A Woman A Gun and Noodle Shop

Coincidence? yeh, suuuuuure.

Quick recap: Mexican couple comes to the US illegally with their 1 y/o son 19 years ago.

Recently the now 20 y/o gets deported back to Mexico. Trigger event is, apparently, his two drug paraphernalia arrests.

Is now living in Guadalajara with/near his mother's sister and where, apparently, his education and accent-free English are quite marketable assets.

Some takeaways:

He's pretty upbeat and making the best of it, considering.

He says he didn't know that he was illegal until he wanted to get his driver's license at age 16 and found he didn't and couldn't have a SS#.

His sister is a citizen and his parents are also now through his sister. iow, his sister was the anchor baby.

While most of his fellow ICE deportees were Latino there were also African, Filipino and British deportees as well.

He won't try to sneak back into the US because the penalties are too great.

h/t HuffPo

WASHINGTON -- Determined to show a commitment to stopping the flow of illegal immigrants, the Senate convened a special session Thursday and passed a $600 million bill to put more agents and equipment along the Mexican border.

The voice vote in the nearly empty Senate chamber sends the legislation to President Barack Obama, who planned to sign it into law on Friday. Obama had urged Congress to channel more money toward border security amid complaints from states besieged by undocumented immigrants and illegal drug trafficking.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., the chief sponsor, said the measure would provide Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano "with the boots on the ground and the resources necessary to combat the crime and violence."

Obama said the bill would help protect communities along the Southwest border and across the country.

"And this new law will also strengthen our partnership with Mexico in targeting the gangs and criminal organizations that operate on both sides of our shared border," he said in a statement.

House Democrats had also called a special session, summoning lawmakers back from their summer break Tuesday to pass the border security bill and a $26 billion aid bill to keep teachers and other public workers from being laid off. Both issues - jobs and border security - are among those expected to be on voters' minds when they go to the polls in November.

Senate historian Donald Ritchie said it was only the second time since the August break became official policy in 1970 that the Senate had reconvened. The first time was after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The border security measure would fund the hiring of 1,000 new Border Patrol agents to be deployed at critical areas along the border, 250 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and 250 more Customs and Border Protection officers.

It provides for new communications equipment and greater use of unmanned surveillance drones. There are currently seven such drones along the border. Almost one-third of the money goes to the Justice Department to help agencies such as the FBI, the DEA and the ATF deal with drug dealers and human traffickers.

The bill is paid for by raising fees on foreign-based personnel companies that use U.S. visa programs, including the popular H-1B program, to bring skilled workers to the United States. India says higher fees would discriminate against its companies and workers.

About 3,000 men and women were questioned for the research, with three- quarters of men agreeing that they would rather work for a man than a woman.

A quarter of women accused female bosses of backstabbing and bringing their personal lives into the office.

And a third of those polled said women with power are `loose cannons' who often feel threatened by colleagues.

 Olivia, an articulate 15-year-old who's about to enter Grade 10 at a Toronto private girls' school, thinks feminists are about as relevant to her life as a rotary-dial phone. "When I hear the word I think of the hippie-ish generation where they're all `girl-power,' " she says. And not in a sexy Spice Girls "girl power" way, more in a humourless, style-less way: "They refuse to wear perfume because they don't want to be seen as sex objects," she says dismissively.

Like many other teenage girls, Olivia regards the fight for female equality as over. "In the Western world, we're pretty equal," she says.

Sample of that lyrical poetry:

"Out there somewhere are the kind of people who do not accept the premature autopsy of a noble art form;

These are the ones who follow in the footsteps of the gifted and the disciplined;

Who have been deeply hurt but not discouraged, who have been frightened but who have not forgotten how to be brave;

Who revel in the company of their friends and sweethearts, but who are willing to face the loneliness that is demanded of mastery."