Friday Open Thread
Circumstantial evidence indicates Mayor Sam is stuck in Ad-hell-phia limbo, so I'll try to fill in.Favorite story of the morning: "6 + 4 = 1 Tenuous Existence," on the front page of the L.A. Times. Long story short: an illegal alien woman comes here from Mexico, marries and has her first child; divorces, remarries again (an illegal alien), and has her second child; gets a tubal ligation; a few years later, she has the surgery undone, because husband wants a son; unable to get pregnant, she had a friend bring back fertility drugs from Mexico; the drugs work, and she has triplets, one of whom was born with hydrocephalus, and has had three brain surgeries so far; then she had quadruplets. The family lives in a one-bedroom apartment, and the dad makes $400 a week as a carpet installer.
The story, written by Sam Quinones, includes the following interesting facts:
"Neither Magdaleno nor her husband speaks English, though she has been in the United States 22 years and he 28. Even her teenage daughters speak mostly Spanish; their English vocabulary is limited."
"Yet all of Magdaleno's 10 children are U.S. citizens. The triplets receive subsidized school lunches. All the youngsters have had their healthcare bills covered by Medi-Cal, the state and federal healthcare program for the poor."
"Alfredo Jr. had been hospitalized all his life until recently. He's had three state-funded brain operations and will require several more, the family said. The couple receive $700 in monthly Social Security payments to help with his medical needs."
Please note: this story does NOT mean that all illegal aliens reproduce like this woman, having far more children than she can possibly support. On the contrary, the woman had sisters who came here and used birth control to limit the sizes of their families to a more affordable scale. So this isolated case, in my opinion, doesn't really prove anything social or cultural. Rather, I see it more as a cautionary tale about personal choices.
Anyhow, maybe mom and dad should sell the rights to their story for a TV show. "The Magadleno Bunch?" Or maybe just a reality show.
Other interesting stories: NBC Channel 4 reports that Playa Vista spent $600,000 on lobbying City Council and City agencies; the Daily News reports that the L.A. Planning Commission has conditioned its approval of a condo conversion on the owners selling and/or renting some of the units at below-market prices; and Santa Monica has essentially banned smoking everywhere in public.
Blog 'em if you got 'em.
Posted by Walter Moore @ 7/28/2006 07:31:00 AM
28 Comments:
Passing the DWP buck
Re "Heat's on DWP" (July 25):
I was disappointed to read that Councilwomen Wendy Greuel and Jan Perry passed the buck and blamed the Department of Water and Power for the energy emergency in Los Angeles....Since they serve on the City Council's Environment and Energy Committee that oversees the DWP, they should have anticipated these problems and are as much to blame as the utility itself.
- David Fleck
Granada Hills
So much for Archie's Chocolate Princess.
Yup, it was working beautifully until last night. Subsequent investigation reveals further vandalism of our cable wiring outside. Is someone trying to silence Mayor Sam? Or does my neighbor's wife want him to stop watching porn? Not sure.
I am very hopeful that as we move forward we will initiate an inclusive process that will include the wisdom and undertakings of the true Mayor of Los Angeles, Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich for he is a tireless representative of the poor and underrepresented in our vast and overarching community. He and Dan Kanabe are stalwart Christian soldiers in the fight against anti-immigrant rhetoric.
I have yet to hear or see "anti-immigrant rhetoric." I think you omitted an adjective: "anti-ILLEGAL-immigration rhetoric."
Did anyone see the KTLA clip on the school hearing in Glassel Park ? It took one negative comment on ADV's LAUSD Takeover Plan and out the nearest exit goes our mayor. Must of had a foul taste in his mouth
fuck you walter you xenophobic pig
Re: 10 Babies
I'm gonna say it and piss off my liberal friends. Why can't gay men and women get married in this state and benefit from the full rights conferred to other couples, yet illegal immigrants and other baby machines can?
bro, baby machines? again, this is an isolated case in any respect to race. It is an unfortunate situation. It is rare to have triplets. And lightning rare to have quads - let alone both. poor choice for sammy to cover this story. it fuels 2 debates that need cooling - the immigrant debate and the welfare debate. or maybe he wrote the puff piece to give a sistah a break - if so, then good for him for championing for the less fortunate.
It is NOT rare to have quadruplets and triplets WHEN YOU TAKE FERTILITY DRUGS, which is what this woman did.
Nor do immigrants -- legal or otherwise -- have a monopoly on stupid reproductive decisions; Andrea Yates comes to mind.
Again, you need to buy a dictionary, or a least turn to one. A "xenophobe" is "a person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples."
I'm neither fearful nor contemptuous of foreign people or places. On the contrary, I enjoy traveling abroad; have studied two "live" foreign languages and one dead one; and enjoy meeting and working with people who have had the gumption to immigrate to our country.
All I ask is that people who move here from abroad comply with our immigration laws, duly enacted by Congress -- and routinely ignored by the Republican President. I don't think that's a particular radical position.
"particular" should have been "particularly"
You often hear that Mexicans are the new Italians, but really, they're the new Irish. Mexican immigrants who stay in Los Angeles and let their daughters get pregnant at 14 are no different from the Irish who moved to South Boston or the Lower East Side and didn't budge for a century. All the while, they lived in squalor and had huge litters whose male members invariably turned to petty crime. By contrast, those Irish who moved out into the "provincial" cities and onto the frontier ended up making considerably better lives for themselves and their families.
Since Mahony and the Mexican govt apparently care so much about the "rights" of illegal aliens living in the US, they should put their money where their mouths are and cut checks for this couple's large bills and expenses, rather than having US taxpayers pay for it.
Something's really got to be done about the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment. It made some sense a long time ago, but definitely not now.
Can anyone say with a straight face that these anchor babies won't be a massive burden on the country?
Re: the Litter of 10
Plus the father has three kids with two other women!!!!!!!!
This was an obvious attempt by the LATIMES to solicit donations for this disgusting family. I have one suggestion...call Jackass Mahoney and force him to take them all to live with him in the rectory.
This shitload of Mexicans is going to cost taxpayers MILLIONS of dollars for the next 50 years. And guess what, folks, the shitload of kids is going to repeat the same cycle.
DEPORT THEM NOW!!!!!!
And did you read about the sibings moving to Lexington, KY? They left LA because LA is too Mexicanized!!!!! And too dirty!!!!!
WARNING TO LEXINGTON: CLOSE YOUR BORDERS NOW!!!! THE MEXICANS ARE COMING, THE MEXICANS ARE COMING!!!!!
Toilet Guy and his best friend, Nunez, are assholes. Trying to sneak out of the school but they got caught by a very angry crowd! AND THE CAMERAS WERE WAITING!!!!
Wanna bet some heads rolled for that one? Especially after the article Monday about the Emporer of LA.
I hope the rest of LA wakes up and sees the corruption that these two reconquista, mechistas are perpetrating. The Mexican mafia makes the Godfather look like Mary Poppins.
Holy crap. I wonder how much the baby with health problem has cost California tax payers. Three brain surgeries can't be very inexpensive.
Here you go Nunez, Cedillo, de Leon, et al. You're getting just what you want.
jinx!
McFerrin you're full of it. Today's Mexican illegals are neither today's Irish nor Italians. The Mexican's can't even pull themselves up by our bootstraps with a generous social welfare system that did exist a 100 years ago.
At least the Irish spoke and English and the Italians were eager to learn - the Mexicans have no desire to learn English. And regardless of their large families, the Irish and Italians suceeded within a generation or two in a far harsher social climate with no welfare system.
There are legal immigrants that come here who don't rely on the welfare system and succeed despite large families. An example are the Iraqis in San Diego - they learn English and Spanish, work 2 or 3 jobs and within in a generation are middle class. The majority of Mexican rural poor will never be anything more than a drag on the public welfare system, crowd the hospital emergency rooms, and overtax all public services. The LA Times article clearly shows most illegal Mexicans will fail here in the United States no matter how much money is thrown at them.
4:44 PM The boy is an American Citizen.
Deal with it! American Citizens come in all shapes and colors, not just albino white.
9:15, you're the one who's full of it. It's a myth to say that the Irish and Italians "succeeded within a generation or two in a far harsher social climate with no welfare system." This may be the case for the Irish who bothered to get out of the ghettos and do something with themselves, but not for the bulk of them.
The eastern-urban Irish did, in fact, have a generous social welfare system: patronage jobs. The Irish in Boston and New York got ahead not by dint of their own industriousness, but because they leveraged their numbers into political power that got them elected to office. From there, they could hand out jobs to other Irishmen; from this springs the cliché of the Irish cop. (I'm sure Tony V. would love to do that, BTW, but it's considerably harder to practice patronage here than it was in Northeastern and Midwestern cities in the ~1865-1929 period.) This period of dependence on state largesse continued through the 1930s, four generations after the first hordes of Irish started washing up on our shores. It all came to an end with the massive social changes wrought by the Depression and World War II and their accompanying migrations. Really, the war did more to integrate non-WASP white ethnicities like Italians, Poles, and Irish into the mainstream of American society than anything else.
9:34,
They're American citizens BECAUSE THEIR PARENTS DECIDED TO ABANDON THEIR FORSAKEN COUNTRY AND VIOLATE AMERICAN IMMIGRATION LAW. The offspring of a mating between freaking Pol Pot and the creature from Alien II would be given American citizenship if it were born on American soil. Like 2:40 said, this was not the intention of the authors of the 14th Amendment.
It's funny this illegal alien woman "thanks" the state for providing her with Medi-Cal. Oh, sure, you're welcome! It's the least we could do. After all, it the duty of every American citizen to pay for everyone in the world to have as many babies as they want, including all the senoritas who decide to not stop at 6 and who themselves could never in 20 lifetimes pay themselves for the care and education of their own offspring. After all, it's people like that whom America owns its success to. Did you read that her husband lays carpet for a living? Just think what America would be if it didn't have illegal immigrants to lay carpet. We'd be back in the Stone Age! The mere thought of an America without illegals makes me shudder with fear.
Who cares where you come from...Italy, Ireland, Mexico, or wherever...
…just don't come here illegally. But if you do, learn English within 25 years for Christ Almighty’s sake. There’s no excuse to not do so. And if you really need to have children, please, please, please keep in mind that if you won't be able to pay for their care or support the schools that they will attend, do everyone else a huge favor and don't have more than one or two at the very most. Someone has to pay for them. It might not be you, but someone does. Regardless of what some politician in Sacramento told you, there's no self-replenishing pot of gold that the state and the country runs on. The money that pays for things like Medi-Cal comes from actual human beings, the large majority of whom are legal resident who work very hard and live their lives responsibly. Don't disrespect them by 1) coming here illegally, 2) living off of them, or 3) demanding even more from them. If your home country is better, that’s great, you can stay there. If not, and if you want to come here, that’s fine, but don’t make it worse.
To 9:15 a.m.
Get your ass back to Tijuana before we deport you! You ignorant pig!!!!
McFerrin, the bigotry of Scot Irish towards Irish Catholics is legendary since the colonization of Ulster by Cromwell. Irish collaborators anglisized their Irish names by replacing the O' with Mc like your ancestors.
The latent bigotry of matamommas in of those of Scott Irish heritage in the United States after all these years is bizarre.
Their regressive mindset is indicative of those protestants of the Orange Order who have nothing better to do than to parade in a drunken stupor on celebration of the Battle of the Boyne whether be in Ulster or in Scotland or likewise some Mormons who consider themselves as the master race.
At least the Irish came in through the legal front door at Ellis Island unlike the dregs of Mexican society that cross into the United States illegally and burden the social and economic institutions in the United States.
Irish Catholics in east suceeded inspite of the protestant bigotry in Massachusetts and New York. One only has to look at the founding of College of the Holy Cross, Fordham, Notre Dame, and Boston College and the support these schools received from an Irish Catholics as a route to upward mobility.
In California where bigotry was not as prevalent, an mayor of Irish heritage was elected in San Francisco in 1867 twenty years before anywhere in New England.
By contast the Mexican illegal immigrant community has done nothing substantive in over a 100 years in developing meaningful alternative, academic institutions. An advanced degree in Chicano studies at UCLA only gets one a better job at MacDonalds flipping burgers or rolling tacos elsewhere.
Even Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany have integrated more than much of the illegal Mexican community in the USA.
The rantings of a wannabe academic in an obscure USC doctoral program reflects more the issue of political correctness and tendency to admit on more one the basis of ethnicity than of merit that is sadly just as prevalent in California private schools like USC as in the public University California system.
The rantings of a wannabe academic in an obscure USC doctoral program reflects more the issue of political correctness and tendency to admit on more one the basis of ethnicity than of merit that is sadly just as prevalent in California private schools like USC as in the public University California system.
*snicker* I have never been accused of political correctness before. Amazing.
BTW, grow some testicles and get a Blogger account before you post ad hominem att--oh, wait. This is Mayor Sam. Never mind, carry on.
Yeah! As Peter's dad once wisely said, don't worry be happy.
God Walter Moore is an asshole. Andrea Yates comes to mind as someone who made poor reproductive decisions??? Don't you mean her HUSBAND comes to mind since Andrea Yates was basically OUT of her mind since the birth of her 2nd to the last child. There were extensive medical reports from her doctor - and outside clinicians - that showed she suffered psychosis after the birth of that child and it was her HUSBAND who "persuaded" her to have another despite having been warned her mental state was fragile and she was in fact suicidal at points. Yet even after being told having another child would push her further into a breakdown, he insisted. She was in NO mental condition to agree to having another child. There is a good reason why society made it a criminal act for someone to have sex with someone with decreased mental faculties. (Which is why it would be criminal for anyone to have sex with Walter Moore. Not that that would ever happen. Ick)
Her husband should never even left their existing children in her care in her mental state let alone get her pregnant again. If you knew anything at all about mental illness, you wouldn't make such reckless ridiculous statements. It's like blaming someone with cancer for dying when you blame her for her "poor reproductive decisions".
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