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Weather: Check tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
The Cold-Weather Shelter known as the Sheltering Tree will open tonight: The shelter opens at Church on the Rock at 2200 North State Street in Bunnell as the overnight temperature is expected to fall to 40 or below. It will open from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. The shelter is open to the homeless and to the nearly-homeless: anyone who is struggling to pay a utility bill or lacks heat or shelter and needs a safe, secure place for the night. The shelter will serve dinner and breakfast. Call 386-437-3258, extension 105 for more information. Flagler County Transportation offers free bus rides from pick up points in the county, starting at 3 p.m., at the following locations and times:
- Dollar General at Publix Town Center, 3:30 p.m.
- Near the McDonald’s at Old Kings Road South and State Road 100, 4 p.m.
- Dollar Tree by Carrabba’s and Walmart, 4:30 p.m.
- Palm Coast Main Branch Library, 4:45 p.m.
Also: - Dollar General at County Road 305 and Canal Avenue in Daytona North, 4 p.m.
- Bunnell Free Clinic, 4:30 p.m.
- First United Methodist Church in Bunnell, 4:30 p.m.
The shelter is run by volunteers of the Sheltering Tree, a non-profit under the umbrella of the Flagler County Family Assistance Center, is a non-denominational civic organization. The Sheltering Tree is in need of donations. See the most needed items here, and to contribute cash, donate here or go to the Donate button at this page.
The Flagler County Commission meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Airport Director Roy Sieger is expected to give an update on noise issues at Flagler Executive Airport. The commission is to appoint members to the Affordable Housing Committee and the Contractor Review Board, and decide the fate of Heather Haywood, the member of the Planning Board who made an unsubstantiated accusation about Commissioner Greg Hansen at a meeting in December, and appears not to have properly complied with a public record request by FlaglerLive. See: “Heather Haywood’s ‘Inauthentic’ Records Fail to Prove Incendiary Accusation Against Flagler Commissioner Hansen.” Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here.
Florida Policy Institute Senior Policy Analyst and Kids Count Director Norin Dollard is the featured speaker at the December 18 general meeting of the Atlantic Coast Chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, at 5:30 pm. at the Flagler County Public Library’s Main Branch, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. This event is free and open to the public. No advance arrangements need be made. All are welcome. For Further Information Contact: Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, President, 804-914-4460 or by email: [email protected]
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Missing Dog Alert: Boo Boo went missing n Nov. 18 he is 2 years old, 22 to 24 lb, he has short little legs, spotted little feet, and he’s a brownish red and white Doxie. He is microchipped but he doesn’t have a collar on. See the pictures above. If you’ve seen Boo Boo, call 386/270-2278. There’s a reward.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: Ken Dorph is a 70-year-old Long Island resident who is fluent in Arabic and who’s spent four decades consulting in finances in the Middle East. He followed the region’s politics. He also has the look of a Santa, and plays Santa, has played Santa, at various functions on Long Island. On Dec. 9, he was to be Santa at a Sag Harbor jamboree. On Nov. 30 he attended a discussion about Israel’s war on Gaza at a synagogue, where a speaker for the American Jewish Committee made a presentation. “Mr. Dorph, who emphasized that he was heartbroken by the war and “desperately” wanted it to end,” The New York Times reported, “objected during the event to the speakers’ characterizations of several topics — the exact language of the Hamas charter, the relevance of the West Bank settlements to the current conflict. When called on during a question-and-answer session, he implied they were feeding the audience political talking points.” He did not raise his voice. He was not rude. He was not obnoxious. He did not act like a mom for liberty at a school board meeting. He raised questions, and showed some frustration with the assumptions being peddled. A few days later, he was disinvited from being Santa. Several members of the synagogue wrote the Sag Harbor chamber of commerce and asked that he’d be removed. The chamber complied. “I love Israel, and I love Palestine, and I do not think those are contradictory thoughts and emotions,” he had said at a talk of his own. But that’s not enough. In an important essay in The Economist, James Bennet, the former editorial page editor of the paper fired after running an op-ed by Sen. James Cotton asking for martial law lite and some skull-cracking, writes this week: “The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.” That observation has innumerable applications, not only to The Times, but to universities, politicians, chambers of commerce–to anyone making opinion about one side or another of the Israel war a litmus test for acceptability. But we saw this in the aftermath of 9/11. We were clearly then more of a fearful than a courageous society, and we have not improved since.
—P.T.
Now this: James Bennet before his firing, in 2019, and James Bennet after his firing, this year.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. 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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole. It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe. The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist. It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact. It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other. I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.
–From “When The New York Times Lost Its Way,” by James Bennet, The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, Dec. 14, 2023.
