N.Y. cop not indicted in chokehold death

In short: a behemoth was selling loose cigarettes on the streets of New York. Apparently doing so is illegal (your guess is as good as mine as to why that would be), but when confronted by the cops this guys response was to belligerently resist arrest.  And so the cops used standard procedures to knock him to the ground and handcuff him. However, he had a heart condition and asthma… and since he was really quite large, the combo of adrenalin, being put on his chest and having  cops bearing down on him to get him under control, his system shut down and he died.

Normally, such a story would get minimal coverage… maybe it was sad he died, but it wasn’t the cops fault that he was breaking the law (dumb though the law may be), and it certainly wasn’t their fault that he was massively overweight and in poor shape. but what makes it newsworthy: the same old story, he was black, the cop who put him in a bog-standard choke hold was white. That’s all anyone really needs to know, I suppose. Reverse the color values, though, and the news gets a lot more muted.

CNN is right now freaking out about “Oh Noes, tonight is the Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center.” You *know* that CNN and the other newsies are secretly going “ohboyohboyohboyohboyohboy!!!”