![Childless Cat Ladies by Bill Day, FloridaPolitics.com](https://i0.wp.com/flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/cat-lady.jpg?resize=1000%2C750&ssl=1)
To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. West winds around 5 mph, becoming east in the afternoon. Chance of rain 50 percent. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. Chance of rain 50 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Flagler County School Board holds a special meeting to approve the 2024-25 budget and taxes, at 5:15 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. See: “How Flagler Schools’ ‘Truth in Millage’ Budget Hid $10 Million Going to Private and Home School Tuition.”
The Flagler County School Board holds a 5:45 p.m. meeting at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, to discuss the District’s refunding of its Series 2014 COPs debt issuance and the opportunity to refund an additional year at a lower rate based on current market conditions.
The Flagler Branch of the NAACP hosts a candidate forum at 6 p.m. at the African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway). The forum will feature candidates for Flagler County School Board and the County Commission.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
In Coming Days: July 31: Flagler Cares hosts its quarterly Help Night from 3 to 7 p.m. at the Flagler County Village Community Room, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B304, Palm Coast. Help Night is organized and hosted by Flagler Cares and other community partners as a one-stop help event. Representatives from Flagler County Human Services, Early Learning Coalition, EasterSeals, Family Life Center, Florida Legal Services, Lions Club, and many other organizations will be available to provide information and resources. The event is open to the public, free to attend, and will offer assistance with obtaining various services including autism screenings, tablets (low-income qualification), fair housing legal consultations, Marketplace Navigation, childcare services, SNAP and Medicaid application assistance, behavioral health services, and much more. Flagler Cares is a non-profit agency focused on creating a vital, expansive social safety net that addresses virtually all the health and social needs of our community. Flagler Cares works with clients to identify needs and create solutions that address those unique needs. Flagler Cares is proud to have a wide range of community partners who are committed to providing high quality services to those who need them most. Flagler Cares is also passionate about filling gaps and bringing needed services into the county where they did not previously exist. For more information about this event, please call 386-319-9483 ext. 0, or email [email protected]. July 31: Flagler County School Board Candidate Debate 2024: A one-hour live-streamed debate is scheduled for 5 p.m. on July 31 at Flagler News Weekly's Facebook page, and is moderated by Flagler Parent's Carmen Stanford and FNW's Danielle Anderson. The debate features Flagler School Board candidates Derek Barrs, Lauren Ramirez, Janie Ruddy and Vincent Sullivan from District 3 and District 5. The event will be archived for future viewing. Parents and the community may submit questions to [email protected] with the subject line: SBDebate2024 no later than July 29, 2024. Ripple Coworking is a host sponsor. Aug. 3: The annual Back to School Jam is scheduled for 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Flagler Palm Coast High School gym, 5500 State Rte 100 E, Palm Coast. Administrators from all of our schools will be on-site to answer questions. There will also be school shirts available for purchase at each school’s booth. District personnel will be on-hand to provide information on various programs and services, including after-school programs. Our Transportation department will be rolling up its booth to address bus schedules and our Food Services team will be available to answer questions about what you need to know about the free breakfast and lunch programs that are available to all students this coming school year. Additionally, dozens of local vendors will be on-hand with information about their youth-focused activities and programs. Be sure to get photos with various mascots and the always popular “Costumers With a Cause” roaming the gym. Food trucks and a bike rodeo will set up behind the gym. Aug. 5: Nexus Center/South Library Groundbreaking is scheduled for 1 p.m. on the acreage opposite the Sheriff's Operations Center on Commerce Parkway in Bunnell. The “Nexus Center” will be a multi-purpose facility to house a new library and the county’s Health and Human Services Department. See: "Flagler County Library’s $14 Million South Branch ‘Nexus Center’ Breaks Ground in August, Ending 10-Year Wait." |
Tangents: I am an admirer of Jimmy Carter–as a politician, as a president, as a post-president, as a human being–despite that “lust-in-my-heart” sanctimony that makes him sound like a latter-day Woodrow Wilson a bit too often. He was by far a better president than Wilson, whose deal-breaker will always be his un-reconstituted Southern racism despite giving us one of the greatest Supreme Court justices ever (Louis Brandeis). His other appointees were more forgettable (James McReynolds and John Clarke. Who?) But Carter on March 5, 1989, wrote one of the worst pieces of his career: “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” published as an OpEd in The New York Times that day. The ayatollah’s fatwa–no need to capitalize either–had gone out against Rushdie for his Satanic Verses. Rushdie was in hiding. His near-murder in August 2022 was far off, though Carter would live long enough to see it (he is still alive as I write this). I hope he regrets that column, the way Rushdie himself regretted his pathetic “Now I Can Say I Am a Muslim” column in the same pages, on Dec. 28, 1990. Carter doesn’t regret it, judging from the fact that he still feature his insult at the Carter Center’s website. “The death sentence proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response, surely surprising even to Rushdie. It is our duty to condemn the threat of murder, to protect the author’s life and to honor Western rights of publication and distribution.” Good so far. But then: “At the same time, we should be sensitive to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate Moslems.” Sure we should be sensitive. But who are “we”? To what extent does that sensitivity extend to a novelist’s responsibility not to explore what the novelist wants to explore? Why should we be so deferential to Muslim sensibilities as to restrict our own liberal, humanist, sometimes freely outrageous but always free minds’ willingness to go where they will, especially in fiction? Fiction! Carter was calling Rushdie’s novel “insulting” while Khomeini’s assassins were running around, while Khomeini’s madness (and Saddam Hussein’s) was mass graving the border between Iran and Iraq. But here’s what Carter said: “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility.” In the west we are directly insulted daily by myriad lesser fools. Grow a pair already. It means nothing to invoke the First Amendment (“freedom for the thought that we hate,” to quote the title of Anthony Lewis’s book on the subject) if the corollary is to invoke the stone-throwers. And on Aug. 12, 2022, Rushdie–whose works I have stopped liking a while back, but that’s irrelevant: my affection for him is of a different order–got knifed, lost his eyesight in one eye, and almost lost his life. Because the people Carter apologizes for—-an American citizen, Rushdie’s attacker: a California-born Lebanese, my own ancestry–are still running around, getting third-degree defenses from former presidents because they were insulted. “There’s a thing I used to say back in the day, when catastrophe rained down upon The Satanic Verses and its author,” Rushdie writes in Knife, “that one way of understanding the argument over that book was that it was a quarrel between those with a sense of humor and those without one. I see you now, my failed murderer, hypocrite assassin, mon semblable, mon frère. You could try to kill because you didn’t know how to laugh.”
—P.T.
View this profile on Instagram
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.
NAACP Candidate Forum
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
One-Stop Help Night on Range of Social, Medical and Legal Services at Flagler Cares
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler County School Board Candidate Debate 2024
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
For the full calendar, go here.
![FlaglerLive](https://i0.wp.com/flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/TheNib.jpg?resize=200%2C206&ssl=1)
Sometimes I think I belong to another age. I can remember being in the garden of our house as a child in the 1950s, listening to my parents and their friends laughing and joking as they discussed everything under the sun, from contemporary politics to the existence of God, without feeling any pressure to censor or dilute their opinions. I also remember being at the apartment of my favorite uncle, Hameed Butt, who sometimes wrote for the movies, and his dancer-actress wife, Uzra, who sometimes acted in them. I watched them playing cards with their artsy-filmi crowd, speaking in even more outrageous language about everything and nothing, and laughing even more uproariously than my parents’ friends. These settings were where I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.
–From Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024).
Laurel says
The beard is a good look for him!