Seven lawmakers representing Volusia and Flagler counties are headed to Tallahassee on Tuesday to consider bills, hammer out a budget and shape state government over the next year. The four representatives and three senators representing the area are all Republicans.

Rep. Paul Renner*and Rep. Tom Leek, representing Volusia Co, are in high-ranking leadership roles. They will have a significant hand in what moves through the House. (*Renner will succeed current Speaker of the House Chris Sprowls after the 2022 legislative session)

Rep. Elizabeth Fetterhoff, who represents a district spanning DeLand and mainland Daytona Beach, is proposing to address a problem homeowners and home sellers are having with getting timely septic-system inspections.

"Right now there is a backlog of inspections, either because of manpower or COVID, so why not cut red tape by allowing a private provider to be hired at the cost of the homeowner?"

Rep. Webster Barnaby, R-Deltona, introduced legislation banning abortions when physicians can hear what Barnaby terms a "fetal heartbeat," usually around 6 weeks. Texas enacted a similar law last year. 

It's a fight Barnaby and other abortion opponents are primed to have as the U.S. Supreme Court reconsiders the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent legalizing abortions.  

"I've been pro-life all of my political career and as an ordained minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, That's my stand and That's where I stand." 

Senators pitch sweeping, pro-business changes

Sen. Tom Wright, of New Smyrna Beach, represents southeast Volusia as well as northern Brevard County — the Space Coast.

He has proposed the bill with perhaps the snappiest title, the "Zero G, Zero Fee" act, which would exempt certain spaceport users from fees or charges while transporting a space vehicle or equipment.

Sen. Travis Hutson, of St. Augustine, has proposed a way to support businesses who've been harmed by local or county ordinances.

"We've seen local governments who want to ban sunscreen (for environmental purposes), or communities attempt to stop cruise ships from docking, or when a city dramatically reduces hours when a bar can operate."

Sen. Jason Brodeur, who represents Seminole County and a chunk of southwest Volusia, filed 34 bills as of Thursday, proposing, among other things:

• requiring a state inventory of critical wetlands
• barring foreign nationals from making political contributions
• establishing "education recovery scholarship accounts" to help children who missed 10 or more days of public school

By Mark Harper - Read More @ The Daytona Beach News-Journal

In typical leftist form the J6 events are now being compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor and the September 11, 2021, terrorist attacks by the Biden administration.   However, before the day’s insufferable events began, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was asked his opinion of what would take place.  DeSantis rightly noted this is Christmas Day for the DC system; they have been preparing for this day for almost a year.  WATCH:

MORE - January 6, 2022 | Sundance

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Of the 46 presidents of the United States, there are three that can be considered indispensable to the nation’s enduring existence as a free people;  they are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Donald Trump. 

Donald Trump’s inclusion on this list derives not only from his political, judicial, and legislative accomplishments but the dramatically positive impact he had on the psyche of Middle America, and initiating the transformation of a feckless Republican Party into a viable and resolute opposition -- as well as the party of the average American of all races, creeds, and ethnicities.  

WATCH - Oct. 13. 2016 - 26 Days Before We The People Voted To MAGA

Trump showed a nation stuck in a 28-year morass of political mediocrity and collectivism that fearlessness, determination, and an implacable conviction in the principles of the nation’s founding would defeat the elites and left-wing dominated Democrat party, their resolve to create a socialist oligarchy.

By renewing and recasting many of the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and initiating an America First domestic and foreign policy, he not only reversed the downward trend of the nation and stopped the left in their tracks but showed the American people with his overwhelmingly effective policies that there were viable alternatives that worked.  

Further, his determined effort to recast the Republican Party as the American populist party and the Democrats as the party of the elites and radicals is succeeding at an accelerated pace. More @ 

Whether or not he runs for president in 2024, his place in American history is secure as he was the right president at the right time.

Cracked Icons

Cuomo Duo

These were the media darlings who hammed it up on television—as thousands of New Yorkers unnecessarily died in long-term care facilities due to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to redirect COVID-19 patients to share facilities with the elderly and infirm. Andrew Cuomo was finally forced to resign from his governorship and is now persona non grata among the once adoring Left. His brother Chris Cuomo should have been dismissed from CNN long ago. He lied on air, in denying his role as a journalist-cum-political advisor, in devising ways to use his media arrogance and contacts to save his brother’s hide. 

Both shared a conviction that as leftists they enjoyed nine lives of corruption and deceit—until they ran out.

The Harris Who Never Was

So far, Kamala Harris is known as our “border czar,” who ostensibly oversaw nearly 2 million illegal aliens streaming across an open border, neither vaccinated nor tested at a time of a surging pandemic. She was originally politicized by mentor, paramour, and aging Willie Brown. He jump-started his then young girlfriend by putting her on a number of well-compensated state boards. She kicked off her run for president at an Oakland rally in January 2019 to media accolades. After blowing through millions in campaign funds, Harris dropped out of the presidential race without winning a single delegate.

Biden’s staff leaks that Harris is a bully and a nasty incompetent; her staff counter-leaks that he is a doddering old fool descending into overt senility. Both are correct.

Jussieopath

From the moment details emerged surrounding Jussie Smollett’s hate-crime hoax, any sane, non-woke person could have recognized he was more than just a pathological liar. Smollett was also a conniving, mean-spirited egoist. He was intent on rescuing his fading acting career by libeling the Chicago police, smearing white Trump supporters as violent racists, and self-servingly advancing the lie of a purported hate crime epidemic against blacks. To believe Jussie, as so many of the liberal establishment were eager to do, one had to believe from the get-go the utterly unbelievable.

No matter. Would-be candidate Joe Biden immediately leveraged Smollett to virtue signal his racial bona fides. Kamala Harris claimed it was a modern “lynching.” Everyone from Nancy Pelosi to the CNN/MSNBC crowd treated us to performance-art demonstrations of their outrage. No one has apologized.

Schiffter

For over two years, Adam Schiff appeared on television and at press conferences to confirm that Donald Trump was guilty of Russian collusion. The script was always the same. He produced no evidence, no data, no credible witnesses. Instead, Schiff grimaced in mock outrage, and began his ritual accusations, given the secret sources he had supposedly seen.

As the Mueller probe collapsed into fantasy—as the FBI Washington hierarchy was insidiously discredited between felony convictions, firings, and resignations, fake FISA warrants, and James Comey’s 245 instances of amnesia under oath; and as Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report damned the very sources Schiff once quoted—Schiff always pivoted to the next “bombshell” that only his committee possessed, but of course could not be made public. 

Basement Biden

The Biden candidacy was one of the most cynical in American history. The unhinged far-Left adopted a befuddled Biden as the respectable veneer necessary to see their hard-core, but stealth socialist agenda finally enacted. Key to a virtual presidency would be virtual voting, as 102 million mail-in and early votes were never subject to the previous standards of authentication and statistical rejection rates of the past—rendering Election Day voting mostly a memory.

Single-handedly the Biden puppeteers have managed to restore the Trump record of achievement simply by doing the opposite of what Trump did, thereby ensuring their own failure and reminding voters of what once was working. 

Other fallen heroes of the Left

Robert Mueller and his dream team that would rid the world of Trump, and the quartet of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe. They, by their dishonesty, prevarications, and careerism have almost single-handedly tarnished the reputations of the Washington-based intelligence and investigatory agencies. Yet now, the Left has no more need of them. They are already fading from the public awareness.

Read More

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Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor.

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Governor Ron DeSantis has announced six legislative proposals that would drastically crackdown on illegal immigration into Florida.

DeSantis made the move after his administration discovered that Joe Biden’s federal agencies have flown at least 70 privately funded flights full of border crossers and UACs (Unaccompanied Alien Children) into the state of Florida — often in the middle of the night. More

“Any of these contractors that are facilitating Biden’s illegal policies by bringing people into Florida, oftentimes flying in at two o’clock in the morning with no notice to the State, anyone who is doing that forfeits the ability to have contracts with State and local government in the State of Florida.

Unfortunately, we had somebody brought in from Biden that murdered somebody in Jacksonville just a few weeks ago, and so we’re very concerned about it, and we want to say this is not the right decision to be making, to be facilitating, which is basically an illegal human smuggling operation." Watch

The measures are significant as they are the first in the nation seeking to effectively outlaw many of the business practices carried out by corporate-funded NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) who are contracted by the federal government to resettle hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens across the United States every year.

The six proposals would:

1. Ban state and local agencies from doing business with or providing benefits to any private-sector business or NGO that helps facilitate illegal immigration to Florida.

2. Ban state agencies from renewing state contracts with transportation companies, such as airlines and bus services, that facilitate illegal immigration to Florida.

3. Require private-sector businesses and NGOs, who facilitate illegal immigration to Florida, to provide compensation to the state of Florida to cover all costs that fall on taxpayers.

4. Mandate county and local jails, as well as courts, to collect immigration status data at the time of a suspect’s arrest and conviction. The information would be reported to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

5. Ban Florida officials from providing any discretionary benefits to illegal aliens while state agencies and hospitals will be required to annually report taxpayer-funded expenses for illegal aliens.

6. Add the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity as an enforcer of E-Verify.

In addition to the six proposals, DeSantis announced an emergency order that bans the issuance or renewal of all state licenses to provide services to Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) who are resettled across Florida. The order is effective immediately. MORE

Spokeswoman Christina Pushaw; “We hope this action will serve as a deterrent to the Biden Administration’s massive human-smuggling operation, while protecting Florida’s most vulnerable kids. Governor DeSantis will continue to use his lawful authority to stand up for Floridians in the face of the Biden Administration’s dereliction of its duty to enforce our country’s immigration laws.”

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Dan Gelernter is a columnist for American Greatness. He lives in Connecticut.

My elementary and high school teachers never did a good job of explaining American federalism. When I was in school, it was hard to see any major difference in government from one state to another, except perhaps in the prevailing tax rates.

But now it’s obvious: New York wants me to show health papers to go to a restaurant. Oregon is moving to make its indoor mask-mandate permanent. In Florida, meanwhile, there are no masks and essentially no COVID. 

"Federalism is now a grand stage for leftist hysteria to play itself out against American freedom."

American freedom is winning: People are leaving California and New York and moving to Texas and Florida in record numbers. The federal government was not, of course, intended to be what it has become: the daily manager of every citizen’s life. In 250 years, the federal government has grown up from a whelp to a monster. Ironically, with this assertion of new federal superpowers, federalism, too, is reasserting itself. 

As Americans continue to frustrate the attempts of government to contain them, to restrain them, and above all to take their money, the federal government will become ever more aggressive in attempting to enforce a uniform—and uniformly leftist—way of life. There are few state governors who have the courage to stand up to the federal government. We need more governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis.

And for those who are urging DeSantis to run for the presidency in 2024: Hold your horses. A good governor is going to be just as important in 2024 as a good president, and these people don’t grow on trees. In fact, there is not another governor in the country who can hold a candle to DeSantis in those matters of personal freedom fundamental to American life. Read More

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Dec. 4, 2021: Ron, Casey and the kids got to watch a great football game between Merritt Island High School and Sebring High School.

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*NOTE: The next official RECVC meeting is 1/11/2022

The estimable historian Victor Davis Hanson reflects,

Most Americans once were mostly in agreement about what happened on December 7, 1941, 80 years ago this year. But not so much now, given either the neglect of America's past in the schools or woke revisionism at odds with the truth.

The Pacific war that followed Pearl Harbor was not a result of America egging on the Japanese, not about starting a race war, and not about much other than a confident and cruel Japanese empire falsely assuming that its stronger American rival either would not or could not stop its transoceanic ambitions. . .

. . . In sum, it was largely Yamamoto's enormous ego, his tactical genius, and his strategic ineptitude, along with Japanese hubris, that explain the strategic idiocy of a brilliant but short-lived victory at Pearl Harbor. But to be fair, no student of military preparedness, economic resources, or social organization could have ever believed that a relatively vulnerable and isolationist United States, still reeling from recurring cycles of depression, in less than four years would have fought simultaneously across the Pacific and Europe with a 12 million person military, the largest economy in history, and the world's most formidable weapons such Essex class fleet carriers, Balao submarines, B-29 long-range bombers, Hellcat and Mustang fighters and the world's first atomic bombs.

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'Day of Infamy' and a devastating defeat. The United States suffered 3,435 casualties and loss of or severe damage to 188 planes, 8 battleships, 3 light cruisers, and 4 miscellaneous vessels. The U.S. Pacific fleet was in shambles.

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 FDR: "No matter how long it may take us"

Almost 4 years after the deadly attack on Pearl Harbor, America had had enough. Because Japan had not surrendered already, despite numerous crushing defeats, the U.S. called upon a weapon that would end all fighting in the Pacific Theater. 

This weapon was the atomic bomb. More specifically two atomic bombs, named "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" .. the most deadly weapons ever used.

On August 6, 1945, "Little Boy" was dropped from a B-29 bomber. The bomb detonated 2000 feet above Hiroshima and destroyed five square miles of the city. There was no response from Japan. The second bomb, "Fat Man" was dropped onto the city of Nagasaki on August 9. The destruction was again terrible.

For President Truman, the decision was a clear-cut one. America was weary of war against a hated enemy. The nation also realized the massive cost in lives of invading the Japanese mainland. More

.Truman: "It is an Atomic Bomb"

Six days after the attack on Nagasaki, on August 15, 1945 (Aug. 14^thin the U.S.) Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender over the radio. World War II was over.