Judy Sanchez woke Thursday to the sound of heavy footsteps in her stairwell, followed by a loud motor. She got to her kitchen in time to see the blade of a chain saw rip through her front door. “It was so crazy,” Judy Sanchez said. “I was terrified.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

The rhetoric of class and inequality is back in force, and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren — the standard-bearer for a combative new progressivism — made the case to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell last night that members of the Senate shouldn’t own stock. “I realize there are some wealthy individuals – I’m not one of them, but some wealthy individuals who have a lot of stock portfolios” she told him.
Hard to see how Warren wouldn’t be, by most standards, wealthy, according to the Personal Financial Disclosure form she filed to run for Senate shows that she’s worth as much as $14.5 million. She earned more than $429,000 from Harvard last year alone for a total of about $700,000, and lives in a house worth $5 million.

The other day, I called Cassandra Gero, a fashion historian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, to chat about pajamas. She sent me an article that ran in the New York Times in 1929 under the headline “Court Sanctions Pajamas in Street.” The paper reported that a New Jersey barber named Samuel Nelson had made a bet that he could walk from Newark to Irvington in pajamas without being arrested. He was wrong; a policeman picked him up and put him in the slammer. But justice ultimately prevailed. A wise judge freed Nelson, calling his arrest “both asinine and stupid,” and warning the policeman, “Neither you nor I are censors of modern fashion here.” If only we lived in such enlightened times.

Mr. Buffett also wrote that his secretary, who makes $60,000 a year, pays over 30 percent of her income in taxes. The Internal Revenue Service reports the average tax rate for someone making that amount is 11.6 percent. Even adding on payroll taxes, she isn’t paying anywhere near 30 percent.

He found that even fathers in jail who had abandoned their kids were still better than no father at all to have in their children’s lives,” Santorum told voters earlier this month, according to the Los Angeles Times. If a same-sex couple were to raise a child, he said they would be “robbing children of something they need, they deserve, they have a right to. You may rationalize that that isn’t true, but in your own life and in your own heart, you know it’s true.

A man who spent two years in solitary confinement after getting arrested for DWI was awarded $22 million for suffering inhumane treatment in New Mexico’s Dona Ana County Jail.

Stephen Slevin was arrested in August of 2005 for driving while intoxicated, according to NBC station KOB.com. He said he never got a trial and spent the entire time languishing in solitary, even pulling his own tooth when he was denied dental care.