Let's hear it for those who stepped up to help the women and children left behind in Postville, Iowa after a raid resulted in the arrests of about 400 undocumented workers, many of whom were imprisoned after cursory proceedings.

The raid left 43 women, wives of the men who were taken away, and their 150 children without status or a means of support. The women cannot leave the town, and to make sure they do not they have been outfitted with leg monitoring bracelets.

Postville has turned into an open air prison for the women and children who, for "humanitarian" reasons, haven't been detained behind bars. The women have been left to fend for themselves, but are prohibited from working to earn money. [more ...]

The New Republic has a good article about the South Ossetian conflict from a Georgia supporter. It is a pretty honest assessment, unlike much of what we have seen from others arguing for Georgia. Ronald Asmus writes:

I know that this is a war that the Georgian government never wanted. To be sure, the Georgian government and President Saakashvili himself is responsible for launching its military move on August 7--albeit in response to provocations and heavy shelling by South Ossetian separatists. That move gave Moscow the pretext to invade. Today, Western observers understandably ask why Tbilisi allowed itself to be goaded into what was clearly a Russian trap. President Saakashvili will have to answer that question himself. But I suspect I have a pretty good idea of what he will say.

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In May, I published Peniel Cronin's ground-breaking research report on the injustices in the 2008 state caucuses. The original report is here, the June revised report is here. ( Posts on the follow-ups and revisions here.)

Ms. Cronin has just released her final report. The data charts for the report are here. The report contains new information and data as well as a rewritten Conclusion and a call for caucus reform.

Ms. Cronin stresses that the report is not about Obama-bashing. It is clearly about the flaws of the caucus as a voting system, as distinguished from its value as a forum of debate and discussion. Here's an excerpt from her conclusion: [More...]

Yesterday the DNCC announced an Unity-Faith Breakfast in addition to the Interfaith event that will open the Convention.

Today, they announced interfaith caucus events. In addition, the release says:

Senator Obama is a committed Christian, and he believes that people of all faiths have an important place in American life,” said Joshua Dubois, Obama For America Director of Religious Affairs. “He's proud to work with the Democratic National Convention Committee on a Convention that fully engages people of faith in dialogue, celebration and prayer. We are honored that so many religious leaders are reaching across partisan and ideological lines in this Convention to address the values that matter to Americans."

Every night, the release continuess, the convention will begin with an invocation and end with a benediction. It stresses the evangelicals included [More...]

On August 13, the DNCC announced additional speakers for Tuesday night, the night that Hillary Clinton and Convention Keynote Speaker Mark Warner will make their speeches.

Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, Governors Ted Strickland of Ohio and Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, Senator Bob Casey, Jr. of Pennsylvania and Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana and Federico Peña, former Mayor of Denver and Secretary of both Energy and Transportation.

In addition to those ten speakers, a press release I received today adds nine more: [More...]

Russia signed the cease fire agreement, but basically said it was staying in its current position, stating "withdrawal would depend on the introduction of what he called additional security measures, without explaining what those were."

I think what Russia means is that Georgia has to give up its claims to South Ossetia and Abkhazia before they will withdraw. George Bush says:

The United States, though, has emphasized that Georgia’s territorial integrity must be preserved. Mr. Bush said Saturday, “There’s no room for debate on this matter.”

(Emphasis supplied.) I agree with Bush. There is no room for debate on this matter. Georgia blew it. It has to give up its claims to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. A face saver is needed. Something like a UN-monitored referendum in these two provinces. But make no mistake, Bush and the US are blustering now.

Speaking for me only

During the Cold War, I was a Cold Warrior. I believed that the Soviet Union was an "Evil Empire." In that era, NATO's mission as a defense alliance against Soviet aggression in Europe was clear and correct. But what about today? You see, I believe, like Ronald Reagan did, that a real change occurred in the era of Gorbachev and since then. Today, the Washington Post editorial board predictably attacks Russia's actions in South Ossetia while pretending Georgia is a good actor in this situation. Michael Dobbs, ironically writing for WaPo's Outlook section on Sunday, debunks WaPo's mythmaking:

I was there in [South Ossetia in] March 1991, shortly after the city was occupied by Georgian militia units loyal to Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the first freely elected leader of Georgia in seven decades. One of Gamsakhurdia's first acts as Georgian president was to cancel the political autonomy that the Stalinist constitution had granted the republic's 90,000-strong Ossetian minority. After negotiating safe passage with Soviet interior ministry troops who had stationed themselves between the Georgians and the Ossetians, I discovered that the town had been ransacked by Gamsakhurdia's militia. The Georgians had trashed the Ossetian national theater, decapitated the statue of an Ossetian poet and pulled down monuments to Ossetians who had fought with Soviet troops in World War II. The Ossetians were responding in kind, firing on Georgian villages and forcing Georgian residents of Tskhinvali to flee their homes.

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The visuals in this video are the point of it.

I've been feeling sad that our good Dr. Hunter S. Thompson will not be in Denver next week to share in the craziness. I sure will miss reading his take on the whole scene.

My good friend Anita Thompson, Hunter's wife, who has been spending fall and winter in NYC to attend and study journalism at Columbia, is now blogging, in addition to her excellent Owl Farm Blog, at The Huffington Post. How'd that come about? [More..]

Mother Jones has a new issue, much of which addresses the failure of the war on drugs. Among those they interviewed was David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire. Here's what he had to say (sorry, no link):

"We are the jailingest motherf*ckers on the planet. More than that, the number of violent offenders in federal prisons has gone down to its
lowest level ever in the history of the country -- in the single digits, by the Bureau of Prisons' own statistics. And the political party that
let this get out of control? It was the Democrats.

The drug war has actually destroyed the deterrent in inner cities by teaching whole police departments to chase drug stats when they should be solving crimes. And, of course, because they can't put all those people in prison, it doesn't even work as a draconian policy. Most people are just thrown back onto the street.

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Criminal charges against seven New Orleans police officers accused of shooting unarmed civilians on the Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina have been dismissed due to the prosecution's misconduct.

According to the Times-Picayune, District Judge Raymond Bigelow agreed with defense arguments that prosecutors violated state law by divulging secret grand jury testimony to a police officer who was a witness in the case.

The shootings were gruesome. A developmentally disabled man was shot in the back. Part of a woman's arm was "blown off." Two men died. Yet the officers were cleared by the New Orleans Police Department's internal investigation. And thanks to the inability of the district attorney's office to play by the rules, they've escaped criminal prosecution.

This is really big news. For the first time in U.S. history, a state commission will investigate whether an innocent man was executed.

A Texas panel will investigate whether a man executed for setting a fire that killed his three daughters actually started the blaze.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission agreed Friday to review conclusions that Cameron Todd Willingham set the fire in 1991. He was executed in 2004.... The Innocence Project, a legal group that works to overturn wrongful convictions, says experts in a report it commissioned concluded the fire was not intentionally set.

You can read JR's diary about it on Daily Kos . One of the experts who co-authored the Innocence Project report is his father, John Lentini, who has written extensively on fire science and errors made during investigations.

The executed inmate was Cameron Todd Willingham #999041. Read the results of a 2004 exhaustive investigation into the case by award-winning Chicago Tribune investigative reporters Maurice Possley and Steve Mills. [More...]

I was waiting to hear from the smartest guy in the room on this and here it is :