Free Republic

ORLANDO, FL — Deputies and state regulators aggressively raided Orlando-area barbershops, roughing up innocent staff and handcuffing them on the floor in an effort to check if the barbers had acquired government permission to legally cut hair. A series of these raids has recently come to light, one of which is making its way through the litigation process in the federal court system. This was the raid of the Strictly Skills barbershop in Pine Hills, Florida, in which government agents warrantlessly stormed in the establishment with as many as 25 customers and 6 staff members present.

The debut edition of our leader board of the Republicans most likely to win the presidential nomination, based on what we know now, shows the field may not be as big as most people think. 1) JEB BUSH (age 62, to Hillary’s 67): He’s got money, momentum, Florida, big ideas. His surprise, early signal that he’s running is THE PLAY OF THE CAMPAIGN so far — pushing OUT Mitt and perhaps Christie by freezing or stealing their money and talent. Jeb will be first Republican to $100 million by a mile. Now, watch for the use of overwhelming force to...

Using Agitprop and elements of the Delphi propaganda method (3), lethal Home Owners Associations (HOAs) are moving north out of huge Miami-Fort Lauderdale territories up along Florida’s I-95 corridor to take over more and more personal property rights of unsuspecting homeowners in gated, HOA communities. And the effects are not pretty! “Resetting the default position. . .exploits the structure of the choice to encourage a more desirable option,” says Cass R. Sunstein, author of the book NUDGE. (1) Employed by the Obama Administration as a regulatory czar, it was Sunstein’s job to have the American people do what the government...

Senator Ted Cruz, the boat-rocking limited government constitutional conservative Senator from Texas, provided another one of his patented cross examinations of a smoke-blowing government official at a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Cruz, the son of legal immigrants from Cuba, asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about border security measures – the so-called “triggers” – contained in the “Gang of Eight's” immigration bill. Specifically, Senator Cruz asked, “If there are no objective metrics, if it is simply the subjective assessment of a host of factors, how can we have any confidence that the border will be secured and that any...

Andrew Johnson of NRO reports that in 2002, as executive of Milwaukee County, Scott Walker signed a resolution that expressed support for “comprehensive immigration reform” that will “provide greater opportunity for undocumented working immigrants to obtain legal residency.” The author of the resolution says that Walker definitely supported it. Having signed it, he should be presumed to have supported, in any case. Will this news harm Walker’s chances of becoming the GOP presidential nominee? Standing alone, it shouldn’t. It’s one thing to sign a non-bonding resolution passed by the legislature in favor of “greater opportunity” for legal residency. It’s quite...

A state-level campaign to rein in the federal government by calling an unprecedented convention to amend the U.S. Constitution is gaining steam, picking up support from two high-profile Republicans as more states explore the idea. Coburn, a legendary government-waste watchdog, announced this week that he has joined the effort by becoming a senior adviser for the group Convention of States Action, which wants states, not just Congress, to pass constitutional amendments. Article V of the Constitution states amendments can be ratified either by Congress or by states if two-thirds of them petition Congress to call a convention. Then, any amendment...

ACTION: Contact your Senators and urge them to cosponsor S. 477, the Firearms Manufacturers and Dealers Protection Act of 2015. Operation Choke Point a Threat to the Second Amendment About a year ago, the Second Amendment community was rocked by news that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had teamed up with Attorney General Eric Holder to utterly destroy firearms manufacturers and dealers by cutting off all credit and banking relationships with them.For its part, the FDIC categorized gun and ammunition sales as a "high-risk business," lumping it in with drug dealers, pornographers, and Ponzi scheme operators -- all of...

Florida Student Told No 'God Bless America' In Morning Announcements By Letitia Stein TAMPA, Fla. (Reuters) - A Florida high school told a student this week to stop adding the phrase "God bless America" when reading scripted morning announcements, drawing protests and irate phone calls from around the nation, school officials said on Friday. The principal at Yulee High School, located in north Florida near Jacksonville, asked the student to stick to the script after receiving a six-page letter on Monday from the American Humanist Association, a group that describes itself as advocating for humanists, atheists and secular governance. The...

Check out the size of this goliath grouper gathering of the coast of Florida. That is a lot of really big fish. It’s definitely not news that the goliath grouper population in Florida has been steadily on the rise over the past decade. The multitude of groupers is the cause of great concern within the angling community, as there are no natural enemies of the patriarch of the grouper family.

Republicans voice support for Netanyahu congressional speech Top Republican leaders took to public and private channels Thursday to expose a coordinated campaign by the Obama administration to attack Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his acceptance of an invitation to speak before Congress, according to conversations with multiple lawmakers and leading pro-Israel insiders. The statements, many of which were obtained by the Washington Free Beacon in conversations with leaders in Congress, come in the aftermath of a widely cited New York Times report in which Obama administration officials accused Netanyahu of breaking diplomatic protocol by agreeing to speak before receiving...

Jeb Bush’s money juggernaut is far eclipsing the efforts of his would-be rivals for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, putting his two political committees on pace to amass an unprecedented sum of tens of millions of dollars by early spring. The former Florida governor’s overwhelming dominance in the race to line up financial backers has come at a speed that has impressed longtime Republican money players, who say wealthy party backers have rapidly migrated to Bush since 2012 nominee Mitt Romney decided against another White House run two weeks ago.

House Speaker John Boehner’s on-staff amnesty advocate Becky Tallent is in talks with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s potential presidential campaign for a job, meaning if she takes it she’d leave Boehner’s office. Tallent is former chief of staff to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)—having personally crafted the amnesty bill McCain and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) introduced in the twilight years of the George W. Bush administration—and then also worked on immigration policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Jeb’s team is looking to hire Rebecca for policy,” a former George W. Bush White House aide told Breitbart News. “The...

If congressional Republican wanted to make the ongoing controversy surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu even more of a partisan food fight, this is clearly the way to do exactly that. Senate Republicans on Thursday moved to officially welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. ahead of his planned speech to Congress next month, the latest development in a saga that has roiled politics in both countries. Almost all GOP senators were listed as co-sponsors of a resolution by Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) saying the Senate “eagerly awaits the address of Prime Minister Netanyahu before a joint session of the...

A Florida school board has made a controversial decision to ban the distribution of religious and political material in its schools. The Orange County School Board previously allowed copies of the Bible in their schools, but they decided to reconsider the policy after receiving a request from the Satanic Temple to hand out Satanic coloring books. The board decided that to avoid legal action, it had to ban Bibles and any other religious material from being passed out to students. …

On February 9th, Florida’s Yulee High School brought the hammer down on a student who offended some of his fellow classmates. The student was reprimanded for his actions after reading the morning announcements over the school’s intercom. Why? Upon finishing the announcements, the student added, ‘God Bless America.’ Two atheist students took offense to the statement. A school spokesperson for the Nassau County School District said that the student had gone off script and was being reprimanded: “It wasn’t part of the scripted morning announcements,” district spokesperson Sharyl Wood said. “The principal took the appropriate steps in speaking with the student...

ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Orange County school board members voted Tuesday evening to ban all religious materials from being distributed at public schools. In 2014, a group put Bibles in Orange County schools for one day, and another group was able to provide atheist materials. But it was when the satanic temple tried to put its own book in schools that the district's policy became an issue. The policy previously permitted the groups to leave religious materials on tables at schools at the beginning of the year on a nationally recognized freedom day. At Tuesday's meeting, board members voted 7-1...

Jeb Bush, a rumored 2016 Republican presidential candidate, just decided to publish hundreds of thousands of emails sent to him during his time as governor of Florida. On its face it seems like a great idea in the name of transparency, but there's one huge problem: neither Bush nor those who facilitated the publication of the records, including the state government, decided to redact potentially sensitive personal information from them. "In the spirit of transparency, I am posting the emails of my governorship here," a note on Bush's website says. "Some are funny; some are serious; some I wrote in...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is the front-runner in a new 2016 Republican presidential preference poll in South Carolina, while U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham is close enough to make it a statistical tie here. But the news is less favorable for Graham in three other early voting states - Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada - where his level of support registers at negligible among GOP voters, totalling at 1 percent and below. The poll, by the conservative Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions, put Walker is out front in South Carolina but statistically tied with Graham, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and...

A father in Seminole County, Florida, is raising concerns after he discovered a lesson on Islam in his son’s 10th-grade history textbook, a book that is also used by school districts across the state. In an interview with WFTV, the father, Ron Wagner, read from his son’s history book: “There is no god, but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Wagner also claimed that students were told to “recite this prayer as the first Pillar of Islam, off of the board at the teacher’s instruction.” Wager said he’s not a religious man, but making such a heavily religious lesson “mandatory...