Free Republic

TALLAHASSEE -- Lieutenant Gov. Jennifer Carroll has turned in her resignation to Gov. Rick Scott. The governor's office confirmed Carroll submitted her resignation Tuesday. Scott will hold a presser on the resignation this afternoon. Carroll was the first female elected as lieutenant governor in Florida and the first African-American elected statewide.

In February, Republican Gov. Rick Scott announced his intention to accept Obamacare’s optional Medicaid expansion in Florida. Since then, the governor has taken a lot of heat: heat from conservatives accusing him of betraying conservative principals; as well as heat from Democrats saying he didn’t go far enough... We’ll lay it out in a very plausible hypothetical. Imagine if Mr. Scott flew around the Sunshine State telling voters that Medicaid is broken and needs reform; that expanding the rolls and adding dependents to a broken system doesn’t make sense; and that when the federal cash starts to run out in...

In the wake of Gov. Rick Scott's appointment of Alan Forst to the Florida 4th District Court of Appeal, Sunshine State News has discovered that state Supreme Court Justices Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince donated nearly $30,000 to the liberal activist group that opposed Forst's candidacy. “I believe this is the first time in our history that two sitting Supreme Court justices have diverted campaign cash to a group that used the money to attack a fellow Florida Bar member nominated to the appellate court,” a former high-ranking government attorney tells SSN. “This action has the potential to undermine the...

When Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, decided in February to sign on to Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid, he made a much bigger splash than the other six GOP governors who have made the same decision. It was a complete reversal of the pledge Scott made last summer after the Supreme Court upheld the law: “We’re not going to expand Medicaid, because we’re going to do the right thing.” The stunning nature of his flip-flop has invited comparisons to his predecessor Charlie Crist, the Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat who developed a reputation for being as flexible in his principles as Gumby. In reality, Scott remains...

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the Republican Party should abandon its efforts to curb voter participation through voter ID laws and restrictions on hours for early voting. “Should we really have gone after reducing the turnout of voters in those places where we thought it would make a difference?” he told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, referring to November’s election, Politico reports. “The Republican Party should be a party that says, ‘We want everybody to vote,’ and make it easier to vote and give them a reason to vote for the party, not to find ways to keep them...

On August 23, 2011 the FBI arrested Imam Abu Taubah aka Marcus Dwayne Robertson. The charge was possession of a firearm by a previously convicted felon, Case Number: 6:11-mj-1380 Attached to Imam Abu Robertson’s case is a Notice of Intent To Use Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Information (FISA). The U.S. Government’s intention to use its FISA powers signals probable cause to charge Imam “Taubah” Robertson “the target of such search is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power”. The facts presented in these filed charges leads this reporter to suspect an element of foreign intrigue may be...

Kimberly Dudley says she is grateful for the agency Healthy Start, which sent an educator into her home to help her get off drugs and prevent her kids from being shipped to foster care. "If I didn't have the program, I would be homeless with a premie," said Dudley, 21, a Clearwater mother of two young children. Now the program is in danger. Earlier this month, the Florida Department of Health turned down a $4.9 million federal grant that already has helped 84 Pinellas County families and hundreds more statewide. The department was forced to turn down the money after...

It's not Saturday night, but apparently the time is right for fighting between Elton John and Gov. Rick Scott. In his upcoming memoir, Sir Elton criticizes the unpopular pol for attempting to cut funds to Florida's AIDS Drug Assistance Program. Elton even wrote a letter to the governor, and the response he received from Scott's surgeon general was essentially, Well, if you care about Florida's AIDS patients' lives so much, why don't you come down here and perform a few charity concerts? ADAP programs help poorer patients with HIV get access to lifesaving but exorbitantly expensive medications. Florida's ADAP program...

It may not have surprised many conservatives, but a June 27th email sent out by MoveOn.org certainly caught the attention of Politifact Florida. The “Truth-O-Meter” went crazy when it analyzed the false claim that Gov. Rick Scott “tried to kick 180,000 people off the voter rolls," among other provocative statements. After investigating, Politifact came to the following conclusion about the statement used by MoveOn to solicit fundraising dollars.

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a victory for Republicans, the federal government has agreed to let Florida use a law enforcement database to challenge people's right to vote if they are suspected of not being U.S. citizens.The agreement, made in a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott's administration that was obtained by The Associated Press, grants the state access to a list of resident noncitizens maintained by the Homeland Security Department. The Obama administration had denied Florida's request for months but relented after a judge ruled in the state's favor in a related voter-purge matter. Voting rights groups, while acknowledging that...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott justified his decision to opt out of the Medicaid expansion Thursday, saying that the massive health care program was growing at a pace that outstrips general revenue and that he was focused on helping his state get jobs. “The most important thing is working on getting everybody a job,” he said on CBS’s “This Morning” when asked about health care. “We have 800,000 people out of work, but we’ve had a drop in unemployment, that’s the most important thing we can do.” “That’s what I’m focused on, getting our citizens jobs to afford insurance. This expansion...

Hollywood’s brightest stars came out for the annual BET Awards Sunday night and once again took time to honor the late Whitney Houston. --snip-- ...Rev. Al Sharpton received the humanitarian award, and urged the crowd to vote this November. "This election is not just about Obama, this is about your momma," he said....

....Under the health care law, by 2014, states must implement a health insurance exchange, or a Web-based marketplace where people can shop for insurance, or defer to a federal program. States need to submit plans to the federal government by Nov. 16 that demonstrate their readiness to launch health exchanges. ....."We care about having a health care safety net for the vulnerable Floridians," Scott said on Fox. "But this is an expansion that just doesn't make any sense." ....."Hopefully we won't have to worry about it because by November we're going to have a new president-elect who is going to...

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Florida Gov. Rick Scott now says Florida will do nothing to comply with President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and will not expand its Medicaid program. The announcement is a marked changed after the governor recently said he would follow the law if it were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. "Florida is not going to implement Obamacare. We are not going to expand Medicaid and we're not going to implement exchanges," Scott's spokesman Lane Wright told The Associated Press on Saturday. Wright stressed that the governor would work to make sure the law is repealed.

A federal judge denied the U.S. Department of Justice’s request for an emergency restraining order to halt Florida’s non-citizen voter purge and said the controversial scrub does not violate federal law. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Hinkle heard arguments this morning from the Justice Department and Michael Carvin, a Washington lawyer representing Gov. Rick Scott’s administration. Carvin was one of the lead lawyers for President George W. Bush in the protracted 2000 recount legal wrangle. Hinkle denied the request for the emergency stop to the program in part because he said the state was no longer doing it. But he...

Florida politics produces very few no-brainer issues. There are even fewer when you can choose whether you want to side with logic or with criminal behavior. Today’s no-brainer is the progressives’ argument against voter identification, perhaps the most irresponsible position in Florida politics today. Gov. Rick Scott is not backing off a pledge to clear Florida’s voter rolls of non-citizens who illegally registered to vote. When the governor received word that the U.S. Department of Justice intends to sue Florida to stop its efforts to “purge” voter rolls, he announced he would sue the Obama administration to force the Department...

The Florida State Attorney's office has announced the wife of George Zimmerman - the defendant in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin - has been arrested on suspicion of perjury. Her husband stands accused of second-degree murder after shooting the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin dead, in what he says was self-defence, after claiming he had been attacked.

Tallahassee - Rumors that former Florida governor Charlie Crist is gay have been around for years, but new allegations have surfaced that he had affairs with two men and paid them to leave the state to avoid embarrassment. The allegations are made in Discovery documents related to Jim Greer's case involving alleged illegal use of Republican Party funds, according to a 10 News WTSP report. Damon Chase, attorney for Greer, who is set to go to trial on July 30 for allegedly paying himself to raise money for the Republican Party of Florida, says Crist is homosexual and once tried...

Florida announced Wednesday afternoon it would ignore the Department of Justice's demands to stop its controversial voter purge, but a state election supervisor threw another twist into the story, telling MSNBC's Al Sharpton soon afterwards that he and his colleagues won't play along. Ion Sancho, Leon County's supervisor of elections, told the PoliticsNation host that Republican Gov. Rick Scott can "do all he wants of this partisan endeavor" but that Sancho would not participate in a process he sees as illegal, adding that he spoke for a good number of his fellow supervisors. The majority of us "will not conduct...

Florida Gov. Rick Scott tells Newsmax.TV that the victory of his Wisconsin counterpart, Scott Walker, in a recall election validates his own policies in the Sunshine State, and says that it may even be a bellwether for the November election between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. “Absolutely” it’s a validation, declared Scott in an exclusive interview on Wednesday. “What we know now is that if you run on a campaign of fiscal responsibility, making your state a business-friendly state, reducing taxes, reducing regulations, putting people in place that are going to be pro-business — because that’s where jobs get...