It’s a Fair Cop

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Erie County Jails: Wins & Losses

You won’t read this anywhere else, because…well, I don’t know why.  I think it’s somewhat important because it was a major issue during 2009 and the recent Sheriff’s campaign.

Marc Odien explains that the Commission of Corrections won a court battle to ensure that inmates get assessed for safety risks, get hygenic supplies, and have clean bedding.  Guantanamo Tim loses one.

The Sheriff’s department is desperately trying to look decisive and ethical by firing the deputies who illegally beat the crap out of a detainee and lied about it.  Beating the crap out of a detainee, of course, is just another word for torture.  It’s also not the first such allegation, and calls into question the veracity of all of this “suicide” talk.

I picture federal DOJ interviews of county officials being not unlike the Monty Python Parrot Sketch.  ”They’re not dead, they’re resting”.

But while we have inmate after inmate end up pining for the fjords, the state action is based on the premise that the jails are not up to the minimum standards the state requires, quite contrary to what the county is saying.  This is such a failure of leadership, but the Boss Hogg-esque Collins administration and our own Rosco P. Coltrane get away with it because the people of Hazzard Erie County for the most part don’t have contact with the prisons and don’t really care if people behind bars are treated humanely or inhumanely.

Until it’s their neighbor or family member.

Deep Thought

How soon before we always surround the word “suicide” with quotation marks when referring to the Erie County jail system?

It’s Come to This

HT Elizabeth Benjamin at Daily Politics

Is That Rain on My Leg?

Here’s what Andrew Rudnick, head of the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, has to say about a new PAC he’s helping to set up:

It’s not really a Democrat or Republican thing; it’s an upstate-downstate thing

That must be why this PAC is dedicated only to electing Republicans to the state Senate and little else. It also must be why the PAC has teamed up with similar chambers of commerce from such upstate locales as Long Island, Westchester County, and the mid-Hudson Valley.

Rudnick said the realities of one-party rule in Albany force the Partnership and other groups across upstate and the metropolitan suburbs to consider Republican candidates.

“The object is to turn enough of those contested races back to Republicans,” he said. “That’s because of where the majority party is at this moment and what they’ve done.”

He pointed to the last state budget and projections of continuing deficits as evidence that the Legislature — under complete Democratic rule for the first time since the 1930s — is ignoring upstate’s economic plight.

“If everyone is Democrat and downstate, we’re now screwed more than we have been,” he said. “We’re all about trying to change that.”

I know that everyone pines for the days of a Republican senate majority, when taxes were low, businesses unencumbered, population and economic growth were the rule, when Bruno was one of the three in a room, and great names like “Volker” had an infinitesimally larger volume of clout than they do now.

And that’s the point – that it doesn’t matter what party an Albany politician belongs to. It doesn’t matter which party controls the Governor’s Mansion or a particular legislative chamber. No matter what happens, money trumps all, and the vast majority of the population gets screwed. For an Andrew Rudnick to suggest that flipping the Senate so that Skelos is in the room with the next embattled ethical mess of a governor will make a stitch of difference is epically ridiculous.

After all, these are the people who gave us the facile and self-contradicting Unshackle Upstate.

At least we can laugh at it all. There’s a wonderful and hilarious postscript to this story.

State Sen. Antoine M. Thompson, D-Buffalo, who coordinates the campaign efforts of Western New York Senate Democrats, did not return a call seeking comment.

Suicides, Schmuicides

County Executive Chris Collins explains why he doesn’t want the United States Department of Justice to investigate allegations of shoddy conditions, brutality, and negligence at Erie County jails:

…he has no faith in the Department of Justice based on its lawsuit against the county, accusing it of shoddy jail operations and inability to curb inmate suicides.

“We don’t trust them. There’s a lot of hearsay in their complaint,” Collins said, explaining that Justice Department personnel could fabricate or exaggerate statements taken from individuals who are interviewed.

“In the law, we want to make sure allegations aren’t exaggerated and are true. This is due process. Let’s face it, a person asking the questions can put words in the mouth. If we can’t review it, you’re going to get biased information,” he said.

Collins said holding center personnel are working hard to prevent suicides.

Well, not by keeping an eye on high-risk inmates or taking away objects with which they can hang themselves or anything. The whole “I don’t trust the DOJ” meme is like something out of the Jim Crow South. It translates into: “I don’t want anyone keeping an eye on what I’m up to. Also, agenda and status quo.”

“We do believe the jail is doing everything it can and at the end of the day, you can’t stop someone from killing himself,” Collins said.

Of course you can. Absolutely you can. If you care to. If you make an effort, take it seriously, and prioritize it.

Chris Collins and Tim Howard are concerned about saving face, but little else. After all, wealthier suburbanites who have little contact with the jail system are their political base. Howard and Collins can completely ignore the issue and not suffer politically in any way.

Meanwhile, however, people are dying.

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Palin and Canadian Medicare

I’m heartened to see Facebook status update author Sarah Palin sing the praises of Canadian universal-coverage, single-payer Medicare. Perhaps we could simplify the whole health care debate and simply enact a universal Medicare buy-in here in the United States. Wouldn’t that be so much simpler? Wouldn’t it be great to abolish Medicaid and just cover everyone? Wouldn’t it be great if your employer and you didn’t have to share the five-figure cost for difficult and often inadequate private medical insurance plans?

At least that way, breathlessly false Republican accusations of a “government takeover” of the “health care system” would be incrementally closer to the truth.

Not true, mind you – just closer to it.

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Root Causes

Someday, people will take a hard look at the problems that hold Buffalo and WNY back economically, politically, and socially.

When that day comes, discussions about revitalizing cities or neighborhoods through the removal or downgrading of highways will become moot. The Kensington didn’t ruin the East Side, and its removal won’t revive it. The elevated 190 didn’t leave the waterfront stagnant, and its removal won’t suddenly revive it.

We pay disproportionately high taxes for really bad government. Maybe we should spend billions to repair that problem.

The Postscript on Massa’s Exit

He left after all, didn’t he. Monday was somewhat of a spiraling descent into the rabbit hole, where the morning headlines touted the fact that passage of health care reform would be eased somewhat by his departure, and the afternoon headlines featured him not going down without a fight. He launched a blistering attack on Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, he said that he was the victim of a plot to oust him over his health care vote, and he’s now preparing to spend an entire hour on not only the Larry King Hour of Ill-Informed Narcolepsy™, but also on the Glenn Beck Hour of Idiotic and Insane ACORN Ranting™.

If Massa was lying or overselling the cancer scare; if he is not being forthcoming about what happened to spur on the ethics investigation, then my trust in him was shortsighted and unfortunate. I always saw him as an honest and forthright guy, and due to his past candor, I give him every benefit of every doubt before assuming he’s full of it.

As a side note to everyone who’s “disappointed” in what I wrote, when I wrote it, and how I wrote it: I don’t care. Be as disappointed as you want. Going into this, Massa was a good guy, a principled guy, a cancer survivor who cited health reasons. The ethical accusations were completely without factual foundation at the time, so it would have been ridiculously speculative for me to condemn or defend any of it. But with each passing hour, the whole thing got weirder and weirder. So, take your disappointment and go read one of those objective blogs that don’t offer an opinion, and don’t hold a political bias.

Massa is too far to the left to be a credible Republican, and he’s burning his Democratic bridges left and right. I don’t know what he plans to do in the future, but clearly it won’t be in elected office. I figure a guy like he wouldn’t go around throwing “they’re out to get me” unless he really believes that. I also have no doubt that Massa ruffled feathers; but it’s one thing to go down fighting – it’s another to drop out of the fight, claim that you’re being forced into it, and BTW they’re all motherfuckers.

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Massa’s Shock Disclosure: He Curses When Drunkedly Joking

Via Rochester Turning, Eric Massa (NY-29)explains what all the “sexual harrassment” fuss is about:

I have to come find out that on New Year’s Eve, I went to a staff party — it was actually a wedding for a staff member of mine. There were 250 people there. I was with my wife, and in fact we had a great time. She got the stomach flu, I went down to sing Auld Lang Syne. And with cameras on me — I’m talking three of them — filming me, I danced with the bride, and I danced with the bridesmaid. Absolutely nothing occurred.

I said goodnight to the bridesmaid. I sat at down at the table where my whole staff was, all of them, by the way bachelors. One of them looked at me and — as they would do after, I don’t know, 15 gin and tonics and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne — a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid. His points were clear and his words were far more colorful than that.

And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and I said, ‘What I really ought to be doing is frakking you,’ and then tossled the guy’s hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where I shouldn’t be there.

Was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely.

Is that even remotely similar or comparable to, e.g., what Mark Foley did? Absolutely not. Top top it off, Massa went on the radio yesterday to allege that the ethics inquiry is politically motivated to push him out of the House in order to get final resolution on health care reform. Massa has been a no vote for anything not containing a strong and vibrant public option. He even suggested that he might rescind his resignation.

So, now that we know the genesis of the sexual harassment claim against Massa, I wholeheartedly condemn his drunken use of the word “fuck” to connote sexual intercourse with a man in a joking manner after a wedding reception.

In the meantime, I reiterate my earlier statement. I’m disappointed in his retirement, and saddened by the news that his cancer has re-appeared. Best wishes to him – a principled and honorable guy.