Free Republic

Now the federal government wants to run the classroom. Not just what’s taught, who gets tested for what or what gets served for lunch, but who gets punished for what and how. Now Washington dictates on discipline. That was the clear word out of Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore yesterday as the attorney general and secretary of education announced new federal guidelines and mandates on school discipline. The goal? To disrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline” which Eric Holder and Arne Duncan say plagues our nation. Specifically, to eliminate what they call racial disparities in discipline. It turns out that black...

I have a friend who fought in Fallujah. He is boisterous and confident and full of life. He has the can-do spirit that defines himself and all who have worn the blue cord of the Army Infantry. But yesterday he was broken. As he talked about the Iraq war, and specifically the fight for Fallujah, there was a sadness that doesn’t come out in the speeches and books. There wasn’t the never-say-die confidence of a veteran non-commissioned officer, there was instead the dazed uncertainty of a man who looks back and wonders what the hell it was all about. Why...

Now he wants to legalize pot. The man who will send you to jail for having eight bullets in your gun is now paving the way for you to get stoned. Andrew Cuomo, proof that the apple, in fact, can fall quite far from the tree. As the first anniversary of his gun-banning Safe Act rolls around, the governor of New York is set to announce in his state of the state address that he is going to unilaterally, through administrative action, legalize medical marijuana. As he looks across the state, and chosen who he wants to stand for, he...

Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston will not be charged with a crime, State Attorney Willie Meggs said Thursday after his office completed an investigation into a sexual assault complaint filed a year ago. “We’ve carefully examined the evidence in this case and found that no charges will be filed,” Meggs said at a news conference in Tallahassee. The decision means Winston remains a favorite to win the Heisman Trophy and will be able to continue playing for the No. 1-ranked Seminoles. According to a January search warrant released hours before Meggs’ announcement, the woman who accused Winston told police she...

SARASOTA - Sarasota Police are investigating the apparent suicide of Anders Ebbeson, husband of former Congresswoman and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Police were called to the scene of the couple's house in the 1400 block of Sarasota's Bay Point Drive around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday. Police and Pastor William Hild of downtown Sarasota's First Baptist Church confirmed that Ebbeson, a 68-year-old Swedish businessman, had taken his own life and asked the community to respect the family's privacy. "On behalf of the family, Katherine's husband took his own life," Hild said outside the home on Bay Point Drive Tuesday morning....

Everyone hates Common Core. In New York, they hate it on the Left and they hate it on the Right. They gather by the hundreds to yell at state officials, they write letters to the editor about it, they plan lawsuits to trip it up. It is quite possibly the most universally unpopular government policy in a generation. And in New York, that’s saying something. What is Common Core? It’s the nationwide public-school curriculum that is the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s Race To The Top program. It tells America’s teachers what to teach and how to teach it. It makes...

Duval County School Board members voted unanimously Friday to start the process that likely would remove the name Nathan B. Forrest from one of its high schools. All seven board members voted to formally accept the written request of District 5 board member Constance Hall to begin the name-change procedure.

Republican Rep. C.W. Bill Young, Florida's longest-serving member of Congress has passed away. On Thursday, the family of the 82-year-old lawmaker said that he was gravely ill. Young's family released the following statement Friday: "U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young (FL-13) passed away this evening at The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the company of his family. The cause of death was complications related to a chronic injury. Information on services will be forthcoming." Young was influential on military spending during his 43 years in Washington, and in October announced his decision to retire. In recent years, Young had...

Shut it down. And leave it shut down. In fact, shut down more of it, and see if you can shut down the state government, too. This is Day Two of the federal government shutdown. Without legislation to pay its bills and fund its operations, the new fiscal year has dawned to dark offices and unanswered phones. And a president with his panties in a bunch. In three separate national addresses in recent days, Barack Obama has assured the country that he is reasonable and accommodating and the evil Republicans are trying to destroy the country. In imploring the Republicans...

When it comes to advancing his partisan agenda, Barack Obama barely waits for the bodies to cool. Literally. Like the Washington Navy Yard shooting. While families and coworkers gathered to pay their respects to the 12 people murdered by a registered Democrat, Barack Obama gave his spiel for gutting the Second Amendment. When people shoot up a mall in Kenya, our president says it’s terrorism. When a guy shoots up a workplace in America, our president says it’s the guns. And as people engaged in legitimate mourning Sunday shed a tear and shared their memories, Barack Obama said we had...

It’s not a matter of color, it’s a matter of culture. In 2042 – when the Census Bureau says white people will fall below 50 percent of the population – it’s not race that will determine how things go, it will be behavior. Whether this milestone ushers in a new era of American glory – or whether it kills the Republic as we know it – will be determined by the personal conduct of the Americans of that day. It doesn’t matter what color the Americans of 2042 are, it only matters that they retain enough traditional American culture to...

In the military, after an engagement with the enemy, it used to be customary to compile an “after-action report.” It was an assessment of how things went. What the enemy did, what we did, what were the outcomes, and what could we have done better. In the wake of the attack at the Washington Navy Yard, there will no doubt be an after-action report. Probably there will be several. One of them should look at the actions of uniformed military personnel during the attack. I got thinking of that the night of the murders when a Navy captain – the...

If we give Obama the benefit of the doubt, he and Putin worked this out on the sly at the G-20 summit. If not, Kerry is just a frigging blowhard idiot who made policy up on the run. Either our national leadership is comprised of some cagey guys who figured out a way to back off from an unpopular and unwise position, or we got absolutely pantsed by Putin and Assad. Either way, we win. And by that I mean, we don’t go to war in Syria. Here’s the background. In an earlier demonstration of freelanced policy, Obama told some...

Syria isn’t our war. It doesn’t involve us, it isn’t our business, we don’t want any part of it. Obama and the boys are about to start World War III and the American people are sitting here wondering what in the hell is going on.They show us some video of dead kids on the evening news and all of a sudden the White House spokesman is talking about how we must respond. We? When did we sign off on that? John Kerry talks in his big-boy voice and various murmurings escape from 10 Downing Street and now we’re counting destroyers...

Welcome to New York, Mr. President. I will be your guide. I am the ghost of America future.You have already been visited by the ghost of America past. She showed you a nation that led the world in liberty, morality and prosperity, and which was on the cutting edge of science, medicine and the arts. A nation that went to war not for conquest, but for liberation, which gave of its treasure and blood to free Asia from the Japanese, Africa from the Italians and Europe from the Germans. A nation that led the world into peace, freedom and modernity....

I belong to the stupid party. I’m a Republican. We specialize in self-destruction. The latest example is the recent decision by the Republican National Committee to ban CNN and NBC from covering any debates during the next GOP presidential primaries. Somehow, in head-up-your-butt land, that makes sense. But out here, in the real world, it’s insane. And petty, and one more sign that the people running this party are, in scientific terms, frigging idiots. Here’s the story. Apparently there is this she-devil named Hillary Clinton who wants to run for president. She’s the one who said we didn’t need more...

Bradley Manning is going to Leavenworth. He deserves it. But he doesn’t deserve to go alone. The largest American intelligence breach since Benedict Arnold is being placed on the back of a private first class. That proves that crap rolls downhill, and that the brass knows how to cover its ass. You know the story. A she-male recruit ends up with a top-secret clearance and downloads every secret we’ve got onto a thumb drive which he gives to the piece of crap who heads that America-hating group Wikileaks. Wham, bam, we’re screwed. People died because of it, terrorists were empowered...

The president told us on Friday what it’s like to be black in America. A couple of days before that, his attorney general said that America needs to be honest about race. Since then, any number of prominent black people have said we need to have a national discussion about race. So let’s. Let’s have a discussion about race. Not a one-sided harangue, but a two-way discussion. Let’s move beyond the politically correct “Whites are racists, blacks are victims” and actually talk things out. You do that by hearing both sides. Toward that end, in the spirit of the president’s...

It wasn’t about Trayvon. It was about Zimmerman. Specifically, it was about Zimmerman’s skin. It was white. That’s what caused the upset, that’s what drove the charges, that’s what brought the trial. As the president – the same president who conjectured that his own son would have looked like Trayvon – urges us to calm and reflection, we should calmly reflect upon what made this incident unique. Sadly, it was not the shooting death of a young black man. There is nothing unique about the shooting death of a young black man. That tragedy plays out with predictable regularity as...

Now that marriage means nothing, we should think of new ways to define it. The Supreme Court last week threw out marriage as understood by most peoples since sometime before Christ was born. In what the president called “a victory for democracy,” a vote of the people and an act of their representatives were nullified by judicial arrogance. The fundamental unit of society has been changed, not by the wishes or practice of the people, or of their elected representatives, but by the cobbled-together opinion of five unaccountable political appointees in Washington, D.C. Government for the people, by the people,...