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Weather: Partly sunny. Highs around 80. South winds around 5 mph. Wednesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the upper 50s. South winds around 5 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Presidential Primary Early Voting is available today from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at four locations. Any registered and qualified voter who is eligible to vote in a county-wide election may vote in person at the early voting site. According to Florida law, every voter must present a Florida driver’s license, a Florida identification card or another form of acceptable picture and signature identification in order to vote. If you do not present the required identification or if your eligibility cannot be determined, you will only be permitted to vote a provisional ballot. Don’t forget your ID. A couple of secure drop boxes that Ron DeSantis and the GOP legislature haven’t yet banned (also known as Secure Ballot Intake Stations) are available at the entrance of the Elections Office and at any early voting site during voting hours. The locations are as follows:
- Flagler County Elections Supervisor’s Office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
- Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast.
- Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE.
- Flagler Beach United Methodist Church, 1520 South Daytona Avenue, Flagler Beach.
The Flagler County Canvassing Board meets today at the Flagler County Supervisor of Elections office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The meeting is open to the public. Check the time in the sidebar or in this chart, which includes the full year’s meeting schedule (the pdf schedule does not include the dates and times of required Canvassing Board meetings which may be necessary due to a recount called locally or statewide.) The board is chaired by County Judge Andrea Totten. This Election Year’s board members are Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart and County Commissioner Dave Sullivan. The alternates are County Judge Melissa Distler and County Commissioner Donald O’Brien. March-April meetings are for the presidential preference primary, such as it is. See all legal notices from the Supervisor of Elections, including updated lists of those ineligible to vote, here.
Palm Coast Imagine 2050 Phase 2 Kick-Off Public Meeting or the Imagine 2050 comprehensive plan update, marking a significant milestone in shaping the city’s future. As part of this process, the city has organized two community conversation workshop meetings to delve into the community’s themes and core planning values, derived from extensive public engagement efforts during Phase 1. There are two opportunities to participate: the first workshop is from 1:00 p.m. to 3 p.m. and the second is from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Community Wing of City Hall, located at 160 Lake Ave, Palm Coast. The workshop will include a presentation and small group discussion. This event is open to the public, welcoming all residents who wish to contribute their ideas and perspectives to the comprehensive planning process. A comprehensive plan is essentially a roadmap that guides the future growth and development of a community. It’s like a big-picture plan that outlines where new homes, businesses, parks, roads, and other essential city components should go and how they should all fit together. Think of it as a blueprint for building a better Palm Coast that meets the needs and desires of its residents, both now and for generations to come. See: “Imagine 2050: Residents Fear Small-Town Tranquility Is History as City Plans for Its Long-Term Future.”
2024 Health & Human Services Summit: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Ocean Center, 101 N. Atlantic Ave., Daytona Beach. The keynote speaker is Selena Webster-Bass, founder and chief executive officer Voices Institute. She will speak on A culture of care, which recognizes the power of human connection, empathy, and health equity leadership, from 10 to 11:30 a.m. Exhibit halls open at noon. Roundtable discussions at 1 and 2 p.m. The Summit hosts mission-critical entities from the health and human services sectors. We welcome entities from the all-abilities, behavioral health, education, faith, fire and rescue, food insecurity, government, healthcare/hospitals, housing, law enforcement, non-profits, and many other groups who serve our community. We convene at the Summit to enhance our knowledge and connections and gain insight into systems of care. As a Coalition, we are addressing risk factors and building protective factors at the community level which in turn impacts individuals and families.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at its new location, Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at Vedic Moons, 4984 Palm Coast Parkway NW, Palm Coast, Fl every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at [email protected].
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Dishonesty chronicles: The print edition of Ross Douthat’s column in the March 3 New York Times was assertive: “The Morality of Israel’s War in Gaza.” The online edition tempered the inanity, but only a little: “The Justice of Israel’s War in Gaza Will Depend on How It Ends.” I was reading the print edition, which appeared next to Nicholas Kristof’s “Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own,” written at least from Planet Earth. Douthat must’ve been on Intuitive’s toppled ship when he wrote his. I was drawn to the print headline and my initial reaction: what the hell is he talking about, morality? The first couple of paragraphs show how journalists pull off intellectual dishonesty with an uncritical readership. Here are the first four paragraphs:
When the United States and its Middle Eastern allies went to war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, there was nothing clean or surgical about the campaign.
Retaking Mosul from the Islamic State’s fighters, a struggle that ran from the fall of 2016 through the following summer, left between 9,000 and 11,000 inhabitants of the city dead, according to an Associated Press report, with about a third killed by the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi air bombardments. Many of those victims were simply described as “crushed” in the subsequent medical reports.
In 2021, my colleagues at this newspaper reported on a U.S. strike cell that “launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria,” but also “sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians,” at a rate 10 times that of similar air warfare in Afghanistan.
When Western journalists reached Raqqa in Syria, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, in the fall of 2018, they found a “wasteland of war-warped buildings and shattered concrete” (to quote an NPR report), in which as many as 80 percent of the city’s structures were destroyed or uninhabitable.
All accurate, all true. The implication being, as he goes on to claim, that no one was in the streets protesting those assaults and those civilian deaths, but the streets are thronged with protesters now calling for Israel’s head. But here’s the dishonesty. The next line after the first four paragraphs about civilian deaths at American and coalition hands was this: “These features of the war were widely reported.” No, they were not. Even reading Douthat’s own summary of the war on ISIS and clicking on the link proves that it wasn’t. The devastation and the civilian death toll was reported long after the assaults. No one knew, at the time of the attacks, that the toll was as high as it proved to be–no one even knew of the extent of the attacks, or, most of the time, that attacks were taking place. It was a war under wraps, thanks to the secrecy regimes of the Obama and Trump administrations. It is also patently false to claim that when Arab civilians in those lands die in large numbers, the public here is silent. There were demonstrations even in the days of Clinton’s blockade of Iraq, which contributed to the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children, according to UNICEF, a claim the Washington Post, of course, called a “spectacular lie.” OK: let’s say it contributed to the death of 30,000 children. Is that better? People protested. People protested the war on Iraq in 2002, as I recall (and I wrote about 50 editorials against it at the News-Journal). Israel is not being singled out. But it is singling itself out with the wanton brutality of its assault on a prisoner population in an area only a little bigger than Palm Coast: Gaza is 140 square miles. Palm Coast is 97 square miles. Finally, what is Douthat getting at by making the comparison, if not a means to justify the genocide, because it happens elsewhere, because we perpetrated our own, because it’s the ways of war? I’ll go with Kristof on this one.
—P.T.
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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.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
So is there a double standard in global attention? Absolutely. Defenders of Israel have every right to point all this out, and sometimes it does reflect antisemitism. Yet — now we get to the other side — it also strikes me as unconscionable to use the world’s hypocrisy, however invidious, to justify the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza. That would be an echo of Russian whataboutism: How can you talk about our war in Ukraine when you Americans invaded Iraq and tortured people there? It’s also true that while some university campuses may be guilty of selective outrage, that is not true of all observers. Some of the most incisive critics of Israel’s actions are from the very U.N. agencies and human rights groups whose staffs are risking their lives in the field to save lives in Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries. In any case, there is a reason to focus on Gaza today, for it is not just one more place of pain among many contenders but, in the judgment of Unicef, the world’s most dangerous place to be a child. Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed. Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old. I can’t think of any conflict in this century that has killed babies at such a pace.
–From Nicholas Kristof’s “Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own,” The New York Times, March 2, 2024.
Pogo says
@FWIW
As stated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whom_the_gods_would_destroy,_they_first_make_mad
As we slouch towards a new Dark Age led by goons like Trump and Putin, does anyone wonder why; why Trump’s margin of victory is plainly the impotent rage of men, of all races, etc. — older men alone are enough, left behind by the pace of change and made septic by personal disappointment, younger men too, for basically the same reasons, while they ridicule each other, as senile, or callow — but they can unite, when they play soldier, beat police with flagstaffs with banners proclaiming support of LEOs, etc., etc.
And then there are the spoilers. Their specialty is winning debating club contests with gimmicks, e g., simply lying, false choices, false equivalencies, and the tried and true question: when did you stop beating women and children?
It all adds up: the dead are still dead, and all the more quickly forgotten, by the pathetic survivors of the debate winners’ Pyrrhic victory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory
And so it went.
Pogo says
@ India Today video: Israel-Hamas War: USA’s Double Standard On Humanitarian Aid To Gaza | Homeland
Yes, please, do go on about Biden’s hypocrisy…
https://www.google.com/search?q=Indian+citizenship+law
‘When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.’
— African proverb