Midwives + Looking Latin@ = UNAMERICAN

I’m really glad the New York Times published this story.

ALAMO, Texas – The citizenship of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who insist they are Americans is being called into question because they were delivered by midwives near the U.S.-Mexico border.

…The people delivered by midwives have documents such as birth certificates and medical records. But the agency that grants passports is challenging the credibility of those papers, citing a history of some midwives fraudulently registering Mexican-born babies as American.

…The government has “effectively reduced to second-class citizenship status an entire swath of passport applicants based solely on their being of Mexican or Latino descent and having been delivered by midwives in nonhospital settings in Southwestern border states,” according to a federal lawsuit against the State Department filed last year…

Read the story for yourself. Once again, looking Latin@ is unamerican and will put you at risk of your own government disowning you.

Private For-Profit Prisons Are the Best

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.

“I’ve never encountered, and I don’t think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids’ lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money,” said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.

Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC.

Before the judges could get rich off of ruining children’s lives, they had to shut down the government-run detention facility first.

In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.

Niiiiiiiice. From the AP. Who could have foreseen that running a prison for profit could lead to ethical problems?

Update on Octuplet Haters

The AP writes:

Police said Thursday they will investigate death threats against octuplet mother Nadya Suleman and advise her publicist on how to handle a torrent of other nasty messages that have flooded his office.

Word that the 33-year-old single, unemployed mother is receiving public assistance to care for the 14 children she conceived through in vitro fertilization has stoked furor among many people.

Wow, do people hate low income families so much that they would threaten to kill a poor woman just for having a big family? I would like to hope that isn’t the case, but even in my own comment section a shocking amount of hate has been expressed towards Nadya Suleman. Words have meaning.

My previous writing on this topic.