Hispanic and black businesses are receiving a disproportionately small number of federal stimulus contracts, creating a rising chorus of demands for the Obama administration to be more inclusive and more closely track who receives government-financed work.
Latinos and blacks have faced obstacles to winning government contracts long before the stimulus. They own 6.8 and 5.2 percent of all businesses, respectively, according to census figures. Yet Latino-owned business have received only 1.7 percent of $46 billion in federal stimulus contracts recorded in U.S. government data, and black-owned businesses have received just 1.1 percent.
That pot of money is just a small fraction of the $862 billion economic stimulus law. Billions more have been given to states, which have used the money to award contracts of their own.
Although states record minority status when they award contracts to businesses, there is no central, consistent or public compilation of that data, according to Laura Barrett, director of the Transportation Equity Network. She and other minority advocates are calling for complete and publicly accessible demographic information on all contracts and jobs financed by the stimulus.
Minority businesses are often too small to compete for projects; do not have access to the necessary capital, equipment or bonding requirements; or lose bids to companies with well-established relationships. There also has been an emphasis on spending stimulus money quickly, which favors businesses that have won past contracts.
But minority advocates say that blacks and Latinos have been harder hit by the recession, and getting a fair share of stimulus contracts is key to the recovery of these communities. Unemployment among blacks and Hispanics is much higher than among whites. And although unemployment among whites increased at a faster rate during the worst of the recession than among minorities, rates of those considered underemployed — including people who have given up looking for full-time work or people working part-time because there is no full-time work available — increased faster among minorities than whites.
Figures from the Transportation Department on highway stimulus spending — at the heart of the government’s effort to lift the economy — have further concerned advocacy groups.
Six percent of the $16.9 billion in Federal Highway Administration contract money spent by states has gone to disadvantaged business enterprises, which includes companies owned by minorities as well as women, veterans and the disabled, according to department press secretary Olivia Alair.
Out of $1.1 billion in state-spent Federal Aviation Administration contract money, 7.8 percent has gone to disadvantaged businesses, Alair said, and 8.6 percent of direct Transportation Department contract dollars have gone to those companies.
Alair said some minority companies might not be included in those figures because they are not small businesses or choose not to classify themselves as disadvantaged. Minority businesses also are eligible for stimulus grants, but those are not tracked by race.
Still, “these numbers are far too low,” especially when compared with state and federal goals,” Barrett said. “The businesses and communities that need federal dollars most are seeing the least.”
The Obama administration has taken steps to address minority concerns. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wrote governors in December urging them to work with disadvantaged businesses. LaHood suggested unbundling large contracts to make them more accessible to small businesses, and emulating a Missouri contracting project that made community groups and openness part of the process.
LaHood’s department has pledged $20 million in subsidies to help disadvantaged businesses pay bonding premiums and fees, and has established a short-term loan program that lent $4.9 million in 2009. Last month, LaHood announced $9.9 million in grants to help businesses owned by minorities and women compete for federal contracts.
Federal agencies held more than 300 events nationwide to educate minority businesses about stimulus opportunities, said White House spokesman Corey Ealons. He also said there is a backlog of awarded contracts that have not yet been entered into the tracking database.
The White House also pointed out that about $21 billion of the $46 billion is guaranteed, and the rest are options. Latino-owned businesses have received 3.7 percent of the guaranteed total, and black-owned businesses 2.4 percent.
The founder and chief executive of one of the nation’s largest black-owned construction companies, Richard Copeland of THOR Construction Inc., said minority-owned companies usually employ 60 percent minorities.
“If we can’t get on these jobs,” he said, “we can’t hire our people from our community, so poverty and drugs and crime and unemployment and welfare become habitual.” His company has done a small amount of weatherization work through Minnesota stimulus contracts.
He said many minority businesses can’t develop the capability to do government work because a “good old boy” network shuts them out of contracts.
Copeland’s company has its headquarters in Minneapolis, and has 200 full-time employees and offices in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Atlanta. He said he abandoned highway work years ago to focus on erecting buildings.
“These big highway contractors try to keep you off the project, and when you get on, they try to make sure you don’t come back,” he said. “We hear about this all across the country.”
That’s what Samuel Foley Jr., a lawyer for the black-owned construction company Holley Enterprises, says happened to his client.
Holley was subcontracted by James J. Anderson Construction to perform demolition and salvage operations on a subway station repair project in Philadelphia. This enabled Anderson to meet contract guidelines for minority participation, but about two months later Holley’s contract was unfairly terminated, Foley said.
Anderson Construction said in a statement that Holley violated the terms of the contract. Anderson said it did not perform any of the work itself and gave the contract to another disadvantaged business.
Foley, chairman of the National Black Chamber of Commerce Construction Committee, said many companies “play games to get rid of the minority contractor.”
“This is not a unique situation,” he said. “For the past 30 years in Philadelphia it’s been this way.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

From: The Buffalo Puerto Rican Press

Well, it doesn’t improve my life any to know the richest man on the planet earth is a Latino from Mexico–Carlos Slim Helu. But if I married him, I would be the richest woman in the world. I thought it’s perhaps time for me to start looking for a suitable mate but the idea of an extremely wealthy one didn’t cross my mind of course every girl thinks about it. Here is your chance ladies. But wait, he has a BA in Arts and Science and is a self-made man. Oh, I have just a little bit more college credentials than he does maybe I’ll be attractive to him because rich men sometimes like well-rounded women of the “mind” as they are so wealthy money buys everything for them and there is no challenge in that.

He is son of Lebanese immigrants to Mexico. According to Forbes Magazine, he is a “Telecom tycoon who pounced on privatization of Mexico’s national telephone company in the 1990s becomes world’s richest person for first time after coming in third place last year. Net worth up $18.5 billion in a year. Recently received regulatory approval to merge his fixed-line assets into American Movil, Latin America’s biggest mobile phone company. His construction conglomerate, Impulsora del Desarrollo y el Empleo, builds roads and energy infrastructure. Son of a Lebanese immigrant also owns stakes in financial group Inbursa, Bronco Drilling, Independent News & Media, Saks and New York Times Co. Newspaper outfit’s stock popped in early March on talk he might buy a controlling stake; he denies the rumor. Donating $65 million to fund a research project in genomic medicine with American billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

From: Guanabee

This morning we were amused to read a headline in the New York Times that said, “Tacos in the Morning? That’s the Routine in Austin“. As any of you who are Mexican-American probably know, tortillas are basically bread to Mexicans, so of course they are present at breakfast. They are present at every meal. It’s like saying, “Bread at breakfast?” Well, yeah. It’s called toast. We’re used to that kind of ignorance from Americans, but what really got us all wound up was this line:

When it comes to breakfast tacos, however, Austin trumps all other American cities.

Oh. No. They. Didn’t. Look, America. We love Austin. Some of us choose to make it our homes, we love it so much. But, we’re sorry. Austin did not invent the concept of serving breakfast tacos, nor does it own the title of Best Tasting Breakfast Tacos. Nor does it even own the title of Good Tasting Breakfast Tacos. It may own the title of Creative Breakfast Tacos. Like any modern, progressive American city, Austin took the idea of the breakfast taco, (which, by the way, is owned by the Rio Grande Valley and done very, very well in San Antonio, too.), and figured out how to gringofy it (cover it in cheddar cheese), produce it more efficiently (store-bought tortillas) and re-interpret it five ways to Sunday (our favorite is filled with Texas BBQ). Of course, the SXSW hungover crowd will not know the difference when they dig into some eggs and bacon on a store-bought flour tortilla buried alive in orange cheese. But just know, gringo hipster, that you are eating the McDonald’s version of the breakfast taco.

In the Rio Grande Valley, and in particular Brownsville, where your editor’s experience mostly lies, breakfast tacos are listed alongside oatmeal and eggs and bacon on the menus at Mexican diners that are only open for breakfast and lunch. These have been operating since Tejanos put food to mouth. The tortillas consumed are primarily flour, are always homemade and usually twice the size of your head. There is never, REPEAT NEVER, any cheese involved. The beans, sigh, are cooked in salt pork. You will never taste beans this good again in your life. In the Rio Grande Valley (and most of South Texas including San Antonio) they eat them filled with things like machacado (dried beef), chorizo con huevo (mexican sausage scrambled with eggs–our circle calls it “The Orange” for the orange grease that drips down from it as you lift your taco to your mouth), carne guisada (stewed beef) and papas con huevo (eggs scrambled with potatoes). They melt in your frikkin mouth.

So when you go to Austin, the best thing to do is eat what Austin does best which is innovative Mexican. Like at Bouldin Creek Coffee House where they make this VEGGIE chorizo to die for. We are not vegetarian and we actually used to make special trips from New York just to eat this stuff. They serve it in tortillas with cheese. We get them on corn without cheese and a side of cantaloupe. Mmm.

We have found a place in Austin that makes their beans with salt pork! It’s a little off the beaten path but it’s called Casa Maria and it’s on South First below Ben White. This joint also serves menudo–the breakfast of champions. They also have a panaderia, or Mexican bakery next door.

One of the restaurants listed in the New York Times story, El Chilito, does make good tacos de barbacoa. Barbacoa is a Mexican barbecue that is traditionally eaten on Sunday mornings. Of course, los americanos have made it available every day of the week. Don’t ask what’s in it, but it’s goooood.

Popularity: 5% [?]

From: Ponte Al Dia

They’re being sold on why the merger of the biggest cable TV and residential broadband company in our country with one of the largest television networks and programmers allegedly would be good for the Latino community and the public interest.

The merger would give Comcast unprecedented control over the commanding heights of our nation’s media system. If allowed to go forward, Comcast would own the broadcast networks of NBC and Telemundo, part of at least 30 cable networks, eight regional sports networks, more than two dozen local NBC and Telemundo TV stations and a movie studio.

If this takeover goes through, the control that Comcast would exert over our TV and Internet experiences will be considerable. We can expect cable rates - which already have increased three times the rate of inflation since 1996 - to spike even higher. We can be sure it will be even harder for independent and diverse programming to find a spot in the cable lineup. And we know mergers almost always mean job cuts.

And let’s not kid ourselves. If this merger is rubber-stamped, it won’t be long before we see another wave of mergers among companies like Verizon, AT&T, CBS and Disney. That’s what always happens, even though these deals historically have been disastrous for consumers - and especially for people of color.

Historically, that’s why leading Latino organizations have been very skeptical of runaway media consolidation. When NBC announced its plan to buy Telemundo in 2001, many of our nation’s leading Latino groups opposed the transaction. They urged the FCC to reject the deal, claiming it wouldn’t serve the public interest or promote diversity.

But now that Comcast wants to buy NBC - which includes the Telemundo network - it will make this deal one of the most consequential media mergers in our nation’s history. But Latino civil rights groups have been strangely silent.

A decade ago, NBC made all sorts of promises about how the Telemundo deal would benefit local communities - and then it reneged on them. For starters, it cut the local Telemundo newscast in 2006 in major cities like Dallas, Houston, San Jose and San Antonio after promising to compete against Univision.

It also stated that the deal would “benefit NBC’s English-only audience by creating new possibilities for the cross-fertilization of ideas and viewpoints.” But those benefits never materialized.

Comcast, too, has a long record of making promises it doesn’t keep. For example, after promising to respect collective bargaining deals, it has turned around and busted the unions of companies it has taken over. That’s cold comfort for the union workers at NBC and Telemundo.

And we can’t overlook the programming. During a congressional hearing on Feb. 24, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) lambasted NBC for the misogynistic and homophobic programming that airs on Telemundo, and he criticized Comcast for not having a single Latino board member.

In that same hearing, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) ripped Comcast for only having one African-American on its board, and took NBC to task for having only one African American and no Latinos among its top executives. Maybe that’s why there’s no black- or Latino-oriented programming on the network.

Comcast wants Congress to believe its’ bad actions are all in the past. But even in sworn testimony to Congress, the company is talking out of both sides of its mouth.

Comcast Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts promised Congress his company would abide by a series of self-imposed “public interest” concessions. But the list of promises they’ve offered is just a bunch of things they’re already doing, things they were already planning to do, or things they’re required to do by law.

It should be noted that Comcast has given generously to support the work of many leading Latino groups. But this does not justify or rectify the damage this merger would cause for consumers, for the public and for our community.

Comcast wants help from Latino groups to push through this mega-deal. But before offering their stamp of approval, we hope Latino leaders will ask some important questions: Will the merger increase cable prices? Will Comcast try to reject labor agreements? Will the merger increase the representation of Latinos on network and cable programming? Will it result in greater Latino ownership of broadcast stations and cable networks? Or will it increase the barriers to ownership?

Will Comcast make sure the open Internet stays that way so that small business can prosper and independent voices can be heard, even though it is in court trying to strip the FCC of its authority to protect an open Internet? Will we be better able to speak for ourselves or will this deal just create an even bigger gatekeeper?

Comcast and NBC Universal will undoubtedly make all sorts of promises about how Latinos would benefit from this massive merger. But they don’t have a believable answer for how this merger will actually benefit our community.

That’s because it won’t.

Felix Sanchez is the chairman of the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts and Chief Executive Officer of TerraCom, a government and public relations firm. Sanchez does not represent nor is receiving direct or indirect compensation to take a position on the merger.

Joseph Torres is the government relations manager for Free Press and former deputy director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Free Press is a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that does not accept money from businesses, the government or political parties.

Popularity: 4% [?]

From: Latinovations

You’ve seen the headlines. America is struggling through the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Americans are losing their jobs and businesses are closing their doors. It is a vicious cycle – but it’s one we can break. As a Latino small business owner in Chicago, I recognize the importance of taking action during this hard economic time.
This is the reason I joined “Voces Verdes”, an initiative of Common Ground for Conservation and La Onda Verde de NRDC. Its purpose is to bring together the business leaders, professionals, parents, teachers and concerned members of the Latino community to urge policymakers to protect our environment and ensure safer, healthier clean energy future and stronger economy for all.
One way Voces Verdes is getting involved with the efforts for clean energy is by participating in the “72 Hours for Clean American Power” campaign. This national progressive grassroots initiative will mobilize a broad coalition supporting clean energy policies to generate a large number of calls from diverse and meaningful messengers to Senators from each targeted state. And since grassroots pressure cannot just come from one constituency or group, the campaign is engaging veterans, farmers, environmentalists, labor activists, scientists, business leaders, and many others. This 72-hour event will send a strong signal to lawmakers in Washington on the urgent need for passage of comprehensive climate and energy legislation.
There’s no question that we have the power to do it. With help from the Senate, we can create millions of good paying jobs that can’t be shipped overseas. Dozens of organizations, representing millions of Americans, are calling on the U.S. Senate to pass clean energy and climate legislation that will jump start our economy, foster innovation in new, cleaner technologies, and create millions of jobs.
In particular, our Latino communities and businesses nationwide are concerned about climate change. This is something we have never had a loud voice on. We deserve a strong and effective energy and climate bill that would ensure a safer, more prosperous future for everyone. Such legislation would create clean-energy jobs and make our communities cleaner and safer.
But despite the public’s support and the numerous benefits, our political leaders have not done enough to move this legislation forward. And while the Senate stalls, countries like China are moving forward investing billions into new green technology.
America can and must be the leader in the new energy economy. It is time for a comprehensive climate and energy plan that ensures a clean environment and better opportunities for all communities in this country. Clean energy will help stimulate our economy, create new and sustainable jobs, bring opportunities for low-income workers and communities to come out of poverty, and provide a better future for our families.
I invite you to join me, business and community leaders in calling for Senators to pass comprehensive climate legislation that puts America back to work and protects our national security and our natural resources. You can be part of the “72 Hours for Clean American Power” campaign by visiting the website at 72hoursamericanpower.com and calling your Senator to demand action on this important issue. Make the call. It is easy and only takes a few minutes and will allow our voices to be heard!

Popularity: 7% [?]

From: The South Chicagoan

All too often, when bad things happen to people, it is because someone was in a position of gullibility and someone came along and took advantage of the combination of innocence and ignorance.

That definitely is the case with a lawsuit currently pending in Tennessee, where state officials are going after a company they say was deliberately looking to pick the pockets of the growing Latino population, particularly those who are not U.S. citizens by birth and whose knowledge of the process and bureaucracy is limited.

IN THIS PARTICULAR instance, a company calling itself the Centro de Apoyo al Immigrante is being sued by the state attorney general’s office. It seems this company was placing advertisements in Spanish-language newspapers in and around Nashville claiming to sell something called an “International Driver’s License.”

Anybody with any sense knows that a valid driver’s license comes from a government agency; although I have heard of some religious-oriented groups that purport to offer special licenses for people who absolutely refuse to carry any kind of identification card issued by a government.

Anybody carrying one of those licenses may think they’re “holier than thou,” but they’re still going to get busted by the police if they’re caught driving with one of them. The same goes for this card, which was being marketed as an attempt to provide an identification card that would be good anywhere.

It is “international,” after all. It says so right in the ad, which probably was located right next to an advertisement for x-ray glasses allowing “men” to see a whole planet of sexy, naked girls.

WHICH MEANS THAT both ads deserve to be given the same credence.

This identification card would almost be humorous, except for the fact that it so clearly is preying on people in this country who for whatever reason are too intimidated by the thought of dealing with a government bureaucracy to get a legitimate identification card.

Now I realize that people who are in this country without a valid visa or other papers are not going to be able to be issued a driver’s license or any other kind of state identification card, although in those cases there are other forms of identification that can be obtained.

It’s just that the “international driver’s license” isn’t one of them.

THE LAWSUIT FILED by Tennessee state goverrnment says the company is violating the state’s consumer protection act by trying to offer up a product that does not live up to the claims made in the advertising.

In short, the identification cards produced by this company are no more valid for anything than if I were to start producing ID cards using a cheap Polaroid camera. But some people are gullible enough not to know better.

If it sounds like I think someone is taking advantage of the vulnerable, you’d be correct. But the fact is that this company was singling out the fast-growing Latino population of this nation, which means there are those people in our society who are now snickering.

They either enjoy the fact that somebody conned a Latino, or they want the list of the victims of this lawsuit turned over to the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency so we can have mass numbers of deportations out of Tennessee.

I GUESS HAVING that many Latinos so close to Dollywood constitutes a crisis situation for our nation.

Either that, or we have some fairly sick, twisted individuals in our society trying to pass themselves off as decent, respectable folks who are all about “law and order.”

I guess “law and order” is all fine when it is about protecting oneself. But forget it if it means that one’s neighbor whom you can’t particularly stand is threatened.

There’s just one part of this lawsuit that has me concerned, and I’m wondering if it could wind up being a legal loophole that ultimately gets this company off the hook for trying to push worthless identification cards onto an unsuspecting public.

THE COMPANY’S ADVERTISEMENTS mention that they are a “notario publico,” and they are indeed certified as a notary public. The problem is that the phrase in certain countries of Latin America conveys a type of person with much more legal authority than a notary public has within the United States.

I have no doubt this company was trying to give itself more credence than it ought to have. But will they be able to claim that the problems with their advertisements all comes down to a level of translation and cultural differences?

I certainly hope not. Because if it does, we’re going to have many more immigrants getting ripped off of their hard-earned money buying something that they could make for themselves even cheaper. Because that is all the “international driver’s license” ultimately is worth.

Popularity: 4% [?]

From: Hispanic News

How polarized is America today? Not all that polarized by historical standards. In 1856, a South Carolina Congressman beat a Massachusetts Senator half to death with his cane in the Senate chamber — and received dozens of new canes from appreciative fans. In 1905, Idaho miners bombed the house of a former governor who had tried to break their union. In 1965, an anti–Vietnam War activist stationed himself outside the office of the Secretary of Defense and, holding his year-old daughter in his arms, set himself on fire. (She lived; he did not.) By that measure, a Rush Limbaugh rant isn’t particularly divisive. Americans may yell at one another about politics, but we mostly leave our guns and bombs at home, which is an improvement.

What really defines our political era, as Ronald Brownstein notes in his book The Second Civil War, is not the polarization of Americans but the polarization of American government. In the country at large, the disputes are real but manageable. But in Washington, crossing party lines to resolve them has become excruciatingly rare.

The result, unsurprisingly, is that Americans don’t like Washington very much. According to a CNN poll conducted in mid-February, 62% of Americans say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election, up 10 points from 2006. Public skepticism about the Federal Government and its ability to solve problems is nothing new, but the discontent is greater today than it has been in at least a decade and a half. Witness the growth of the Tea Party movement, a diffuse conglomeration of forces that have coalesced around nothing so much as a shared hostility toward Washington. Or the Feb. 15 announcement by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh — a man who almost made it onto three presidential tickets — that he would not stand for re-election because “Congress is not operating as it should” and “even in a time of enormous challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.”

This revulsion toward the nation’s capital is understandable. But it makes the problem worse. From health care to energy to the deficit, addressing the U.S.’s big challenges requires vigorous government action. When government doesn’t take that action, it loses people’s faith. And without public faith, government action is harder still. Call it Washington’s vicious circle.

Breaking this circle of public mistrust and government failure requires progress on solving big problems, which requires more cooperation between the parties. But before we can begin to break that circle, we need to understand how it developed in the first place.

The Death of Moderates

The vicious circle has its roots in the great sorting out of American politics that has occurred over the past 40 years. In the middle of the 20th century, America’s two major parties were Whitmanesque: they contradicted themselves; they contained multitudes. As late as 1969, the historian Richard Hofstadter declared that the Democratic and Republican parties were each “a compound, a hodgepodge, of various and conflicting interests.”

But in the 1960s and ’70s, as liberal Northern Democrats rallied behind civil rights, abortion rights, environmentalism and a more dovish foreign policy, conservative Southern Democrats began drifting into the GOP. And as the Republican Party shifted rightward, its Northern liberals became Democrats. Whereas many members of Congress had once been cross-pressured — forced to balance the demands of a more liberal party and a more conservative region, or vice versa — now party, region and ideology were increasingly aligned. Washington politics became less a game of Rubik’s Cube and more a game of shirts vs. skins.

The first shirts-and-skins President was Ronald Reagan, the first truly conservative Republican elected in 50 years. But it was only after Reagan and his GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, left office that congressional Republicans realized they could use political polarization to stymie government — and use government failure to win elections. And with that realization, vicious-circle politics started to become an art form.

In the 1980s, discrediting government was not the strategy of the congressional GOP, for two reasons. First, the sorting out hadn’t fully sorted itself out yet: the Senate alone boasted moderate Republicans from blue states like Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Oregon, where activist government weren’t dirty words. These moderates — who met every Wednesday for lunch — chaired powerful committees, served in the party leadership and helped cut big bipartisan deals like the 1986 tax-reform bill, which simplified the tax code, and the 1990 Clean Air Act, which set new limits on pollution. Second, because Republicans occupied the White House, making government look foolish and corrupt risked making the party look foolish and corrupt too.

All that changed when Bill Clinton took office. With the GOP no longer controlling the White House, a new breed of aggressive Republicans — men like Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott — hit on a strategy for discrediting Clinton: discredit government. Rhetorically, they derided Washington as ineffective and conflict-ridden, and through their actions they guaranteed it. Their greatest weapon was the filibuster, which forced Democrats to muster 60 votes to get legislation through the Senate. Historically, filibustering had been rare. From the birth of the Republic until the Civil War, the Senate witnessed about one filibuster per decade. As late as the 1960s, Senators filibustered less than 10% of major legislation. But in the ’70s, the filibuster rule changed: Senators no longer needed to camp out on the Senate floor all night, reading from Grandma’s recipe book. Merely declaring their intention to filibuster derailed any bill that lacked 60 votes.

In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. “Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort,” scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, “now filibusters are a part of daily life.” For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of “stabbing us in the back.” Their pictures were taken off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. “What do these so-called moderates have in common?” conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. “They’re 70 years old. They’re not running again. They’re gonna be dead soon. So while they’re annoying, within the Republican Party our problems are dying.”

In Clinton’s first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works. While filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton’s agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.

With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people: they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge. So when the Gingrich Republicans carried out a virtual sit-down strike during Clinton’s first two years, the public mood turned nasty. By 1994, trust in government was at an all-time low, which suited the Republicans fine, since their major line of attack against Clinton’s health care plan was that it would empower government. Clintoncare collapsed, Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans learned the secrets of vicious-circle politics: When the parties are polarized, it’s easy to keep anything from getting done. When nothing gets done, people turn against government. When you’re the party out of power and the party that reviles government, you win.

The Endless Filibuster
All this, it turns out, was a mere warm-up for the Obama years. On the surface, it appeared that Obama took office in a stronger position than Clinton had, since Democrats boasted more seats in the Senate. But in their jubilation, Democrats forgot something crucial: vicious-circle politics thrives on polarization. As the GOP caucus in the Senate shrank, it also hardened. Early on, the White House managed to persuade three Republicans to break a filibuster of its stimulus plan. But one of those Republicans, Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter — under assault for his vote and facing a right-wing primary challenge — switched parties. That meant that of the six Senate Republicans with the most moderate voting records in 2007, only two were still in the Senate, and in the party, by ‘09. The Wednesday lunch club had ceased to exist. And the fewer Republican moderates there were, the more dangerous it was for any of them to cut deals across the aisle.

In 2009, Senate Republicans filibustered a stunning 80% of major legislation, even more than during the Clinton years. GOP leader Mitch McConnell led a filibuster of a deficit-reduction commission that he himself had demanded. The Obama White House spent months trying to lure the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, Chuck Grassley, into supporting a deal on health care reform and gave his staff a major role in crafting the bill. But GOP officials back home began threatening to run a primary challenger against the Iowa Senator. By late summer, Grassley wasn’t just inching away from reform; he was implying that Obamacare would euthanize Grandma.

By October, the process had dragged on for the better part of a year, and the public mood had grown bitter. According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, the percentage of Americans who said Obama had done a “very good” job of “achieving his goals” was less than half the level of January 2009, and significantly fewer people believed he was successfully “changing business as usual in Washington.”

The Republicans have used this rising disgust with government not just to cripple health care reform but also to derail other Obama initiatives. In a memo to clients on how to defeat new regulation of Wall Street, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged them to attack “lobbyist loopholes” — items that were put into the financial-reform bill, as in the health care bill, largely to attract enough Democratic votes to break the GOP filibuster. Needing 60 votes has made the debate over every bill on Obama’s agenda longer and uglier, which is exactly how the Republicans want it to be.

Last month, when the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed Americans’ views on health care reform, it found that most people still back the individual components of Obama’s effort. But enthusiasm for the bill itself — the contents of which remain hazy in the public mind — has faded, just as in 1993. And according to a new poll by CNN/ORC, public approval of Congress stands at its lowest level since — you guessed it — the Gingrich era. Once again, the Republicans have told Americans that they can’t trust government with their health care, and once again, their own actions have helped convince Americans that what they say is true. The circle is complete.

Breaking the Circle

In recent years, Republicans have played this style of politics better than Democrats. Winning elections by making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party. But there’s no guarantee Democrats won’t one day try something similar. Were a Republican President and Congress to make a genuine effort to rein in entitlement spending, Democrats might act in much the same way McConnell and company are acting now. At its core, vicious-circle politics isn’t an assault on liberal solutions to hard problems; it’s an assault on any solutions to hard problems. It’s no surprise that Democrats couldn’t successfully filibuster George W. Bush’s tax cuts and Republicans couldn’t successfully filibuster Obama’s stimulus spending. When you’re handing out goodies, it’s much harder for opponents to gum up the process. As Vanderbilt University’s Marc Hetherington has argued, trust in government matters most when government is asking people to make sacrifices. It’s when the pain is temporary but the benefits are long-term that people most need to believe that government is something other than stupid and selfish. Which is exactly what they don’t believe today.

Is there a way out? In theory, if the Democrats won so overwhelmingly that they controlled nearly 70 seats in the Senate, as they did when Franklin Roosevelt secured passage of Social Security and when Lyndon Johnson got Medicare through, they could simply steamroll the GOP. But America in 2010, unlike America in 1935 or ‘65, is closely divided between the two parties. Although bipartisanship is not an end in and of itself, the reality remains that today, and for the foreseeable future, neither party can do big, controversial things without help from the other.

So, what might encourage the two parties to cooperate?

First, more New Hampshires. Since the 1970s, Iowa and New Hampshire have held the first two presidential nominating contests. Iowa is a caucus, which means that only a small — and ideologically extreme — fraction of the state’s voters take part. New Hampshire, by contrast, is an open primary, which encourages candidates to appeal to voters outside their party. If every state took New Hampshire’s example to heart — and allowed independents to vote not only in presidential primaries but in congressional ones as well — the consequences could be profound. Not only would more moderate candidates win, but the same candidates would stake out more-moderate positions, the result of which might be something of a bipartisan rebirth.

Second, more Crossfires. In today’s highly segmented, partisan news environment, it’s hard to create big new media institutions dedicated to objective news reporting. But it might be possible to create new talk shows and blogs in which liberals and conservatives interrogate one another’s views — programs like the early (and more substantive) incarnation of CNN’s Crossfire or William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. There’s no guarantee that the conversation would be edifying, of course. But it would be a useful antidote to the current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing the other side make its case. The recent televised meeting between Obama and the House Republican leadership was a reminder that honest but civil debate can show people that their side isn’t infallible and that not everyone on the other side is evil and foolish.

Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both parties, the out-of-government party (particularly if it’s also the antigovernment party) benefits anyway. That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand that it climb out of debt. Like the public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, nonideological way to cut the deficit, if only the two parties would stop bickering. His approach was simpleminded and ego-driven, but it forced both parties to make serious efforts to address the problem, and by the mid-’90s they had come together on behalf of fiscal discipline.

Imagine if another powerful third-party voice were to emerge today, demanding that both parties take real steps to solve problems like global warming and health care — as opposed to the Tea Partyers, who insist that government just get out of the way. Republicans would still disagree profoundly with the Obama Administration’s favored remedies, but they would feel greater pressure to amend rather than kill them. Perots would create a countervailing pressure against those partisan zealots who are constantly threatening to punish Republicans for giving the White House an inch.

Above all, new Perots would remind Washington that although Americans disagree on lots of things, the country isn’t as divided as its capital. Every four or eight years, a new President gets elected by pledging to bring the country together. And every time he fails, the pressure on our two-party system builds. When government acts to solve problems, even if the solutions aren’t perfect, it breaks the vicious circle of political failure and mistrust. When it comes to health care, for example, virtually every expansion of government’s role — Medicare, Medicaid, the veterans’ health care system, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, even George W. Bush’s prescription-drug plan — has proved popular. But when problems fester year after year and public trust in government falls lower and lower, strange and convulsive things can happen. They happened when Perot jolted the political system in 1992, and we may well see them again soon. Perhaps if the two parties can’t come together to solve difficult problems out of a sense of responsibility, they’ll eventually respond to something more visceral: fear.

Popularity: 6% [?]

From: Yahoo News

There was a time, just a few years ago, when Emilio and Analia Maya’s lives brimmed with possibility, when their little Main Street cafe thrived and their hard-fought dream of life in America seemed enticingly within reach.

They had emigrated from Argentina in the late 1990s and settled in this picturesque village at the foot of the Catskills, working in restaurants and gas stations, becoming respected members of the community. Emilio joined the volunteer fire department. His sister volunteered as a translator for the local police.

Life was hard, but happy, and they had big plans. They were saving to open a restaurant where Emilio, now 34, would whip up Argentine specialties like chicken empanadas and chimichurri steak while Analia, 30, served customers.

But that was before the Mayas struck their deal.

Like so many other immigrant workers here in the Hudson Valley, the Mayas had overstayed their visitor visas years earlier. Their days were haunted by the fact that they could be deported at any time.

Though she loved life in America, Analia yearned to be able to travel freely, to once again see friends and relatives in her hometown of Mendoza, to glimpse the familiar, snowcapped peaks of the Andes.

One day, feeling particularly homesick, she turned to her friend, police officer Sidney Mills. The burly, crewcut cop regularly recruited Analia to help with cases involving Hispanics. He estimates that Analia, and later Emilio, worked on as many as a hundred cases.

“Can you help us get legal papers?” she asked him.

Mills didn’t hesitate.

“They were doing right by the community,” he says. “I thought I should do right by them.”

So in March 2005 Mills arranged a meeting at the station between Analia and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Kelly McManus and Morgan Langer. They peppered her with questions about the kind of information she could provide, about why she wanted to stay in the U.S. “I want to finish college and become a translator,” she told them.

According to Mills, the deal was straightforward: In exchange for working as informants, ICE would help the brother and sister get coveted S visas, which, in rare instances, are awarded to immigrants who help law enforcement.

“It was very clear,” Mills says. “That was the deal they thought they had made.”

Five years later, the Mayas say they have only questions and a burning sense of betrayal. They insist they held up their end of the bargain, risking their lives in hours of undercover work, wearing wires and using fake names. But for reasons they do not understand, ICE and the agents who were their handlers abruptly turned against them — and they now face imminent deportation.

“How can this country be so cruel?” Analia asks.

___

Analia remembers how her heart leaped the day they sealed the fateful deal. Finally they were on the path to legal status and eventual citizenship. Emilio was more wary. How could they trust the very people charged with deporting them? What if it was all just a trick?

Still, at Analia’s insistence he agreed to meet the agents the following week. That first encounter — in the back of a black Explorer in the Price Chopper parking lot — was terrifying. In the car they spotted handcuffs and guns. Oh my God, thought Analia, what have we done?

But the agents were friendly and professional. They were looking for information on people involved with drugs, gangs, human smuggling operations, prostitution and selling false papers. They made it clear that they couldn’t pay for information, and that the Mayas would have to sign forms stating that they would never talk about their undercover work, not even with their immediate family.

And so the Mayas were inducted into the murky world of “CIs” — confidential informants — a world filled with suspicion and deceit and danger, a world in which, undercover, they were no longer Analia and Emilio Maya, but Ana and Edwin Martinez.

At first, the work seemed simple enough. At soccer practice, in the restaurant, even grocery shopping, the Mayas would initiate conversations about information the agents were seeking. They would meet McManus and Langer in supermarket or church parking lots and inspect photographs of suspects. ICE wasn’t interested in regular people working illegally, Analia says. “They were looking for the big fish. The really bad ones.”

Emilio wasn’t so sure. On the street the S visa is known as the “snitch” visa. What if word got out that the Mayas were informing on immigrants like themselves? If the true identities of Ana and Edwin Martinez were exposed, would ICE be there to protect them?

And yet the promised reward was dazzling. The Mayas were about to open their restaurant, Tango cafe. Their parents had followed from Argentina and were helping them. What illegal immigrant wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to secure legal status and end the daily dread of deportation?

What choice did we have, Emilio asks — though he acknowledges that, in fact, they did have a choice. Agents had explained at the very first meeting: If they had any doubts, they were free to walk away without any repercussions. Instead, they chose to stay.

As the months passed the Mayas got to know their handlers — the redheaded, no-nonsense Kelly; the nerdy, bespectacled Morgan. The relationship was businesslike, not warm or social. But the Mayas trusted them. After all, officer Mills had introduced them.

In February 2006, the agents decided to take the next step. They wired Emilio and sent him to a Main Street house that operated a prostitution ring.

Mills remembers the night clearly — how he, McManus, Langer and Analia sat in an unmarked car down the street, listening as Emilio asked about the girls, where they came from, who brought them, the cost. Analia, who was acting as translator, was shaking. What if they discovered the recorder, hidden in a packet of cigarettes? What if they turned on her ?

The agents were pleased. The night’s work brought a big reward: Later that month McManus and Langer drove the Mayas to the ICE office in New York, where they were photographed, fingerprinted and handed work permits — small white cards stamped with the authorization to work for a year. As long as they were working for ICE, the permits would be renewed every year.

Analia and Emilio were ecstatic. Finally they were legal. This was the first step, they thought. The S visa would surely follow. “The agents were laughing at us, we were so happy,” Analia said.

___

That September, agents approached Analia about an undercover job in a cosmetic factory in Port Jervis 70 miles away, where she was to pose as an illegal immigrant from Mexico. She was to get information on hiring practices, on who provided the false papers, and on the managers.

Analia was nervous but a bigger concern was leaving the restaurant indefinitely. “Tell them you can’t go,” Emilio pleaded. “What about our customers?”

“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “This is our future.”

For five weeks, Analia lived in a hotel near Port Jervis, working the 7:30 am to 3:30 p.m. shift at the factory. Agents would pick her up at 4:30 in the morning, slip on the wire — a small device she wore in her jeans pocket — and drive her to a parking lot where a van picked up the workers. When her shift ended, they would pick her up, debrief her, and drive her back to the hotel.

Standing for hours on the assembly line was exhausting, and trying to pry information from managers was even harder. Analia didn’t dare make friends. Nights were miserable, alone in the hotel. And there was the constant fear of being exposed.

Analia begged McManus to let her go home. But, she said, the agent told her that she had to keep her side of the deal. Otherwise, she would be arrested and there would be nothing McManus could do.

In the end, an old injury — a broken collar bone that hadn’t healed properly — landed Analia in the emergency room. Doctors said she couldn’t work in the factory anymore.

For the most part, Analia said she never felt in serious danger, though Emilio described several close calls. Once, he said he was wired and trying to buy false papers from a suspect in a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee shop. The suspect became suspicious, flung down the money and stormed away.

On another occasion, Emilio said, he was wired at the Newburgh police station, 50 miles away, and sent to a run-down neighborhood to find a woman named Maria. He was instructed to pay her $220 for a false Social Security number and work permit. But Maria insisted on driving to another location and agents lost track of him. Terrified, Emilio had to make his own way back to the station, miles away.

By the summer of 2007, Emilio’s nerves were frayed. He was losing valuable time from his cafe and he still hadn’t received a visa. He was sick of pretending to be Edwin Martinez. He wanted out. “We had given them information on a gang, on a smuggling operation, on drugs, and still we had nothing,” he said.

But when he demanded an explanation from the agents’ boss, James Mooney, the response was chilling, Emilio recalled: If the Mayas stopped informing, they risked immediate deportation.

Analia dismissed it as an idle threat. After all, they had made a deal with an agency of the U.S. government. Of course it would be honored. They just had to be patient.

But things were changing, the Mayas could sense it. In 2008, they say, the agents began demanding information on terrorism and guns — information the Mayas simply couldn’t provide. The brother and sister continued offering tips about local activities, but they were no longer sent on undercover jobs.

In many ways, it was a relief. They were busy running the restaurant. Emilio had married his girlfriend, Kseniya, a 22-year-old student from Belarus, and they had a baby girl, Valentina. Analia was pregnant with her son, Santiago. They had little time for information gathering, though the question was never far from their minds: Where did they stand with ICE?

The answer came in May 2009. At a meeting in the Price Chopper parking lot, Emilio says, agents bluntly told him that unless he delivered information on weapons and terrorism, his work permit would not be renewed and he would be deported.

He listened in horror. What about the promised visas? What about their deal?

“They said the information I gave them wasn’t good enough,” Emilio says.

Analia was frantic. Where could they turn for help? They had promised not to tell anyone about their work. They had no written proof of their deal with ICE. What would happen to them?

Their parents urged them to leave, to go back to Argentina, to turn their backs on the country that now seemed to be turning on them. No, Analia said. We’ve worked too hard to just give up.

In desperation, she confided in a customer at Tango — U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey, who had stopped by for Saturday lunch with his daughter. Sobbing, Analia told him everything. The congressman listened in disbelief. “Calm down,” Hinchey said. “The government doesn’t use people and throw them away.”

That next week, Hinchey’s office began researching their case — and, the Mayas say, ICE stopped taking their calls.

Months passed. Hinchey’s office pressed unsuccessfully for information from ICE. The Mayas’ permits were valid until 2010; now that a congressman was involved, they assumed, they would somehow be allowed to stay.

No one foresaw what happened next.

On Nov. 17, as he left his house for work, Emilio was surrounded by nine agents wearing ICE flak jackets and pointing guns. Among them were the agents who had coached him and wired him. “We are deactivating you,” they said, slapping him in handcuffs and shackles, as a horrified Analia begged McManus for answers: “Why are you doing this? Where are you taking him?”

Emilio was “out of status” and would be deported, McManus said.

She acted, Analia recalls, as if she was dealing with strangers.

___

Emilio was driven 100 miles to Pike County jail in Hawley, Pa., and locked up for 15 days, though he was given no explanation and charged with no crime.

Analia was inconsolable. She called Hinchey’s office and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s, immigration lawyers, and of course, Mills. He listened, shocked. There must be some explanation, he thought.

A 10-year veteran of the police department, Mills had long worked undercover narcotics operations, sometimes with the FBI. He knows how deals are stuck with informants. And though he had never dealt with ICE before, “I assumed it was just another law enforcement agency and the rules would be the same.”

The golden rule: “You protect your sources, and you never renege on a deal.”

Now Mills is torn between the belief that the Mayas are good people who deserve to be rewarded for their work, and the nagging feeling that, “there must be something I don’t know.”

If there is, ICE hasn’t revealed it. The only explanation Hinchey’s staff received was that none of the information the Mayas provided had led to arrests or prosecutions.

Emilio was released on a 90-day stay on the eve of his deportation in December after Hinchey personally called ICE field agent Thomas Decker, who signed the release. The order for deportation was signed by Mooney — the same agent who met regularly with the Mayas and oversaw their undercover work. It was dated Dec. 27, 2005. ICE won’t explain why it waited four years, and used Emilio as an operative before serving it.

When the 90 days are up, Emilio must leave the country voluntarily or face deportation. The clock runs out on March 2. Analia faces her own hearing in immigration court on March 5.

ICE spokesman Brian Hale said the agency was in the difficult situation of being unable verify details about any case involving informants, or even to confirm a deal was made. In general, he said, ICE uses “alien informants” in what he termed a “significant public benefit parole” program, which may eventually lead to S visas. “There has to be a significant benefit to the government,” Hale said. “That is the standard they have to adhere to.”

Reached at her office in Castle Point, ICE agent McManus, the Maya’s key contact, said she couldn’t comment and hung up.

Critics of ICE say it is not unusual for the agency to treat informants poorly.

“They use the most vulnerable people to do dangerous work, make them all sorts of promises and then just abandon them,” says New York immigration lawyer Claudia Slovinsky. In more than 25 years of practice, Slovinsky says, she doesn’t know of a single case of someone receiving an S visa.

“These kind of shocking things happen with ICE all the time,” Slovinsky says. “And we need to shine a light on it because most Americans have no clue.”

The Maya’s plight has divided this historic little village on the banks of the Hudson. The local fire and police departments have written on their behalf. Weekenders have flocked to their aid, signing petitions, holding fundraisers, bombarding Hinchey and Gillibrand’s offices with letters of support.

Gillibrand’s staff has asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “to determine whether the Mayas are being given full and fair consideration in this matter.” And last week Hinchey submitted a rare private bill requesting the Mayas be granted legal status. Private bills are occasionally used to provide relief from immigration laws for compelling cases. But they are unpopular, particularly in the current political climate. There are complex rules governing their introduction and they are extremely difficult to pass.

Meanwhile, the reaction from the Latino community has been suspicion and fear.

Before Emilio’s arrest the cafe hummed with patrons from Argentina and El Salvador and Chile. Latinos don’t come to Tango anymore. They shun Emilio and Analia at the bank and the supermarket. Emilio, who played professional soccer in Argentina, has been dropped by his local team. Analia’s friends won’t return calls because they fear her phone is tapped.

It’s an open secret that undocumented immigrants work in many restaurants and factories in the area, and they are easy to find. While they won’t speak openly about the Mayas, privately many say that any entanglement with ICE — either as informant or suspect — is perilous. “People are just scared of anything to do with ICE,” said one restaurant worker from El Salvador.

Another said it was hard to have sympathy for informants. “You make your bed, you lie in it,” he said.

The Mayas understand. Even if they avoid deportation, they wonder about their prospects in Saugerties. “What kind of a life can we have here,” Analia says, “when so many people are enemies?”

For now, the clock is ticking and the strain shows. Emilio is on the verge of giving up and buying a ticket to Argentina, knowing he will not be able to return. Analia and Kseniya say they will be unable to run the restaurant on their own, and besides, they wouldn’t want to stay in the country without him.

Tango still opens at 7 every morning, still clatters with old-fashioned conviviality and charm. Customers breeze in and coo at the babies, and Analia greets them with a smile. In the kitchen, Emilio tries to distract himself with cooking. But as the deadline looms and the family awaits it’s fate, nothing in the cozy little cafe feels the same.

Popularity: 8% [?]

From: MyFoxLa

Mitt Romney, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts and 2008 presidential candidate, was physically threatened by a passenger on an Air Canada flight leaving Vancouver on Monday morning, according to reports.

The Globe and Mail said the incident was sparked when a man sitting in front of Romney’s wife Ann in the economy section of the plane moved his seat back.

He became “physically violent” when Romney asked him to move it upright for take-off, apparently trying to hit the 62-year-old.

Romney’s spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said: “Governor Romney did not retaliate.”

After hearing of the incident, the pilot returned the plane to the gate and had the passenger and his bags removed.

Romney was not injured.

He and his wife were in Vancouver for the opening of the Olympic Winter Games.

There is speculation that Romney, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, is preparing for another bid in 2012.

Popularity: 4% [?]

From: NY Daily News

New York Latinos have found love in the produce section at Pathmark. On the Staten Island ferry. At the Latin Quarter nightclub. And lately, they’ve been looking for sparks at speed-dating parties like the one Friday at the Leopard Lounge in the East Village.

Felicia García, 26, a college admissions counselor from the Bronx making her third trip to these twice-monthly meet-and-greets, said one connection turned into a three-month relationship. Until, she said, “I learned I should ask right away if they have kids.”

While García’s traditional mother is eager for grandchildren, hearing about the increasingly popular way to meet drew one response: “Tu eres loca” — you are crazy.

“I don’t even know how to explain it to my mother,” offered Cristal Rodríguez, 26, a paralegal from the Bronx and a speed-dating first-timer.

How about calling it a game of romantic musical chairs?

At Friday’s Latin night, hosted by NY Minute Dating, about 20 men and women chatted at small tables as the dim bar glowed with votive candles and red boudoir lights.

The scent of sandalwood drifted through the air. The heartbeat thrum of “Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart” by Alicia Keys played overhead.

Every five minutes, the men rotated to the next table of amorous possibility.

Alex Martínez, 27, a banker from Chelsea, had been on a dinner date at Dos Caminos just the previous night. “Couldn’t have been that successful because I’m here,” he said. “Tonight, I’m not anticipating anything.”

“Letting things play out” was also the attitude of John Paul García, 37, a Filipino business manager with a self-described “corazón Latino,” Latin heart.

“Guys don’t court you anymore,” said Joann Santos, 31, who hadn’t been on an official date — “These don’t count,” she laughed — since last summer.

Born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, Santos explained that the last guy she met, in December, just disappeared.

“We spoke on the phone about going to the Christmas-tree-lighting together,” she said, “and then I never heard from him again.”

While her Guatemalan mother has always been “supportive but watchful,” Santos said she won’t be telling her about these five-minute fixups. Not when all her other stories about New York dating left her jaw dropping or, as Santos described it, “boca abierta.”

Besides, Santos found the men this night only “interesting” and planned on leaving town for the upcoming Valentine’s Day weekend.

Popularity: 6% [?]