Free Republic

TRENTON — On Wednesday, about 350 people gathered at the steps of Trenton City Hall to call for justice and an end to violence after the killing of Julio Cesar Cruz last Saturday. Community leaders from Trenton’s Latino community as well as former Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer and community activist Andrew Bobbit stood beside the victim’s brother, Jose Antonio Cruz, as each one spoke about the urgency of seeking justice.

Texas might be going purple, but probably not as quickly as people think. That's the takeaway from some interesting new findings from Gallup. For a while now, smart political observers have talked about the prospect of the Lone Star State becoming competitive (or even blue) at the presidential level, giving Democrats a potentially game-changing 38 electoral votes that would make it very difficult for Republicans to win elections for the foreseeable future. Some have even suggested Texas could be in play in 2016 or 2020. One of the problems with the whole Texas-turning-purple/blue idea, though, is that there isn't a...

California's Latino population is going to overtake the white population in only two months, according to this year's state budget report. The state is also getting older, with the population of over 65s predicted to hit a boom over the coming months. The state has been getting more diverse for a while, but now the Latino population will be 'the single largest race or ethnic group', and it's thought to be because most Latino groups are in their prime childbearing years.

Latinos are wary of signing up for Obamacare because of fears that the information they provide might be used to deport themselves or family members. "They're scared," Ledy Ordonez, 43, who lives in Fremont, Calif., told the San Francisco Chronicle. She has a clothing and jewelry stand at a farmer's market in Oakland. "They're afraid if they put in an application for their children ... they'll get deported." While enrollment figures are not available yet from the Obama administration, healthcare advocates say fewer Hispanics are enrolling in the Affordable Care Act because of such concerns.

Paris — Scientists on Wednesday said they had found a variant of a gene to explain why Latin Americans are at higher risk of Type 2 diabetes, and pointed to a possible DNA legacy from the Neanderthals. The variant lies on a gene called SLC16A11, which plays a part in breaking down fatty molecules called lipids, they said in the journal Nature. A research consortium called SIGMA -- for the Slim Initiative in Genomic Medicine for the Americans -- sought to understand why Type 2 diabetes in Mexicans and other Latin American populations is roughly twice as great as among...

**SNIP** What my experiences do not include are those that are far too common among Latino 18-year-olds who are disproportionately affected by carbon pollution. Carbon pollution contributes directly to climate change, in turn endangering Latinos due to the resulting health and environmental repercussions. One expected climate impact in the U.S. is more smog in areas with poor air quality, translating to more asthma attacks for our young people. In fact, the Latino community is one of the hardest hit: Hispanic children are nearly two times as likely to be hospitalized for asthma as white children. Other illnesses related to poor...

Fewer than half of blacks and Latino workers have retirement plans on the job, leaving the vast majority of them with no savings designated for their golden years, according to a report to be released Tuesday. Americans of all races face the growing prospect of downward mobility in retirement, the report said, but the problem is particularly acute for blacks and Hispanics. More often than not, blacks and Latinos benefit little from the tax breaks and other policy initiatives aimed at bolstering retirement security because they typically have no money to save for retirement in IRAs and other vehicles outside...

Not the only interesting result here — Gallup’s also picking up the trend of millennials abandoning The One — but after so much post-election heavy breathing about his advantage with Latinos and how the GOP can win them back, it’s obviously the showstopper.Second look at congressional gridlock on immigration reform?The glass-half-full read: This is proof positive that Democrats do not, in fact, own the Latino vote. They can blow it, and to some extent may already have. But then, we already knew that from previous Gallup polls. Back in August, they noted that O’s job approval among Latinos was conspicuously...

Drug trafficking, gang wars, political instability, corruption, and poverty have combined to make Latin America by far the most homicidal region of the world. The region has 40% of the world's murders, despite having only 8 percent of the population, according to the U.N. The highest murder rate of all is in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, with 169 homicides per 100,000 people, according to a study published earlier this year by Mexico's Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice. The ranking is based on 2012 data, except for San Pedro Sula and Distrito Central in Honduras, where authorities would...

Obamacare could become a liability for Democrats among Latino voters, a key demographic that has been a focus of their health reform messaging. Hispanics have been far more sympathetic to President Obama’s signature domestic achievement than the rest of the general population, with Latinos accounting for roughly 30 percent of the uninsured pool. The botched rollout of Obamacare’s new insurance exchanges, though, hardly resembles what the president promised Latino voters when he sold his health reform plan. For all the problems with healthcare.gov, the Spanish-speaking version of the federal website registering consumers hasn’t even gone live yet. And amid the...

AMERICA’S CHANGING demographics, long a delicate topic, have become an increasingly prominent part of national political debate... --snip-- "The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies," that encouraging reports of higher Hispanic rates of graduation from high school often did not account for Hispanics who never entered high school in the first place. They warned that “as a group, Latino students today perform academically at levels that will consign them to lives as members of a permanent underclass in American society. Moreover, their situation is projected to worsen over time.” Academic stagnation in so large and rapidly expanding...

After two election cycles of Democrats successfully marketing Obamacare to Hispanic voters, the health care law's rocky start could turn into a bargaining chip for Republicans. Hispanic adults have supported President Obama's Affordable Care Act at a rate twice that of whites. More than 10 million Hispanics—roughly one-fourth of the total uninsured population—stand to benefit from the law. An outsize proportion of the eligible Hispanics are the healthy millennials who could make or break universal health care. But glitches on the enrollment site are blocking Hispanics (and everyone else) from signing up for subsidized insurance, while the Spanish-language website has...

Here’s something you won’t hear from the Hispanic media, the mainstream media, or the White House: Among the many terrible side effects of Obamacare is its adverse effects on Hispanics. This stems from the fact that the Hispanic population is one of the youngest, in addition to Obamacare’s impact on the wholesale and retail industry, which employs many Hispanic Americans. Wholesale and retail will be hit especially hard by Obamacare, because, as one consultant noted, “employers not currently offering coverage to all employees working at least 30 hours a week may be more inclined to change their workforce strategy so...

Bryan Llenas reports from New York City

The Spanish language website for the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, won't be available for online enrollment until the week of Oct. 21, officials said. Spanish speaking members of the community have been directed to the website Cuidadodesalud.gov as the Spanish language alternative to HealthCare.gov to enroll for insurance coverage. However, the website is not yet equipped with online enrollment tools, officials said. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials said the enrollment tools will launch when they celebrate a national Hispanic Week of Action during the week of Oct. 21 in order to ensure that Latinos in the...

The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) and the American Bible Society (ABS) are kicking off a three-year campaign to promote biblical fluency and literacy in the U.S. Hispanic community with Mes de la Biblia (Month of the Bible). With biblical illiteracy affecting 92 percent of the U.S. Latino community, the two organizations are challenging Hispanic churches and Hispanic Christians to commit to reading Scripture daily throughout September. “We are inviting pastors and leaders to take action in the fight against biblical illiteracy, which threatens to destroy the principles and values on which our great nation was founded,” says Rev....

A fraud-infested government program that gives low-income populations free cell phones should expand in Hispanic communities because it will help bolster employment rates, according to a powerful Latino rights group working to save the program as Congress considers killing it. The controversial cell phone giveaway, known as Lifeline Assistance, has grown immensely under President Obama and in fact has become known as “Obama Phones.” It went from costing American taxpayers $819 million in 2008 to $2.2 billion in 2012 , according to figures provided to an Idaho newspaper by one of its U.S. Senators. The money is collected nationwide from...

The political stakes could hardly be higher. Latinos, who have leaned Democratic, demographically are surging in Texas. And if the Democrats can turn Texas blue (or even purple) they would have a huge leg up at winning control of the executive branch of the U.S. government in future presidential elections. By achieving sufficient Democratic preeminence in Texas progressives could turn the White House blue.  And they know it. As the Democratic Party’s George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall once famously said, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”  So, too, are Plunkitt’s Democratic Party successors taking their opportunity … announcing...

Nationwide, Latino groups and leaders, including civil rights group National Council de la Raza (NCLR), have taken to the streets and the halls of power to rally alongside the African American community against the acquittal of George Zimmerman. NCLR announced yesterday that it had joined the NAACP, National Urban League (NUL), National Action Network (NAN) and other civil rights organizations in asking U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to meet and discuss possible next steps to be taken by the U.S. Department of Justice following the verdict in the Zimmerman trial. “While we respect the legal process and the jury’s decision,...

Conservative pundit Ann Coulter has been one of the loudest critics of immigration reform, claiming it will give the Democratic Party more voters since Latinos are a lazy, liberal and government-dependent people. While there are many sound arguments to make against the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill, the basis of Coulter’s arguments focus on offensive stereotypes and her analysis of the potential political consequences of immigration reform is greatly exaggerated. Many on the right have recommended that the GOP improve its messaging with Latinos and work on reforming our broken immigration system. Coulter, on the other hand, believes that Latinos...