Slow News Day

AOC says she wants 'to abolish our carceral system'

That FoxNews headline popped up on my Google page, so not entirely trusting FoxNews, I googled the terms myself, and found this from 2 years ago:

First of all, many people in jailed or in prison don’t belong there at all.

Whether it’s punitive sentencing for marijuana possession or jailing people for their poverty & letting the rich free through systems like cash bail, we wrongly incarcerate far, far too many people.

/2

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 7, 2019

Lastly, people tend to say “what do you do with all the violent people?” as a defense for incarcerating millions.

Our lawmaking process means we come to solutions together, &either way we should work to an end where our prison system is dramatically smaller than it is today.

/4

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 7, 2019

Not a lot there I can disagree with.  Rather like "defund the police" it sounds like a perfectly dreadful idea calculated to make people run screaming from Democrats and Democratic candidates for office.

Or is it?

I've gotten the pulse of my area from "Next Door" lately.  Mostly it seems to be old cranks who hate the Mayor (who won by a wide margin of the popular vote) and the Democrats who run the county and hold elective offices like County and District Attorney, even the Democratic judges who are deemed too lenient, letting people out on bond when we all know people arrested by the police should spend the rest of their lives in jail, for the safety of all of us!

So, yeah, hardly a representative sampling of Houston residents.  But they all prattle on about how Democrats are "defunding the police."  Which is a lie on par with Trump building his border wall, or my favorite today, how Biden spent $2 billion (or was it $24 billion?  Does it matter?) NOT building the border wall.  How that happened is not explained, but these people aren't real clear on government and how it works (the main complaint was bail in Houston, which is governed by state law, not by the whims of local judges and county attorneys.  But you can't fix stupid.)

The people, in other words, who will grab any bit of nonsense and scream at it because Republicans didn't say it, or say it's bad.  What're ya gonna do with folks like that?

Ignore 'em, mostly.  AOC actually explains her policy idea in four tweets.  Not exactly bumper stickers, but we can't approach all reform and improvement on the basis of bumper stickers, or on what people who don't like it (or anything!) are going to scream about.

Funny, I'm not hearing anybody on Next Door scream about infrastructure.  Why is that?