While few Cedar Rapids residents would balk at that description, they would also acknowledge continued difficulty in meeting the dual challenges of flood recovery and a historic economic downturn. One week prior to the governor’s tour landing in Cedar Rapids last Thursday, a local restaurant believed to have successfully migrated through the challenges shut its doors, an apparent victim of recovery-related debt and a less prosperous downtown.

Gov. Chet Culver's message of Iowa's resiliency was brought home to Cedar Rapids this week when he visited the Raining Rose Inc. manufacturing plant. (Photo: Iowa Independent/Lynda Waddington)

Culver was in Cedar Rapids offering praise to a local body care products manufacturer that has not only managed to recover from devastating 2008 flooding, but has thrived. The company, Raining Rose Inc., began in 2003 with 15 employees. At the time of the floods, the company employed 52 individuals, but now boasts 65 — and, according to operations manager Kyle Hach, is now considering if it needs to relocate in order to further expand.

“We got 8 to 9 feet of water [in our plant], and it destroyed everything,” Hach said. “During that time, we spread out to any available building we could find in Cedar Rapids. I think at one point in time we had over eight locations for our different departments — sales, packaging, warehouse, production — while we worked on rebuilding our facility here.”

Although the company took advantage of Jumpstart Iowa Small Business Assistance Program offered by the state, Hach says that the owners approached recovery as if they would not receive any assistance.

“Chuck, the business owner, built this business conservatively. He built it the right way,” Hach said. “We went into the rebuilding process with the expectation that we were not going to get a single dollar of help. … So, [looking longer term,] we are doing okay. We have rebuilt and are actually looking at moving to a new building in two or three years because we have simply outgrown this location. Financially, the company is doing really well.”

For the governor’s office, there could be little better place to tout a vision for “Moving Iowa Forward,” the name of the statewide tour. Culver arrived, shook hands, and took his place behind a lectern to expound on the number of state assistance programs passed during the last legislative session that have helped speed recovery in hard-hit locations like Cedar Rapids.

“I’m really here to highlight the resiliency of this company, their employees, the City of Cedar Rapids,” Culver said. “We have overcome and we continue to work to overcome the floods of 2008 — the challenges that came with that — and also the economic challenges caused by this worldwide recession that is affecting 48 states, nearly every business and homes across Iowa as well as families across the state and across the country. I am inspired everyday by the people that I have the honor of representing.”

Linn County, Culver said, has received $93 million in funds from the Iowa Jobs Initiative, known as I-JOBS, for infrastructure projects that the state is optimistic will spur economic activity. In addition, $3.6 billion in federal funds for disaster relief have been obtained by the state, with Cedar Rapids and Linn County receiving roughly $750 million from the statewide pool.

“We are continuing to make flood recovery a top priority. I’m speaking again this morning to Secretary [Shaun] Donovan at Housing and Urban Development, continuing to keep these funds flowing and  trying to secure more funds. This is personal to me. This is our hometown … and I’m going to continue, for as long as I am governor, to fight for all of you,” Culver said, drawing his only applause line during the brief address.

Just one block west of the manufacturing plant, several homes sit mostly untouched since the massive and unprecedented flooding. More properties in similar states of limbo and rot are located in pockets of residential space surrounding the Cedar River. The buyout process, which has been difficult for many in Cedar Rapids due to government red tape, is something that newly elected Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett has championed. It is also something that Corbett was pleased to hear addressed by the governor during his visit.

“My No. 1 priority for this year, and until we get some resolution, is to support the flood victims,” Corbett said following Culver’s address. “People have been through absolute Hell since the flood, and we have to find some resolution and close this chapter in the flood saga — and this chapter is the buyout process.”

The city, according to Corbett, wants the property and is asking the public to come forward on a voluntary basis in lieu of forcing participation by using eminent domain. Corbett and three additional members of the Cedar Rapids City Council are advocating that the property owners be provided 110 percent of pre-flood assessed value, which is a 10 percent increase from what the pre-election City Council had approved. The city has roughly 1,300 properties that are eligible for buyouts.

“I was happy to have the governor’s support. Although he didn’t quite endorse exactly what we are trying to do here locally, he seemed to be supportive overall what we are trying to do,” said Corbett, a former Republican Iowa House Speaker. “He told me to keep fighting, just as he is going to keep fighting. We can make the excuses of bureaucratic red tape in Washington, but for a flood victim that has lost everything and has had to set his or her life on the curb, that doesn’t carry much water. They expect elected officials to fight for them — locally, their mayor; statewide, their governor. Sometimes you just have to put a stake in the ground and say that we are going to fight.”

Culver said that he “really wants to help” with the buyout process, and offered the services of his office to work with federal agencies “to make sure that these homeowners in Cedar Rapids are bought out at the very highest level possible.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. (WDCpix)

Proposals taking on climate change, immigration reform, the foreclosure crisis, and bank regulatory reform all remain high on the Democrats’ legislative wish-list. But the combination of heightened unemployment and thorny mid-term elections will make it more difficult, in 2010, to unite Democrats behind those proposals, for fear the votes will haunt moderates on the campaign trail.

Although Congress is on the brink of passing the most sweeping health-care reforms in four decades — representing both the Democrats’ top domestic priority and a major victory for party leaders — most of those changes won’t take effect for several years. As a result, many experts anticipate that health care — despite having dominated Congress for much of last year — will have less an influence on November’s elections than the economy.

“Americans won’t be able to test the veracity of these wildly divergent claims [about the health care bill],” Robert Reich, former secretary of Labor under President Clinton, wrote on his personal blog Tuesday. “So don’t count on health reform to help Dems next November — nor harm them, either.”

Instead, Democratic leaders will likely focus their energies this year trying to improve the economy (where unemployment remains in double digits) and safety measures in the wake of a near terrorist attack in Detroit on Christmas Day.

Read more at The Iowa Independent’s sister site, The Washington Independent.

Des Moines anti-abortion activist Dave Leach. (Video screengrab)

Leach and a group of anti-abortion activists posted a dozen items on the auction site in order to raise money to hire a private attorney for Scott Roeder, who is accused of murdering Tiller because he performed abortions. Around a dozen items were posted, including graphic artwork drawn by fellow inmates and signed by Roeder as well as an “Army of God Edition” of Leach’s newsletter which lists ways to damage abortion buildings from putting super glue in locks to following two simple bomb recipes.

After five hours, eBay removed 10 items, with the final two items removed by late Monday afternoon. The company said in a statement that the anti-abortion memorabilia violated its listing polices which prohibit items being posted that “promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual, or religious intolerance, or promote organizations with such views.”

Leach said the site allows plenty of postings that fit that description.

“You sell World War II stuff, which ‘glorifies’ our role in it,” Leach said in a letter to eBay executives obtained by The Iowa Independent on Wednesday. “You do not censor things which honor police, who exist for their capacity for judicious violence. So it seems to me that your statement cannot be made sense of, without a common sense appeal to the context of violence.”

In August, Leach drafted a legal brief of Roeder claiming the necessity defense, which argues that a crime may be permissible if it is committed in order to avoid a much greater harm. The money raised would go toward finding an attorney willing to argue that defense.

Leach’s hope is that refusing to contest the facts of the case will leave no other option to the judge but to let the jury hear argument regarding whether Roeder was forced to commit murder in order to stop an “unlawful harm,” meaning abortion. That argument has been tried before and has repeatedly been rejected by judges regarding crimes committed to stop abortion because abortion is legal, and therefore protected by the law.

“[O]ur project has nothing to do with ‘promoting or glorifying violence,’” Leach said in his letter. “It is all about moving judges in abortion prevention trials to stop censoring the only trial issue, and the only defense, from the hearing of the jury. Does that sound to you like a fanatical, extremist, violence-glorifying, radical goal?”

Leach argued with the assertion that his postings “glorified violence.”

“For example, would you accuse the Bible of ‘promoting violence against an individual’ when such individual is slaughtering thousands every year?” Leach said. “How about items which honor police, who exist for the purpose of inflicting violence upon individuals when justified?”

In a note accompanying the letter, Leach said he and his associates may pursue other options in order to go forward with the auction, saying he has looked into purchasing software to make the auction a reality.

“We have had enough publicity, I think, to attract buyers,” he said. “Especially if we do it soon.”

Leach, who has received his fair share of bad press over the years regarding his association with radical anti-abortion movement, said he is comforted that Jesus received bad press as well.

“But I have been pondering the ‘bad press’ Jesus got from the Pharisees, and how he handled it, and a strategy remains alive in my mind how to turn this all around into a public move to end abortion,” he said.

Leach publishes a newsletter called “Prayer & Action News” that describes itself as “a trumpet call for the Armies of God to assemble.”

Roeder was a contributor to the publication, which advocates the doctrine of justifiable homicide in the case of abortion doctors. Along with Leach, the auction was organized by Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who made headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic. Since Roeder’s arrest in May he’s been in regular contact with what The Wichita Eagle describes as “a who’s who of anti-abortion militants.”

Insurance premiums in Iowa rose by 77.9 percent from 2000 to 2006. Iowans’ wages increased by only 20.4 percent over the same period. Enrolling in Medicaid in Iowa requires earnings of less than 71 percent of the federal poverty level, or $15,204 for a family of three. This formula keeps many Iowans from getting access to any health insurance.

“The majority of America’s uninsured cannot stretch their earnings far enough to cover health insurance, but their low incomes are too high for public assistance,” wrote the report’s author, Andrew Cannon, a research associate at the Iowa Policy Project.

As an example, the group points to Larraine Murray, independent child care provider in Des Moines whose income exceeds the threshold to qualify for Medicaid, but is not enough to cover the cost of a private health insurance plan. But even if she could afford private health insurance, Murray fears she would be excluded from insurance based on her pre-existing conditions.

“It really saddens me to be let down by a health care system over and over again [even though] I live in this great nation, in this great state of Iowa,” she said.

The group also found that the average annual health insurance premium for small businesses more than doubled in 10 years, rising 113 percent from 1999 to 2009. Employee contributions to health insurance premiums more than doubled since 1996.

Of the Iowa small businesses that do not offer health insurance to employees, 85 percent say that they cannot afford it. Of the small businesses in Iowa that do offer health insurance, 52 percent say that doing so is a large financial burden.

“Small-business owners cannot survive economically if they continue to face double-digit increases in health-care costs — and neither can their employees,” Cannon wrote. “Health-care reform must ensure that small business have access to affordable, quality health care coverage.”

Bill and Jeanne Hammen, owners of a jewelry shop in Grinnell for the last 23 years, said over the past 8 years they have seen their health care costs skyrocket so much that they have been forced to lower benefits.

“In order to be able to keep offering coverage we’ve had to cut benefits and offer a lower quality plan to be able to afford it,” Bill Hammen said.

Roughly 76 percent of small business owners see the current health care system as a barrier to entrepreneurship.

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.COM)

Speaking with controversial radio host Steve Deace about a recent letter criticizing Grassley penned by GOP state Rep. Kent Sorenson of Indianola, Salier said it is not surprising political observers believed it was the first shot of a coming primary challenge.

“If this were 8 to 10 years ago, then yes, I would have been surprised by that reaction because Grassley was the dominant force in Iowa politics, in both parties,” he said. “Grassley was the dominant force and had an enormous amount of loyalty. That has so eroded out from underneath him. There is so much talk of primarying Chuck Grassley now that I think he had to respond very quickly to somebody like Kent Sorenson to try to head that off if that was indeed what Sorenson was thinking.”

After the letter was made public, Grassley apparently had dinner with Sorenson to discuss his concerns, which included past statements on same-sex marriage and his vote for the $700 million bank bailout.

Earlier in the day, Sorenson told Deace he has no interest in running for the U.S. Senate. However, he said he has been contacted by two different county central committees urging him to challenge Grassley in a primary.

If Grassley doesn’t take Sorenson’s complaints to heart, a primary challenger will emerge and Salier will work hard to make sure Iowa’s senior senator does not return to Washington, D.C.

“If he doesn’t right his ship on this, he very well may face a primary,” he said. “And if it’s someone who thinks like me on these issues or someone who thinks like Kent Sorenson does, I’ll take everything I’ve got to try to propel them forward.”

Grassley’s seniority in the Senate should not be a reason to support his candidacy, Salier said, since something like his position of power on the Senate Finance Committee means “absolutely bupkis if what you do with that power is work with [Montana Democratic Sen.] Max Baucus to try to advance socialized medicine.”

Deace said several times that if Salier were to enter the race, he would defeat Grassley.

“People are that frustrated,” Deace said.

This isn’t the first time Salier has discussed Grassley’s political vulnerablity. He blasted Grassley’s response to the April Supreme Court ruling overturning Iowa’s ban on same-sex marriage, saying he “isn’t even close to the same conservative” he was when he was first elected.

Salier is the founding member of the conservative group Everyday America. In 2002 he became a hero of sorts to Iowa’s social conservative movement when he ran a surprisingly close U.S. Senate primary race against Congressman Greg Ganske.

Is that fair to someone of my status who makes — let’s face it, I make $172,000 a year. Is it fair that I should get $4,500 to go out and buy a new car? I just don’t think that is fair. I don’t think it is right. But I think it would be right for someone making less than $50,000 a year because they are the ones who need the help.

His message was clear: Congressional lawmakers earn enough already, and therefore don’t need the taxpayers subsidizing their vehicles. Unmentioned was the fact that, at least in the House, the taxpayers already pay for lawmakers’ vehicles — and at costs well above $4,500.

The New York Times wrote the regional piece last year, revealing that 13 House lawmakers in New York and New Jersey take advantage of a chamber rule allowing them to bill taxpayers for leased vehicles as part of their office costs.

“The use of a car — gas included — is one of the benefits of being a member of the House of Representatives,” the Times noted dryly, adding that Senate rules don’t allow upper-chamber lawmakers the same benefits. “There are few restrictions on what kind of car the members can choose, and there is no limit on how much they can spend. … Not only does the federal government pick up the cost of the lease and the gas, but also general maintenance, insurance, registration fees and excess mileage charges.”

Topping the expense list (at least as of May 2008) was Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), who was billing taxpayers $998 a month for his Lexus LS 460. So on top of the roughly $170,000 in salary Meeks was pulling in, he also got almost $12,000 to drive a luxury sedan.

Some lawmakers defended the perk, saying that their large districts require a lot of travel to meet with constituents. But Meeks, who represents a section of Queens, declined to comment for the Times story. “These are never lighthearted stories,” he said.

Mike Lillis covers congress for the Washington Independent, a Center for Independent Media site.

The ads, which said, “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone,” first went up on buses Saturday and were removed by Tuesday.

Gov. Chet Culver said he was “disturbed” by the ads.

This isn’t the first controversy surrounding atheist advertisements on buses. After an ad campaign was successful at generating publicity (and a lot of controversy) in London and elsewhere in the UK, atheists and advocates of religious freedom have attempted to replicate those efforts in many cities in the United States.

According to a Pew Research study in April, roughly 5 percent of U.S. adults say they do not believe in God, but only about a quarter of those adults call themselves “atheists.”

A 2006 survey by sociologists at the University of Minnesota found that atheists are “America’s most distrusted minority.” According to the survey, they are tolerated more on the east and west coasts than they are in the Midwest:

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology. The study will appear in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.

From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. “Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Edgell also argues that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.

Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings. “Americans believe they share more than rules and procedures with their fellow citizens—they share an understanding of right and wrong,” she said. “Our findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good.”

The researchers also found acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.

The study is co-authored by assistant professor Joseph Gerteis and associate professor Doug Hartmann. It’s the first in a series of national studies conducted the American Mosaic Project, a three-year project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the contemporary United States.

McDowell says he buys and sells domain names at home in his spare time, and that’s all this was.

It’s a practice sometimes called “domain name speculation.” It’s somewhat common, though intellectual property lawyers have done a good job of going after folks for squatting on the wrong name in recent years, so it’s not as common as it used to be.

Here’s a written statement McDowell sent me:

The registration of this particular URL has nothing to do with Sen. Paul McKinley or his exploring of a run for governor of Iowa. Completely outside of my duties in the Senate Republican Leader’s Office on my own personal time, I sometimes buy and sell URLs as part of some outside consulting and online work that I do in my spare time. In no way did Senate Republican Leader Paul McKinley have anything to do with this purchase that I made awhile ago on my own time and with my own resources. There is absolutely zero correlation between my personal purchase of this URL and Senate Republican Leader Paul McKinley or my duties in his office.

I followed up by asking McDowell if he would sell the domain name to Branstad if he decides to run. He said he definitely would.

That means that if Branstad is running for governor, he’s even more behind online than I originally thought.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 12 to 5 Tuesday morning in support of Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh. His statements suggesting that the United States needs to adhere more vigilantly to international law have sparked outrage from conservative lawmakers, and only one Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, voted to support his nomination in committee.

“Harold Koh believes that Americans should be subject to the views of foreign and international bureaucrats,” King said. “He supports customary international law, a direct assault on the sovereignty of the United States.”

King went on to call Koh an “anti-free speech radical,” saying he will place foreign courts and globalism before the U.S. Constitution.

A letter to the Senate committee from the Coalition to Preserve American Sovereignty pointed to Koh’s past statements regarding the Iraq War as a violation of international law and that decisions made by the International Criminal Court matter in America as reasons to oppose his nomination.

In late March, Fox News host Glenn Beck said Koh supported Muslim Shari’a Law over the Constitution, a charge later debunked.

His defenders say his views are not out of the mainstream. He supports voluntary U.S. participation in bodies like the International Criminal Court and has argued that international human-rights standards should influence U.S. law. Even some conservatives say they will support him based on Koh’s belief in strengthening Congress’s role in treaty approval and in greater congressional say over foreign and national security policy.

Koh’s nomination will now go before the full Senate. He is expected to be confirmed.

Postville had been known as a unique community for years. Home to the Kosher meatpacking company Agriprocessors, Inc., the city had a diverse population of Orthodox Jews, immigrants from Latin American countries, and native Iowans. Though the city always grappled with its disparate constituencies, the May 12, 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid at Agriprocessors changed things there forever.

News coverage of the raid generated more calls for comprehensive immigration reform from leaders across the country, but one open question remains: Will the experiences of Postville change things anywhere else?

Postville, a human face

Although ICE had been conducting work site immigration raids for years, the massive raid in tiny Postville struck an emotional chord with people who typically approached the discussion from opposite ends of the spectrum. (At the time, it was the largest single-site immigration raid in the nation’s history.)

Later in the summer, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus traveled to the town to see it firsthand. U.S. Rep. Tom Latham (R-Ames), whose district includes Postville, hoped it would be a chance for more leaders to see a real-world example of U.S. immigration policy.

“The members of the Hispanic Caucus will have seen firsthand, number one, the effect of the meatpacking plant owners and, what appears to be, them knowingly having illegal people working there,” Latham said in a July interview with Iowa Independent. “They will see the impact and the consequences of that. Most importantly to me, they are going to see how devastating this was to the families who have been torn apart — the human impact on these people.”

Three members of the federal delegation that visited Postville were noticeably moved by the stories they heard. U.S. Rep. Joe Baca, a California Democrat, rose from his chair, crossed the room and hugged one immigrant woman who shared her experiences. U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, said, “I know this in all aspects of my life: This is a human crisis.”

Several Iowans delivered testimony to Congress about the raids including local attorneys, a court-hired translator who assisted with the criminal prosecutions of detainees, religious leaders and U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Cedar Falls), whose district borders Postville.

But a year later, the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform is still distant. Braley recently admitted that despite his wishes to the contrary, he does not expect significant immigration reform to go before Congress anytime soon.

Indeed, despite a massive demonstration in Postville, visits from congressional leaders, hundreds of prayer vigils, local calls for comprehensive reform, a Beltway regime change, and pressure from the various odd-bedfellows now working in concert to make good on the lessons of Postville, there are few policy improvements to show for all the effort.

Questioning ‘assembly-line justice’

The one aspect of Postville’s story that does seem to be having a national impact relates to the way detainees are prosecuted after a raid has happened, and the fight is being waged in the courts, not in Congress.

Most detained Agriprocessors workers were charged with aggravated identity theft, a criminal violation that carried a two-year federal prison term. The workers, who knew little or no English, were offered mass-produced plea deals on a lesser charge that carried only a five-month prison term. Legal representation was provided by criminal defense attorneys, hired by the government, who were charged with representing 10 or more individuals.

Although immigration attorneys outside the make-shift courtroom in Waterloo complained that they were not being allowed access to the detainees, federal officials quickly responded that criminal complaints trump administration (immigration-only) offenses. Even as they fled to other states, panicked residents of Postville told stories of inhumane detainee treatment and spoke of residential immigration sweeps.

Days later, when 76 percent of the 389 detained workers had signed the plea deals, federal officials came out swinging.

“It is unfortunate that those with their own agenda have spread misinformation — ignoring the fact that 297 people admitted their crimes and accepted the consequences of their actions. There have been no checkpoints, no random checks, and no house-to-house sweeps as have been rumored,” said Matt Dummermuth, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Iowa.

Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of ICE’s Office of Investigations, also derided “the usual spate of false allegations and baseless rumors.”

Perhaps because of the humanitarian public relations fiasco that encompassed an earlier immigration raid in Marshalltown, federal officials began mounting a defense at a press conference the day after the raid. It was first announced at that event that several detainees had been released back into the community. The move, which was initially welcomed by human rights advocates, would later become a primary example of government cruelty. The detainees, released back into Postville due to medical conditions or to care for children, could not legally earn a living. And, despite the swiftness of the earlier plea arrangements, the wheels of justice moved slow for those left in limbo.

The undeniably efficient criminal proceedings that took place in the days following the raid — plea deals that have been labeled as coerced by some who witnessed them — lit an immediate firestorm against an already tainted Department of Justice. Following oversight hearings in their U.S. House committees, U.S. Reps. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) and John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) spoke out against such expedited court proceedings, labeling them “a kangaroo court.”

“The assembly-line justice that we heard about today denies people the opportunity to assert asylum claims or get help if they were subjected to human trafficking or other forms of abuse,” Sánchez said.

Immigration advocates had high hopes when the new Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, announced that all raids would be ceased while her department crafted a new policy. But as information about the new policy comes to light, it is not clear that much has changed.

Still, a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision calls into question many of the so-called “assembly line” convictions by narrowing the federal definition of aggravated identity theft. The court ruled unanimously that suspects must have knowingly used another person’s identity to be convicted of the aggravated crime.

Since most of the Postville workers signed plea agreements on lesser charges and waived their right to appeal, it is not known how many of their convictions will be revisited, though many were initially charged with the crime in question. Still, as Congress seems to wait for other issues to quiet down before tackling immigration, recognition of the lessons of Postville is welcome, no matter where it comes from.