We learned from Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas in his devastating essay (posted by Duke in its entirety at Sanctuary), that there were horrible travesties of both the law and justice itself in how the Postville, Iowa raid was executed.

As Dr. Camayd-Freixas said, speaking of his conversation with one of the immigration judges who had no choice but to rule as a rubber-stamp for the ICE:

As a citizen, I want our judges to administer justice, not a federal agency.

Yet that is exactly what happened.  A federal agency administered “justice” and the defense attorneys and judges were helpless to change anything.  As a result, an entire town was ripped apart, economic devastation ensued, and as we now see (h/t woc phd by way of symsess’ great roundups at Sanctuary), the human rights abuses continue:

Women were deeply impacted by the raids. First, female workers at Postville were part of the round up. The lost access to their children, including babies that were still nursing, without warning nor concern. For others, many of the primary or main source of income in their household was permanently removed. In many cases, the raids also labeled these women as undocumented, ensuring that they could not work. Others, afraid of being deported in a raid, did not return to their jobs. The result is that most of the women are also unemployed and unable to be employed.

For women who did not immediately hear about the raids, there was also the fear and confusion about the location of their sons and husbands. Some women went for days without knowing what had happened. As fear turned into confirmation that men were being held for deportation, women’s anxieties and stressers went up.

I watched Godzilla movies with my dad when I was a little girl and I didn’t know anything about the atomic bomb and World War II, so I drank up the radioactive born monsters and cheered for them because they seemed sort of likable to me.

In sixth grade I mentioned to someone that I didn’t really think people in the Soviet Union walked around with balls and chains on their ankles, they were probably just like us, and the next day when I walked into the classroom everyone yelled out “Commie!” at me … not really in a mean way, just school hijinks, and I laughed, too, I liked the attention and clowned around about it.  I didn’t know much at all about the Soviet Union or the United States, for that matter.

In another class, still in junior high, I commented that maybe the young people who went into the Peace Corps became radical afterwards because they found they had been lied to by our history books and our schools and communities, and that if they had been taught the truth about our role in the world those young people would have done a way better job in all those different countries where instead they ended up seeing a very different America than they had been raised to know.

I got the “love it or leave it” response from some of my classmates, which I met with the utter obnoxious scorn of a typical junior high student.

But I didn’t really know what went on in any of those countries.

So what was it that I did know?

Went out tonight to a posh Mexican restaurant near Lincoln Center (not on my dime, oh no, lol lol).

Wrote a tune on the subway ride home.

Been promising NL and kj I’d do an audioblog so here it is.  The link will take you to gabcast (at least I hope it will!), so hit “play” on episode number 8.

Gabcast! Auld Manhattoe #8

lyrics are below.

On July 16, 2008, CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) put out a report (warning:  pdf) entitled “Those Who Dared: 30 Officials Who Stood Up for Our Country.

CREW explains:

The actions of those named in this report are as varied as the people themselves and cut across the federal government. Some, like Glenn Fine at the Department of Justice and John Higgins at the Department of Education, are inspectors general who have been the only check on agency-wide corruption, misconduct and undue political influence. Others are included for a single act of courage, such as Army Specialist Joseph Darby who turned over to authorities the now infamous pictures of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who rushed to Attorney General Ashcroft?s hospital bedside to prevent top White House officials from pressuring the Attorney General to approve an illegal surveillance program.

Imagine working in the belly of the beast – in the Bush Administration, imagine the feeling of realization that something is terribly wrong with the way things are working.  And everyone around you seems to be just fine with it all.  Imagine feeling things become more and more wrong, maybe talking with a co-worker about it only to find they think there is something wrong with YOU, imagine how high the stakes suddenly appear — you can lose your job, you can be smeared so badly you will never get another job, or you can even be physically harmed.

And yet these people spoke out anyway.

You can’t pour anything into a vessel that’s already full, so there’s all sorts of fancy words to talk about emptying it first and cleaning it out, purification, purging, catharsis, all that.  Psychological terms, spiritual terms.

I remember once hearing about a spiritual practice that purified a person, emptied them of all the negative feelings and thoughts and attachments, and I remarked “but then there would be nothing left!”  Yeah, scary thought.  Nothing.

New moon tonight, and emptiness is on my mind.  Empty of thoughts and decisions and opinions.  Empty of expectations and desires and demands.  The moon waxes and the moon wanes, eternal cycles of emptiness and fullness.

Fear can fill the human spirit during times of great change and makes action into panic stricken yelling and dashing about, “save me!”  “Save me!”  “Somebody DO something!”

Elton John – “Grey Seal,” 1974 (courtesy of Regdwight23 from YouTube)

The third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is coming up next month.

Today Dolly has been upgraded to a Category 2 hurricane.  And again there are worries about levees:

Coastal officials worried Tuesday that Tropical Storm Dolly may bring so much rain that flooding could break through the levees holding back the Rio Grande.

Some stories don’t ever seem to change.

Courtesy of video by CNN, turns out the New York Times, after having published an OpEd by Barack Obama, has rejected Johh McCain’s efforts and will not publish his OpEd.

The video is very creepy – the Villagers are all atwitter.

Here is McCain’s rejected piece, in its entirety.

This is considered a big breaking news story.  Yep.

Enjoy the circus that used to be called America.

And no, there’s nothing below the flip.

Miss Sarah Vaughn (“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” featuring a young Bob James (Fourplay) on piano with Larry Rockwell, bass and Omar Clay, drums; courtesy of YouTuber pixaninny)

and Miss Sarah Vaughn (“Perdito” circa 1955 musicians unknown, courtesy of YouTuber JazzVideoGuy)

See I like to sing harmony, that’s my favorite, even in choir in school I loved the vibrations I’d feel when singing with a big group of voices and we’re all singing different parts and it comes together as one sound, that’s a rush.

Over at Daily Kos, KagroX has a story up from ThinkProgress:

The Sunday Times reports Stephen Payne, a Bush pioneer and a political appointee to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, was caught on tape offering access to key members of the Bush administration inner circle in exchange for “six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.”

In an undercover video, Payne is seen promising to arrange a meeting for an exiled leader of Krygystan with Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice. (Not President Bush because “he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days,” Payne says. “I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone.”) All it will take for him to arrange this high-level meeting, says Payne, is “a couple hundred thousand dollars, or something like that.”

Let’s take a little look at what bribery means in the context of High Crimes and Misdemeanors.