Oh yeah. That’s punishment
fitting the crime:
A New Orleans judge sentenced three people who looted liquor from a grocery store after Hurrican Katrina to 15 years in prison, saying he wanted to send a message.
and yet:
Two men each have been sentenced to a year in prison, a $5,000 fine and two years of supervised release in a Hurricane Katrina fraud case, U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said.
I’m not even going to speculate on the skin color of the people involved. That would be irresponsible, no?
Policing
The Culture of Life (But Only If You’re White and Rich)
Riggsveda at American Street ties together the stories of the Kenyan Dog who mothered an abandoned baby, the ‘do not rescuscitate’ order, and the fate of an abused child, in this moving report on the so-called ‘culture of life’, as practiced by Florida Family & Children Services.
“In Kenya, a baby is thrown away in a plastic bag, but rescued by a stray bitch and adopted into her litter.
In Florida under the watchful eye of the famous Dept. of Children and Families (who fought so hard for Terri Schiavo), a baby is battered and abused, sent to the hospital for 2 months, then despite the enormous amount of evidence of her torment, released back into the custody of a mother who didn?t want her, whereupon she is again beaten so badly that DCF sends a lawyer out to the hospital to request a Do Not Resuscitate order..”
Business is Business
The growing use of Tasers is disconcerting because their risks have not been properly studied, biomedical engineers say. More than 70 people have died since 2001 after being shocked with Tasers, mainly from heart or respiratory failure.
Taser International says the deaths resulted from drug overdoses or other factors and would have occurred anyway. But coroners have linked several deaths to the weapons, and independent scientists who are authorities on electricity and the heart say that the company may be significantly underestimating the weapon’s risks, especially in people who have used drugs or have heart disease.
Taser has performed only minimal research on the health effects of its weapons. Its primary safety studies on the M26, its most powerful gun, consist of tests on a single pig in 1996 and on five dogs in 1999. The company has resisted calls for more tests, saying that it is comfortable with the research it has conducted.
Thatt’s capitalism for you…