The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Today at the editor’s glance: A busy day in local government. The school board retreats to a conference room at the Government Services Building, cutely called “The Beach,” to hold a multi-hour goal-setting session. It’s open to what hearty members of the public are willing to audit. The board holds a workshop at 3 p.m. Most eyes will be on the Palm Coast City Council’s 6 p.m. meeting, expected to draw its share of blazin’ crazies as City Manager Matt Morton may (or may not) explain why he resigned and what council members are present try to maneuver their way through the resignation’s implications, potentially floating or naming an interim. County Administrator Jerry Cameron’s name has been on numerous lips. His secretive, partisan style appeals to some council members, harkening back to the Jim Landon era, though Landon was only secretive, not partisan. There may be extra security at the meeting, but it’s not only local government meeting rooms that have become cauldrons. “Federal judges call for increased security after threats jump 400% and one judge’s son is killed,” CBS’ Bill Whitaker reported on 60 Minutes over the weekend.

In Florida, today is the start of hurricane season. It’s also the day when the state ends the $300-a-month federal jobless benefit and reinstates a “work search” rule that requires unemployment claimants to show they’ve applied for at least five jobs per week. The rule was suspended last year because of the pandemic. Florida’s sales tax “holiday” for hurricane supplies is ongoing, through June 6. Elsewhere, President Biden is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to mark the 100th anniversary of the pogrom against hundreds of Black residents, with remarks, a tour of the Greenwood Cultural Center and meetings with surviving members of the community. It could finally be the end for Israel’s indicted and mendacious Netanyahu. In Paris May 31 was just another Monday but Reilly Opelka, who partly grew up in Palm Coast and is to have his name adorn the expanded Palm Coast tennis center and racquet club–assuming the coming mayoral election doesn’t upend the plans–won his first-round match at Roland Garros in Paris, where he is seeded for the first time in a grand slam tournament. He’s seeded 32. He beat Slovakia’s Andrej Martin (ranked 108th), dropping just nine games in three sets. His second-round match against Spaniard Jaume Munar (ranked 72) is scheduled for Wednesday. We forgot to wish Don Fleming, the former Flagler County Sheriff, a happy birthday: he turned 76 on Memorial Day. And as a Pogo special, since he clamored for cats and codas, there’s both down below, with a great little piano piece by Brazilian pianist and composer Chiquinha Gonzaga (“Atraente” in Portuguese, “Attractive” in English) that, who knows, could cool tempers and remind us, as Will Rogers had it, that all politics is apple sauce.

The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. It was suspended in March 2020 as was the Daily Briefing, as the Covid pandemic upended everyone’s schedules. We’re happy to be bringing both back, in altered forms. The Live Calendar had a serious case of covid: it’s much skinnier, less populated and still recovering, the previous calendar having been scrapped altogether. It’s slowly being rebuilt as local events ramp back up, with one significant change: now you can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.

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For the full calendar, go here.

“My grandmother has been singing in churches my entire life, and through all the minor and major troubles of her babies and grandbabies, she ain’t never felt us guilty, not guilty as Daniels means, which is to believe that you’re condemned to suffer, and deserving. But maybe all of this is Wright’s point. This country pushes some of us to always imagine ourselves through the lens of those who hate us, and when we do, there is no escape, even underground.”

–From Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Times review of Richard Wrights’s “The Man Who Lived Underground,” newly restored in a the Library of America edition.

Previously:

Online behavior | Groovy Tennyson | Overwork | There is a God | On Lincoln | Killing the planet | A Vietcong infantryman | Property v. minorities | Originalism | Liberty v. fatality | Blanche Gardin | Poe’s old age | Whose Christian tradition? | The real socialists | Roberto Bolaño | WSJ v. China | GOP radicals | Evolution accidents | Xenophobia is us | Washington | Birches | Mindcraft | Disillusion | Husband and wife | Marriage Survivor | Sir’s rudeness | Missing information | Executions | Something to live for | Worrying about Jesus | Norilsk

 

Chiquinha Gonzaga’s “Atraente,” Alessandra Feris, piano

 

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.