At the New York Times, a film about a pregnant 15-year-old is cause for celebration, since the girl is a Mexican immigrant. Pass the popcorn, er nachos, and let the diversity begin!

“Quinceanera,” a portrait of a Mexican-American family in Los Angeles, is as smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced. Set in Echo Park, a working-class Latino neighborhood in the early throes of gentrification, it has a wonderfully organic feel for the fluid interaction of cultures and generations in the Southern California melting pot.

Without pinning smile buttons onto its characters, the film, a prize winner at this year’s Sundance festival, takes a benign look at the conflicts and crises of three generations of a resilient family whose principal breadwinner, Ernesto (Jesus Castanos-Chima), operates a storefront church. Illegal immigration is not an issue here, and the film optimistically assumes that newcomers to the country carry with them a surge of vitality.

The central character, Magdalena (Emily Rios), Ernesto’s ebullient 14-year-old daughter, is anticipating her Quinceanera, the traditional ceremony that celebrates a girl’s official passage into womanhood at 15. [...]

Magdalena’s future is thrown into disarray when she suddenly finds herself pregnant by her puppyish boyfriend, Herman (J. R. Cruz), and her father throws her out of the house in a rage. (Her pregnancy comes as a complete surprise because it is a rare instance of a girl’s conceiving while remaining technically intact during intense petting.) But when Magdalena insists that she is still a virgin, her father refuses to believe her. Herman’s mother, fiercely ambitious for her college-bound son, won’t listen to her story and keeps him out of her reach.
['Quinceanera': Turning Sweet 15 in Los Angeles's Immigrant Stew, 8/4/06]

Preggers without sex? That’s getting into Virgin Birth territory, as in Jesus and Mary — extreme immigrant worship even by normal Hollyweird standards. Apparently the characters are too precious to fornicate normally like Hispanic teens do all the time, as shown by Latino girls having the highest teen birth rate in America.

More importantly, there is no mention that Mexicans have imported their retrosexual peasant ideas about women to the United States. An American girl of 15 is looking at three more years of high school, followed by college in many cases, while even an “upwardly mobile” Mexigrant of that age is expected to marry and have lots of children ASAP. And they do.

As sociologists have often observed, children who have children are some of the surest prospects for a life of poverty. The New York Times‘ celebration of this self-destructive custom shows that the liberal blinders remain unmoved.

D. A. King can be heard on George Putnam at 4:05 Eastern time. [Audio here.]

Putnam turned 92 recently, check it out here.

California State Senator Don Perata (D-Oakland) [send him mail]has never been known for his eloquence and in fact almost seems to enjoy sticking his foot in his mouth at every available opportunity. Seriously, the simple fact that Democrats allow him to speak in public should have solidified a Republican majority in California years ago.

Here he goes again…in an interview yesterday, the Senate President Pro Tem said,

“Immigration is a red meat issue. You’ve got all these crackers down in San Diego taking on the governor. Even the governor was shocked,” he said, referring to Schwarzenegger’s assessment of the heated rhetoric surrounding the immigration debate in that part of the state. “Those aren’t the people I represent. But there is no point in getting into a pitched, vocal battle with these people. … If you start getting engaged with these people, you get tar all over yourself.” [Perata calls bill's opponents 'crackers' by Lynda Gledhill, San Francisco Chronicle, August 4, 2006]

Crackers? Crackers? Perhaps the Senator is getting public speaking tips from Congresswoman Cynthia “I’m a BLACK woman!” McKinney.

As for “getting tar” all over himself, that may not be such a bad idea–it might glue his racist mouth shut.

Any bets on whether the MSM (or any one of our ten million “civil rights” groups) will condemn his remarks?

Lawrence Auster compares the media coverage of Naveed Haq, mass shooter and murderer , and Mel Gibson, loud-mouthed drunk driver.

There is something seriously amiss when the raving drunken words of a movie director spoken to two officers in the back of a police car are treated as vastly more important than the fact that we have let millions of Jew-hating, Christian-hating Muslims into this country, one of whom, every few weeks it seems, acts out his jihadist rage with actual murder.

To repeat: we now have jihadist murders taking place regularly in this country, and we have tens of thousands of potential jihadist murderers walking around at liberty among us, but what we obsess about is a single unhinged comment by one celebrity who has never done anything to hurt Jews.Our flight from reality

Google News shows about 6,600 hits for Mel Gibson, updated 15 minutes ago, as I write, and about 1,310 for Naveed Haq, updated three hours ago. That’s not very impressive, all things considered. In the meantime, Mark Steyn points out who Mel Gibson really hates:the English, who get not only slaughtered, but libeled in Gallipoli, The Patriot, and Braveheart.

Good With Ketchup is blog of dumb jokes, and dumb jokes are a hobby of mine, so I was clicking through the list, looking for something I hadn’t heard when I came across this list of immigration reform haiku, of which I’ll only reproduce a couple:

Fly the flag proudly
Show love for your new country
Oops, some brought wrong ones

Immigrants do the work
No one else wants to do
Like passing laws?