Free Martha!

Martha Stewart, interviewed by Barbara Walters before her sentencing:

" ... There are many, many good people who have gone to prison ... look at Nelson Mandela."

Indeed.  Let us pray that Martha's unjust incarceration will spur a nationwide movement to end this brutal system that relegates the rich and well-connected to second-class - nay, third-class - citizenship.
 
Need yet more proof that her mouth is running on autopilot these days?  Martha ("It's a Good Thing") Stewart says of her sentence:

... it could have been worse. ... Five months versus 10 months or 16 months ... That's a good thing.

Maybe that mouth isn't totally on autopilot - for example, she shrewdly deflects possible Leona Helmsley comparisons with this:

"I didn't cheat the little people. ... We're all little people. I didn't cheat anybody out of anything."

Life is just too harsh, all the same, it seems.  Consider this complaint:

"There are certain people who I wish I'd never met. I have lost my job. I have lost my position in my company. I am no longer the CEO of Martha Stewart Omnimedia. ... That makes me angry and sad."

Except for the bit about being CEO of a big company, lots and lots of 'little people', victimized by a pump-and-dump Bubble Economy, having been saying much the same thing for years.
 
Allie McBeal, when asked why her problems were so different, so special, so much worse than other people's, answered: "Because they're ... mine."  But it's true: Martha's problems are not really like little people's problems because in her case, she almost died.  You know those prisoners at Abu Ghraib whose heads were pushed under water until they thought they'd drown?  Pfft.  That's nothing compared to Martha's brushes with the Grim Reaper:

"What was a small personal matter became, over the last two years, an almost-fatal circus of unprecedented proportion.  I have been choked and almost suffocated to death."

Quick, administer the Heimlich Manure!  Ah, she must be breathing a little easier, now - she's being fined a mere $30,000 (because that's the maximum under the law, if you can believe it) but Martha Stewart OmniMedia went up 37 points on the news of her sentencing.