of new laws proposed, especially in blue states are going the wrong way, we may be in the middle of a judicial rights revolution.

NPR

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Criminal defense lawyers sound the alarm about mass incarceration if Roe falls : NPR

Picture a court of law, jury in place, set to determine the fate of a woman who has had a miscarriage. And she's been charged with murder.

This hypothetical is part of how the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) is training its members to prepare for a wave of criminal charges if, as expected, the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

Only it's not a hypothetical — this happened in 2019. After a California woman delivered a stillborn baby at 8 months, she tested positive for meth at the hospital and the staff called the police. The Kings County prosecutor charged her with the "murder of a human fetus" and she spent 16 months in jail before the charges were dismissed.

I have very mixed feelings about Chris Jacobs getting booted out of Congress over his position on gun control 🔫

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I have very mixed feelings about Chris Jacobs getting booted out of Congress over his position on gun control 🔫

For one, I think it’s good that the Republican base and the good hard-working conservative country folk in the Southern Tier are holding their elected officials accountable, and are standing up for their rights. For too long, many of the leftists have thought they can trample on our constitutional rights, allowing the state to seize firearms and personal property with little due cause or recourse, leaving ordinary citizens in fear of their government. Too often Republicans and conservatives have had cowardice, unwilling to stand up to media and jackals on the left, rolling over much like too many did in era of McCarthyism.

At same time, I am no fan of moral purity tests — or how the Republican Party has become a party of arbitrary and capricious restrictions on abortion, while the Democrats have become a party calling for arbitrary and capricious on gun owners. It seems like increasingly that the Republican Party is all about arresting and jailing Democrats, while the Democratic Party is about arresting and jailing Republicans by creating laws to target them. The hell of it all is most politicians aren’t likely to go jail, but the police will be using their new found powers from Republicans and Democrats to attack and imprison the colored and poor.

I agree with the many Republicans activists that Chris Jacob had to go. Any politician that threatens fundamental rights should be kicked out of their party, be it Democrat or Republican. People should vote the gun-grabbers out of the Democratic Party and the abortion-banners out of the Republican Parties. And they shouldn’t make their whole office about kowtowing to jackals of the press and popular culture. Politicians don’t have to be at the public-trough, writing laws that hurt ordinary people, they can get jobs in the private sector where they can do things for their community without hurting the American people at large.

Chris Jacobs Drops Re-Election Bid After Bucking His Party on Guns – The New York Times

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Chris Jacobs Drops Re-Election Bid After Bucking His Party on Guns – The New York Times

On Friday, facing intense backlash from party leaders, a potential primary from the state party chairman and a forceful dressing down from Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Jacobs announced that he would abandon his re-election campaign.

The episode, which played out as President Biden pleaded with lawmakers in Washington to pass a raft of new laws to address gun violence, may be a portent for proponents of gun control, who had welcomed Mr. Jacobs’s evolution on the issue as a sign that the nation’s latest mass tragedies might break a decades-old logjam in Washington.

Just last week, Mr. Jacobs, who is the scion of one of Buffalo’s richest families and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association in 2020, had been an easy favorite to win re-election, even after a court-appointed mapmaker redrew his Western New York district to include some of the state’s reddest rural counties, areas he does not currently represent.

But by Friday, after local gun rights groups had posted his office phone number on the internet and local party leaders had started pulling their support one by one, political analysts predicted he may well lose a primary challenge based solely on his embrace of firearm restrictions.