IP,
of course you're coldhearted. Compassionte conservatism is an oxymoron.
Seriously, though, no one flew an airplane into the Murrow Bulding, and suing the fertilizer or rental truck industry almost certainly would have been laughed out of court. Suing the airline industry, however, seemed like a pretty good idea, and it's already teetering. So congress used a ton of our tax money (I thought conservatives were <i>laissez faire</i>) to bail them out and then a ton more to set up a blood money fund to keep 3000 families from all trying to get multibillion dollar settlements from the hole they had just flushed our money down.
So it's not charity; it's corporate welfare for the airlines.