"Expendable"

As Charlie Pierce puts it.

This reflects the most basic kind of expendability. The kind of thing that happens, usually with no public notice, and it's hard to look at:

Last September, Anna Brown, a 29 year old homeless black woman, went to three hospital emergency rooms complaining of pain in her legs. At the last one, St. Mary’s, she refused to leave without getting treatment. The hospital had her arrested....

Hospital surveillance cameras show her in a wheelchair and dropped to the ground by arresting officers....

Police car surveillance cameras show Brown in the back of the police car telling officers she was unable to get out of the car without a wheelchair. Jailhouse surveillance cameras show officers carrying her into a jail cell and placing her on the floor. Fifteen minutes later, Brown died of blood clots that migrated from her injured leg to her lungs....

After her death, the jailhouse surveillance camera show the local fire chief and an officer discussing the fact that Brown "could very well" have been a "drug seeker." No drugs were found in her system....

Race, health care, and surveillance culture come simultaneously into play here. That the healthcare system can be reckoned as something other than a force for good is balanced by the good of a typical "evil": surveillance. Without surveillance film, it's possible the death of this young woman would have gone unnoticed.

But surveillance cameras from a few different places, perhaps like police video capturing the physical condition of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case, cast a grainy yet objective eye to events. And yes, the images beg racial questions: if Anna Brown wasn't black, if she wasn't perceived as a "drug seeker," if she weren't homeless, would she have died on the floor of a jail cell because a hospital didn't want to deal with her? All the authority figures shown were white males.

Some background from this MSNBC story: A mother of two, Ms. Brown struggled with housing and employment after losing her St. Louis home to a New Year's Eve tornado—in 2010 .

So add on a few more "safety net" problems there.

Of the ever-increasing expendability of around 99%—and our laughable "rights"—Pierce reports on the week in the Supreme Court, and the "Strip Searches for All!" decision—

... By the usual 5-4 majority, Anthony Kennedy being his usual swinging self, and writing the opinion personally, the Court decided that local police can pretty much strip-search anyone they want, for whatever reason they can make up, even if the guy they picked up never gets charged with anything because the whole thing was the result of a bookkeeping glitch, and even if the arrest was for something that isn't even a crime. This, they said, was because we're arresting so many people, and because Timothy McVeigh was stopped for a broken tail-light and one of the 9/11 hijackers once got a speeding ticket, so the local cops can't know who the really dangerous criminals are once they take them into custody....

"Experience shows that people arrested for minor offenses have tried to smuggle prohibited items into jail," Kennedy said. And officials cannot take such a risk, he added.

If you think this sounds a lot like Kennedy's famously clairvoyant musings on what abortions do to the delicate psyches of the women who exercise their right to have them, in that Kennedy is known to dive right into the speculative, you wouldn't be too far wrong.

Justice Samuel Alito joined the opinion in full. While at least one observer of the case found Alito to be somewhat skeptical of the police's claims in his questioning, his devotion to strip-searches remains, of course, well-documented.