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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Sunday Night: Mostly clear in the evening, then becoming partly cloudy. Lows in the upper 50s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Today is Easter Sunday.
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
‘Bonnie and Clyde, the Musical,’ at Daytona Playhouse: March 29, 30, April 4, 5, 6, 12, 13 at 7:30pm, March 31, April 7, 14 at 2:00pm. Tickets: $25, $24 and $15 depending on age. Book here. When Bonnie and Clyde meet, their craving for excitement and fame send them chasing their dreams. Forced to stay on the run, the lovers resort to robbery and murder to survive. As the infamous duo’s fame grows bigger, the end draws nearer in this exciting musical.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
 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. |
Readings: Richard Hofstadter was that rarity of great historians: as readable as he was erudite, and often willing to address the issues of the moment. He died in his prime in 1970. He was just 54. He’d won two Pulitzers by then. If he’d kept going, he’d have been that other hyper-rarity: a historian winning a Nobel for literature. He wrote that well. (Bertrand Russell won it for literature, and he only wrote non-fiction.) Some of his great books included Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), recently reissued by the Library of America. The October 1970 issue of American Heritage, the month of his death, carried one of his essays, “America as a Gun Culture.” It reads like an OpEd published after any of our recurring mass-murdering shootings, though he was writing after the carnage of the 1960s and the assassinations by guns of the two Kennedys, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers: “Many otherwise intelligent Americans cling with pathetic stubbornness to the notion that the people’s right to bear arms is the greatest protection of their individual rights and a firm safeguard of democracy — without being in the slightest perturbed by the fact that no other democracy in the world observes any such “right” and that in some democracies in which citizens’ rights are rather better protected than in ours, such as England and the Scandinavian countries, our arms control policies would be considered laughable.” He ridicules the claim by such ideological terrorists as the NRA that the Second Amendment was synonymous with individual liberty. ” Plainly it was not meant as such. The right to bear arms was a collective , not an individual, right, closely linked to the civic need (especially keen in the absence of a sufficient national army) for “a well regulated Militia.” It was, in effect, a promise that Congress would not be able to bar the states from doing whatever was necessary to maintain well-regulated militias.” That’s the reasoning, upheld by three Supreme Court decisions, that Antonin Scalia and four other justices demolished with Scalia’s 2008 Heller decision, which adopted what Warren Burger, the conservative, former Chief Justice, had called the “fraud” of Second Amendment interpretations. See the video.
—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.
But perhaps more than anything else the state of American gun controls is evidence of one of the failures of federalism: the purchase and possession of guns in the United States is controlled by a chaotic jumble of twenty thousand state and local laws that collectively are wholly inadequate to the protection of the people and that operate in such a way that areas with poor controls undermine those with better ones. No such chaos would be tolerated, say, in the field of automobile registration. The automobile, like the gun, is a lethal instrument, and the states have recognized it as such by requiring that each driver as well as each car must be registered and that each driver must meet certain specified qualifications. It is mildly inconvenient to conform, but no one seriously objects to the general principle, as gun lobbyists do to gun registration. However, as the United States became industrial and urban, the personnel of its national and state legislatures remained to a very considerable degree small town and rural, and under the seniority system that prevails in Congress, key posts on committees have long been staffed by aging members from smalltown districts—worse still, from small-town districts in regions where there is little or no party competition and hence little turnover in personnel. Many social reforms have been held back long after their time was ripe by this rural-seniority political culture. Gun control is another such reform: American legislators have been inordinately responsive to the tremendous lobby maintained by the National Rifle Association, in tandem with gunmakers and importers, military sympathizers, and far-right organizations. A nation that could not devise a system of gun control after its experiences of the 1960’s, and at a moment of profound popular revulsion against guns, is not likely to get such a system in the calculable future. One must wonder how grave a domestic gun catastrophe would have to be in order to persuade us. How far must things go?
–From Richard Hofstadter’s “America As Gun Culture,” American Heritage, October 1970.
Louis Tart says
All of our rights come from God! We are created with these rights. These rights are self-evident and unalienable! To deny these rights is to deny the very constitution of men’s souls!
Jim says
Hi! I’m Donald. I’m selling Bibles because I love the Bible and I have Bibles – many….. I believe in the Bible and God. I know you may have trouble believing me because I’ve been found guilty of rape, guilty of falsifying the values of my properties in New York and elsewhere to cheat on taxes and get better loan rates, charged with attempting to overturn the presidential election, stealing top secret US government security documents and hiding them in the bathroom at Mar-a-logo, paying a porn star to not talk about having sex with me while my [current] wife was having my latest child, recommending drinking bleach to kill Covid (and you!), among other less than Christian (the only faith, by the way!) things….
Also, don’t be confused by the posting of a picture of Joe Biden bound and jailed as something a non-Christian would do. As with all my actions, it’s just all harmless fun (when I want to describe it that way) and it doesn’t reflect on whether I have any morals or decency. I think we can all say I’ve done a great job of clearing up any doubts you might have! So let’s all make America Great Again by buying my over-priced and clearly being sold to shamelessly raise money to pay for all the terrible lawsuits and criminal trials I’m facing. I need the money and God would want me to do this (just ask Him!).
Suckers….(oops, I didn’t mean to say that, it just slipped out….)
Pogo says
@The cartoon is…
…actually quite amazing: a bible with gangrene — hard to imagine, but it happened; once upon a time.
William Markert says
Why no mention of TURTLEFEST on April 6th ,this is big to Flagler Beach
Laurel says
I’ve said this a few times before, but when I look at Trump, I see Darth Vadar when he took off his helmet and exposed himself as the unformed man. When I hear Trump, I hear no conscience, no shame, no substance, no humility, no empathy but just a shallow husk of a human…if that.
What he really is good for, is to give people permission to put the blame on someone else other than themselves. He gives people permission to not be responsible for their own behavior and mistakes. That’s, apparently, a very strong drug.