It appears that the financial crisis facing one of DC’s main health care providers for Latinos has been averted. In June, la Clinica del Pueblo announced it would have to cut services if it couldn’t recoup a $500,000 deficit. Interim executive director Enrique Cobham says an anonymous donor sent a check for $50,000 and has promised another $50,000 if the clinic can raise a matching sum of individual donations. Topped off with emergency help from the city, he says, the needed money will be in the bank soon enough to cover expenses.

La Clinica started as a one night a week drop-in center in the 1980s and now serves 7,500 patients a year, most of them uninsured Latino immigrants. For the most part, the clinic has kept up with growing demand. From 2000 to 2007, the budget rose from $1 million to about $7 million. But growth brought problems as well. Last summer, the federal government awarded the clinic certification as a federally qualified health center, which meant they could bill Medicaid at a higher rate and get access to additional grants and other federal funds. But the status also required an immediate expansion of services, which meant spending money they didn’t yet have. The cost of the expansion wiped out the center’s cash on hand, leading to the current situation.

Having overcome the immediate crisis, Cobham says his staff is “working on restructuring things to make sure we don’t get into this challenge again in the future.” In the long run, he says, la Clinica saves the city money by offering an alternative to the emergency room. “We play a major roll not only in serving community needs but also in reducing the incidence of more expensive health care that comes from people not receiving basic primary care,” he says.

WUSA-9 did its own visa-related lifeguard shortage story a couple days after City Paper’s.

There’s no new news here, but right around the 40-second mark in the station’s piece, it occurred to me that the story was better made for TV than in print. A moving picture is worth more than 1,000 words — at least when the subject is a Ukrainian lifeguard named Lily.

Sources indicate the WUSA news director fought for all the footage of Lily to be shown in slow motion.*

*Totally made up

I’m not talking about the housing bubble here (or this man’s rather bubble-shaped stomach). I’m referring to a red bubble on page 25 of this month’s issue of The Atlantic. The page holds a graphic showing the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of MS-13 gang members in the United States from February 2005 to September 2007. The accompanying piece is entitled “How to Grow a Gang,” and it describes how MS-13 members deported from the U.S. are expanding their bases back in El Salvador, building their “coyote” immigrant transport businesses, and bringing more illegals back to the U.S. “Most ICE arrests have been for immigration related offenses, not criminal offenses. Suspected ‘associates’ are lumped in with gang members, which only reinforces gang ties,” writes author Matthew Quirk, who ultimately argues that the solution to this problem may be jailing MS-13 members here, not deporting them. (The article is not posted on the Atlantic’s website yet.)

Read the rest of this entry »

John Cox maybe be long-shot nut job numero uno in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, but the activist from Chicago seems to have decent taste when it comes to lifting background music for his weird anti-immigrant song. Does Robert Plant know about this?

Yesterday’s voting experiment hasn’t really gone anywhere.

It’s not for a lack of participation. Four people have (so far) commented on our ballot of potential jerks culled from posts left on Craigslist.

Nor is it for lack of opinions. Scan the comments, and you’ll find there’s some disagreement as to whether one of the candidates’ professed actions broke the law. And there are, among other things, accusations that the jerks’ claims are “bs.” (You can read the full comments here.)

Still, there’s no clear winner.

City Desk: We report, you decide!

We have a three-way tie in today’s installment of this occasional feature.

Below are three recent posts to Craigslist’s* “rants & raves” section. We need your help to decide who’s today’s biggest jerk. Polls are open until 5 p.m., so cast your vote via the comments section and stay tuned for the results.

Candidate No. 1: “having some fun with day laborers”

There is a Dunkin Donuts at the corner of Viers Mill and Randolph Rd. in Montgomery County and the freakin hispanics have over run the place. Me and one of my friends decided to play a little game with them. We pulled into the parking lot with his Ford F250 Crew Cab and they swarmed us. We told them that we needed help digging the around the foundation of a house, I think all they understood was “dig”, we agreed to $13 and hour and 4 of them got in the back. They smelled bad, well at least one of them did, so we drove over to River Rd. into one of those neighborhoods with the huge houses and large lots. We pulled up to a house, we all got out and we acted like we were calling someone on the cell phone. We told them to sit down in the shade and we would be right back. I don’t think it will be long before the cops show up. Muhahahahahahaha!!!

Candidate No. 2: “Day Laborers- Awesome!”

That’s funny shit. Take the naysayers shit with a grain of salt. They’re the ones who one time will say “they’re trying to make a living” but out of the other side of their mouth complain that the wetbacks are taking American jobs.

One time my friend and I picked up 13 of those spics, and put them in a pickup truck. We started driving like assholes, taking turns too hard, speed-stopping, hitting speed bumps at 50mph. We gave the last one left in the truck who didn’t fall out or bail because he was scared $100 for playing.

And finally, Candidate No. 3: “Re: Day Laborers”

Awesome post!

Fuck these illegals, I say. Me and my boys sometimes just beat up a couple, just for shits and giggles.

I can recommend them as great stress-bags. They NEVER go to the cops.

* To be fair, these comments are not representative of all Craigslisters. “At least they’re out ATTEMPTING to earn a buck instead of riding around in Daddy’s pick up truck all day long,” observes one.

In case you missed the previous winner, here’s a fresh immigration-debate post from the “rants & raves” section of Craigslist. It was posted earlier today under the heading “whre to find illegals”.

There are 1040 wal-marts in the US. there are probably a million illegals working or shopping at them each day. Drive cattle cars up, barricade the doors and load up the illegals.

There’s a big debate over the day laborers that congregate near Home Depot in Northeast. Neighbors are pissed that these folks, well, piss and do other unseemly things in the vicinity. See this story in the Washington Times for more on that.

Ward 5 Councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. has proposed building a multiculti training center on the site, the better to handle the open-air labor market that has sprung up at this contractor hotspot.

Build the center, indeed. But before building the center, raze the entire shopping center, bulldoze the parking lot, and keep digging. As Washington City Paper pointed out years ago, this project was launched and executed hastily, to the eternal detriment of economic and community development in and around Brentwood. The whole thing sits too high off Brentwood Road NE, a problem that the developers handled by building a retaining wall and saying, essentially, the hell with it. Bring this eyesore to street level, make the shops front the street, and then build the day laborer site. How hard could that be?

Posted to the “rants & raves” section of Craigslist earlier today:

I picked up some illegals outside the Herndon 7-11 in my pickup truck. I told them I had work for them to do. I brought them about 20 miles west of Leesburg(to t he middle of no where). Told them to get out the work was here.

Then I drove away. It then started to rain really hard.

I got the idea from a video I saw. I believe the link was here where a guy picked up some illegals and brought them to immigration.