Free Republic

If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race. Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities. While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.

Quebec’s separatist government is betting on broad popular support with a proposal that prohibits public workers from wearing headscarves, skullcaps and other religious symbols, yet it is dividing the movement that advocates independence from Canada. The proposal, unveiled by the ruling Parti Quebecois last week, plays with the explosive issue of minority rights in a part of Canada, a country that prides itself as being a tapestry of immigrants rather than a U.S.-style melting pot. The government’s proposed Charter of Quebec Values would ban teachers, doctors and other public workers from wearing highly visible religious symbols, including yarmulkes, headscarves and...

Kenyan Vice President William Ruto orchestrated a campaign of ethnic killings "to satisfy his thirst for power" after disputed 2007 elections, prosecutors said Tuesday at the start of his trial at the International Criminal Court. Ruto, 46, and co-accused Kenyan radio boss Joshua arap Sang, 38, pleaded not guilty to charges of stoking the worst violence in the east African country since independence in 1963. Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, Ruto's former political foe turned ally, goes on trial at the ICC on November 12. He also proclaims his innocence. The start of the high-stakes case, with the ICC's reputation on...

PITTSBURGH — Three teenage girls are facing several charges, including ethnic intimidation, after police said they brutally beat a 32-year-old woman Sunday in Pittsburgh’s North Side. Investigators said the incident happened around 2 p.m. near the intersection of Concord and Itin streets. According to police, the girls threw a bottle at the woman’s car, and when she stopped to confront the girls, they attacked her. “It’s sad, but it doesn’t surprise me. Our youth …,some of them are going in the wrong direction,” said one resident who did not want to be identified. Officers said the woman was kicked, punched,...

In defending New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday that local police officers “disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.” The comment, made by the mayor to radio host John Gambling during a Friday morning interview on WOR-NY, comes on the heels of a New York City Council decision earlier this week to create an independent inspector general to oversee the police department’s practices amid allegations that law enforcement wrongfully targets blacks and Hispanics with its stop-and-frisk program. Speaking on the air, the mayor dismissed the suggestion that the New York Police Department needs...

Farrakhan then attempted to bring his rationale all together, saying “White folks don’t produce black children — except [if] it‘s a white woman with a black man or a black man with a white woman and that’s the end of your race. So you’re dying a natural death these days. And without an AK47 ’cause the brother ain’t shooting no blanks.”

Islamic extremists are engaged in “ethnic cleansing” of Christians in the Syrian city of Homs, local sources tell the Fides news service. Militants with links to Al Qaida have reportedly driven 90% of the Christians out of the city, going door-to-door to inform families that they must leave immediately. Read more: http://times247.com/articles/syrian-christians-being-ethnically-cleansed-by-islamist-rebels#ixzz1ptHgXEnO

In one of the best Marx Brothers scenes is from A Night at the Opera, where Groucho and Chico are ripping up a contract and they finally come to the SANITY CLAUSE, in which Chico proclaims there is no SANITY CLAUSE. In tomorrow’s Financial Times, there is a story about France pushing for a Christmas gift from the ECB. The gift that the French are hoping for is a backstop for the European banks that are under severe stress because of the huge amount of EURO sovereign bonds on the banks’ balance sheets. In order for the ECB to act,...

When Sarah Palin dissed Herman Cain as the "flavor of the week" in September, the Republican presidential candidate pushed back on her assessment. "I got some substance here. Okay? I'm Häagen-Dazs Black Walnut. It lasts longer than a week," Cain told Tonight Show host Jay Leno, apparently unaware the flavor was a limited edition..........

Italy on Wednesday became the first major economy to require an international bail-out as its debts hit “totally unsustainable levels”. The country's escalating crisis prompted questions about whether European leaders had sufficient will or financial firepower to rescue it. The interest rate at which the Italian government borrows on the international bond markets hit seven per cent – the point at which the smaller eurozone economies of Ireland, Portugal and Greece had to be rescued. Italy, the world’s eighth largest economy, has more than £1.5 trillion worth of debt, which has prompted speculation from some world leaders that it is too...

The six weeks allotted to save monetary union have expired. The G20 has come and gone, yet no workable firewall is in place as the drama engulfs Italy and threatens to light the fuse on the world’s third largest edifice of debt. As of late Friday, the yield spread on Italian 10-year bonds over German Bunds was a post-EMU record of 458 basis points. This is dangerously close to the point where cascade-selling begins and matters spiral out of control. The European Central Bank has so far bought time by holding a series of retreating lines but either it has...

Minorities Become A Majority In Washington Region By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik August 30 Washington is among eight big-city metropolitan regions in which minorities became a majority in the past decade, according to a new analysis of census data showing white population declines in many of the largest metro areas. Along with Washington, the regions surrounding New York, San Diego, Las Vegas and Memphis have become majority-minority since 2000. Non-Hispanic whites are a minority in 22 of the countryÂ’s 100-biggest urban areas. The white population shrank in raw numbers in 42 of those big-city regions. But every large metro...

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi confirmed that they would be moving toward a balance budget amendment on Friday, after rampant speculation that the European Central Bank would intervene bond markets and purchase Italian and Spanish debt in exchange for structural reforms.

(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama has made an unprecedented demand on Israel, Jewish leaders said today after the president called for Israel to redraw its borders to where they were in 1967 before the Six Day War. One rabbi said Obama was, in essence, asking for "ethnic cleansing" of thousands of Jewish families. “It’s immoral in that basically the president of the United States is asking that 500,000 people who live, work, and raise families around Jerusalem – Jewish families – that they be uprooted, resettled, deported from their homes, have their families broken,” Rabbi Aryeh Spero, founder of Caucus...

An 83-year-old Beverly man has died after suffering severe burns when his kilt caught fire while he was burning leaves and brush in his yard last week. Arthur Ciampa’s 19-year-old neighbor, Evan Smith, rushed to his aid on Thursday after hearing screams next door, Beverly police said.

CALIFORNIA, Pa. -- A football player at California University of Pennsylvania has been charged with ethnic intimidation and other crimes after police said he assaulted another man off campus. California Borough police on Tuesday charged Darnell Harding, 20, of McKeesport. Police said Harding, who is black, beat and kicked a 23-year-old white man who told police Harding had said he planned to mess with the first white person he encountered. University spokeswoman Christine Kindl said Wednesday that it's too early in the school's disciplinary process to determine whether Harding will face school or team sanctions.

A lot has already been said about the Administration’s decision to intervene in Libya. What sounded like a support operation to enforce a no-fly zone has since revealed itself to be an offensive operation led and conducted almost entirely with U.S. assets and command. “Despite the White House attempts to make this look like it’s a huge coalition effort — obviously it required coalition political support — but for now the U.S. military is not only in the lead but conducting almost all military operations, with only minor participation from the French, as you mentioned, even some British fighters over...

Police will soon be allowed to return to the days when they could stop and search people on the basis of their ethnic background. Last night the news threatened to ignite a huge row between the Government and civil liberties groups. So-called ‘Sus laws’ were scrapped in the 1980s after the alleged targeting of black people by police led to race riots in London, Birmingham and Liverpool.

When Barack Obama’s two faculty mentors at Harvard Law got in trouble for plagiarism, they were rescued by Dean Elena Kagan. In 1989, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe hired first-year Harvard law student Barack Obama as his research assistant.  After Obama was elected president, Tribe would gush, "His stunning combination of analytical brilliance and personal charisma, openness and maturity, vision and pragmatism, was unmistakable from my very first encounter." Obama had one other prominent mentor among the Harvard faculty, Professor Charles Ogletree, an African American.  In the run-up to the election, Ogletree would enthuse, "I'm so excited about this candidacy...

Poll question: Do you support Arizona's law banning public schools from teaching ethnic studies classes that "promote resentment" of racial groups?