Tag: florida

Florida School Board Moves to Censor Speakers and Prohibit Broadcast of Public Comments

In response to months of public backlash from parents and residents opposed to forced student masking, School Board members in Palm Beach County, Florida, are proposing new rules to censor and limit the public’s ability to voice their opinions and prohibit broadcasting of all public comments.

According to the School Board of Palm Beach County website, “speakers will not be denied the opportunity to speak on the basis of their viewpoint.” Pursuant to Florida statute § 286.0114, “the public shall be given a reasonable opportunity to be heard on a proposition before a board or commission.” Florida statute § 286.011 states that all meetings of public boards or commissions must be open to the public and the minutes of the meetings must be taken, promptly recorded, and open for public inspection.

The new policy, being drafted by school board attorneys, would limit the number of people who would be allowed to speak at public meetings and the amount of time they are allowed to speak. The new rules would also prohibit any speaker from addressing any board member by name, criticizing any board member, superintendent, or district staff member, and would prohibit the broadcasting of all public comments during all board meetings.

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Florida’s Civil Asset Forfeiture Reforms Haven’t Stopped the Shakedowns

On a May day in 2015, a task force of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and Miami-Dade Police Department officers raided Miladis Salgado’s suburban Miami home and seized $15,000 in cash that they found in her closet.

The DEA agents were acting on a tip from a confidential informant that Salgado’s estranged husband was laundering drug money.

The cash in Salgado’s closet was not drug proceeds, however. It was money that Salgado, who worked at a duty-free store in the Miami airport, had been saving up for her daughter’s quinceañera, an important coming-of-age 15th birthday party. Salgado had been planning to book a banquet hall, D.J., and -photographer. Suddenly bereft of her savings, she had to cancel the party.

It took two years for Salgado to get her money back, even after a DEA agent admitted in a deposition that there was no connection between her cash and the alleged criminal activity. In the meantime, Florida passed a law reforming the state’s civil asset forfeiture process, which allows law enforcement to seize property—cash, cars, houses—even when the owner isn’t convicted of a crime. The 2016 law raised the burden of proof for forfeiting property and now requires at least an arrest before most property can be forfeited.

But despite tightening the rules for when police can keep seized property, Florida remains one of the most prolific practitioners of civil forfeiture. The Sunshine State took in more revenue through forfeitures than any other state in 2018, according to a survey by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm. Local and state police can evade the new restrictions by working with the federal government, just like the Miami-Dade police did in Salgado’s case. In return for calling in the feds, they get a cut of the proceeds.

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Florida parents sue after school clandestinely orchestrated daughter’s gender transition

The parents of a Florida teenager have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit after their daughter’s school directed their child to pursue a gender transition without notifying them.

January and Jeffrey Littlejohn of Tallahassee, Florida, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida last month, seeking to “vindicate their fundamental rights to direct the upbringing of their children” after Deerlake Middle School, where their 13-year-old daughter was enrolled, failed to notify them that their daughter had entered a school-sanctioned gender transition plan.

The lawsuit, which names the school superintendent, the assistant superintendent, and the Leon County School Board as defendants, says the Littlejohns’ daughter informed them during the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020 that “she was confused about her gender and believed she might be non-binary.”

The Littlejohns’ daughter, who is referred to as A.G. in court filings, “asked her parents to permit her to change her name to ‘J.’ and to use ‘they/them’ pronouns” as the 2020-2021 school year approached, the lawsuit says.

Her parents declined but told her she could use the “J” name in school as a nickname.

“We didn’t think it was in the best interests of our child,” January Littlejohn told the Washington Examiner in an interview. But, she went on, “we didn’t feel like we would stop her friends from calling her a different name.”

The lawsuit says the Littlejohns informed their daughter’s math teacher, Rima Kelly, about the teenager’s gender dysphoria and continued treatment with a mental health counselor on Aug. 27, 2020.

Kelly offered to inform the school about their daughter’s desires to identify as nonbinary, which the parents declined. The teacher is not a named defendant in the case.

A couple of weeks later, on Sept. 14, while she was getting into the car, the Littlejohns’ daughter mentioned that the school had asked her which bathroom she wanted to use, which the lawsuit says she thought was “funny.”

January Littlejohn told the Washington Examiner that was the first time she became aware that the school was meeting with her daughter and assisting the teenager in embracing a different gender identity in school settings. The school did not facilitate any transition-related medical procedures.

The school claimed nondiscrimination law barred them from informing the parents about the meeting with their daughter, which occurred on Sept. 8, 2020, unless the child authorized them to be there.

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The Left Discovers It Loves Evictions as Florida Landlord Challenges DeSantis by Evicting Unvaccinated Tenants

A major Florida landlord has announced it will evict current tenants who do not have proof of vaccination and will refuse to lease to new tenants who have not vaccinated.

If you’re not vaccinated for COVID-19, you can forget about moving into any of eight apartment complexes in Broward and Miami-Dade counties owned by Santiago A. Alvarez and his family.

And if you’re still unvaccinated when it comes time to renew your lease, you’ll have to find someplace else to live.

Alvarez, who controls 1,200 units in the two counties, is the first large-scale landlord known to national housing experts to impose a vaccine requirement not only for employees, but also for tenants. They’ll be required to produce documentation that they’ve received at least an initial vaccine dose.

The policy, which took effect Aug. 15, could set Alvarez’s company on a collision course with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vaccine passport ban, which prohibits businesses from requiring that customers be vaccinated.

And yet the landlord might have exposed a loophole in the governor’s ban, forcing courts to decide whether a tenant is equivalent to a customer.

Alvarez says he’s not backing down. Signs posted at the leasing offices of his apartment complexes spell out the policy along with the words “Zero Tolerance.”

“We have to be concerned about our tenants and our employees,” Alvarez said in an interview. “All of these are private properties. We’re just trying to keep people safe and healthy. It’s going to cost us money, but we’re very firm on that.”

There is a lot going on here.

First up, the reaction by the left shows that they are immoral and slavishly devoted to polishing Biden’s shoes or whatever. In August, you’ll recall, the Supreme Court shut down the illegal “eviction moratorium” imposed by the CDC. This, we were told, was Armageddon.

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Gov’t Threatens Kodak Black with Cease and Desist Over Donating AC Units to Housing Projects

In July of this year, as residents of the Golden Acres Projects sweltered in their homes during an oppresive Florida heatwave, rapper Kodak Black decided to step in and help them out. On the 4th of July, Black arrived in the neighborhood with a truck full of 100 AC units to hand out. He went door to door himself to hand out the units.

“We out here passing out AC units, helping install them,” Kodak said in a video posted to social media. “We do it for the projects, we do it for the projects. The people relying on just enough cash to survive. We’ll get you all ACs man, we out here.”

Many of the residents were brought to tears by the kind act which may have quite literally saved some of their lives.

“A lot of times people get it twisted. They be like, ‘Man, Kodak sleep, Kodak this, Kodak that.’ Well check this out. Kodak back in his hood, man, giving back. It’s nothing new. You just happen to be a part of it today, that’s it.”

While the community celebrated their new AC units and the fact that they could now cool their homes, the government was working behind the scenes to do what government does.

Fast forward to this month and the Housing Authority of Pompano Beach made sure that no good deed goes unpunished. TMZ reports the Housing Authority of Pompano Beach issued a cease and desist letter to Kodak, claiming that he caused “disturbances” when delivering air-conditioning units to a housing project in July.

“Your actions have adversely impacted the Property’s residents’ right to peacefully enjoy the property,” the letter reads, according to TMZ.

The authority also claimed that the rapper’s subsequent music video, which was shot in the same location, also caused a “disturbance.”

Others disagree, however, and Black’s attorney, Bradford Cohen, responded with a letter of his own reprimanding the housing authority for their “wish to stop the assistance to the elderly and underprivileged during a heat wave and 2 year pandemic.”

The Libertarian Party VP candidate for 2020, Spike Cohen, also shared some harsh words about the government’s response to a rapper donating AC units to those in need.

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Police Arrest Man For Not Sitting At Palm Beach School Board Meeting

Like thousands of other people across the country, Everett Cooper attended his local school board meeting to voice his concerns about mask mandates. His evening ended with a trip to jail as police dragged him out of the meeting, literally for refusing to sit down in a separate room where the unmasked and undesirables were “allowed” to be.

As Orwellian as this sounds, school board officials in Palm Beach, Florida, ordered the police to drag several people out of the meeting. These people weren’t even sitting in the same room with the school board members. Their crime? Standing up. Literally. They weren’t doing anything to disrupt the school board business. In the video, you can hear school board chair Frank Barbieri interrupt Superintendent Michael J. Burke, apparently seeing people on a monitor feed standing in the adjacent room. Barbieri starts telling people to sit down, then starts ordering police to drag people out as he identifies them.

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CDC Reports False COVID Data for Florida and Leaves Major Questions

The CDC has been turned into a dithering, incoherent mess under Joe Biden — to the extent that it hasn’t always been that at some level. But the politics being injected into bureaucracy have certainly reached a level not previously seen. RedState has chronicled many of the CDC’s twists and turns (and outright corruption at times), but this one may take the cake.

Yesterday, the CDC reported Florida’s COVID data, something that is part of a normal cycle after a weekend, claiming that the Sunshine State saw over 28,000 new cases on Sunday. That would have been a record high, and it helped drive another round of anti-Florida media coverage.

The problem? The CDC’s reporting was false.

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Florida Sheriff’s Office Now Notifying People It Will Be Inflicting Its Pre-Crime Program On Them

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff’s Office has been swamped with negative press coverage centering on its predictive policing program. The Office claims it’s not “predictive policing,” but rather “intelligence-led policing.” Whatever you call it, it sucks.

The Sheriff’s Office may have some lofty goals that involve stopping crime before it starts, but the supposedly forward-looking policing program does little more than subject past offenders (along with friends, families, and acquaintances) to sustained harassment by law enforcement officers. What’s supposed to keep crime down by directing resources to possible serious criminal activity has manifested as multiple visits from officers who do little more than try to coerce people into consenting to unlawful searches and write out nuisance citations for things like missing mailbox numbers or uncut grass.

The Sheriff’s Office has since spun this off to include students at public schools, presumably to prep kids for a future of pointless harassment by law enforcement officers simply because they have the misfortune of living in Pasco County.

Thanks to some lawsuits and investigations, the Sheriff’s Office is being a bit more proactive on the notification front. According to this ongoing investigation by the Tampa Bay Times, targets of the “intelligence” program are now being informed they’ve been blacklisted by the Sheriff’s Office.

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Law lets government vaccinate unwilling ‘by any means necessary’

A new Florida law that prevents companies and organizations operating there from requiring “vaccine passports,” that documentation that purports to prove an individual has been vaccinated for COVID-19, also has a stinger: a provision allowing the government to force vaccinations on people.

The paragraph in the state’s 2nd engrossed version of SB 2006, an “act relating to emergency management” and more, states: “If the individual poses a danger to the public health, the State Health Officer may subject the individual to isolation or quarantine. If there is no practical method to isolate or quarantine the individual, the State Health Officer may use any means necessary to vaccinate or treat the individual.”

The fight over mandatory vaccinations still is developing in the U.S., following the pandemic that apparently got its start in Wuhan, China, and flooded the world, killing some 600,000 people in just the United States.

Some private organizations have demanded employees be vaccinated, and fired those refusing, and a number of legal cases have developed from those demands. Governments to this point have been encouraging – even bribing – citizens to take vaccines, but have not yet been to the point of forcing them.

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Florida Supreme Court rejects ‘grow your own’ marijuana legalization initiative

The Florida Supreme Court has rejected a prospective citizen’s initiative to place a proposed constitutional amendment before voters in 2022 to legalize adult recreational marijuana and allow Floridians to “grow their own.”

In a 5-2 ruling Thursday, the court determined the prospective amendment’s ballot summary is “affirmatively misleading,” the second time since April the state’s highest court has issued that verdict to knock a marijuana legalization measure off the 2022 ballot.

Tampa-based Sensible Florida submitted its proposed amendment, Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol to Establish Age, Licensing, and Other Restrictions, to the Division of Elections on March 17, 2016.

The summary reads: “Regulates marijuana (hereinafter “cannabis”) for limited use and growing by persons 21 years of age or older. State shall adopt regulations to issue, renew, suspend, and revoke licenses for cannabis cultivation, product manufacturing, testing and retail facilities. Local governments may regulate facilities’ time, place and manner and, if state fails to timely act, may license facilities. Does not affect compassionate use of low-THC cannabis, nor immunize federal law violations.”

The proposed amendment would permit people to grow “six mature flowering cannabis plants per household member 21 years of age or older” and possess “the harvest therefrom, provided the growing takes place indoors or in a locked greenhouse and the cannabis grown is not made available for sale.”

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