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Weather: Tropical storm conditions expected. Showers and thunderstorms likely before noon, then showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm between noon and 3pm, then showers and thunderstorms likely after 3pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 88. Heat index values as high as 101. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. Tonight: Tropical storm conditions expected. Showers and thunderstorms, mainly before 3am. Low around 77. Chance of precipitation is 80%. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms.
- 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 Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Closures: Flagler County schools, the county courthouse, Daytona State College are all closed today due to Hurricane Helene.
Drug Court has been cancelled for today, as have all court proceedings.
The Flagler County Canvassing Board meeting scheduled for today has been postponed to Oct. 3.
The Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee has been cancelled.
The Flagler Beach City Commission holds a special meeting to approve its budget at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, but its scheduled regular meeting’s agenda is postponed to the Oct. 10 meeting. Watch the meeting at the city’s YouTube channel here. Access meeting agenda and materials here. See a list of commission members and their email addresses 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 quality. |
Notably: Here’s a thought by Mikhail Bakunin I wish informed the residents of DeSantistan who cheer every time they ban a book, rewrite Black history when they’re not censoring it, vilify transgender people, fabricate murderous doubt about vaccines and call it all “free Florida.” Bakunin was an anarchist, though the term as it was applied then is not the same term as it is applied today. Tormentors, to him and to society, were “priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, officials, financiers, capitalists, moneylenders, lawyers.” He died in 1876, “a Columbus, as Herzen said, without America,” Barbara Tuchman reminds us. He was a favorite of the likes of Edward Abbey–the Edward Abbey of The Monkeywrench Gang, who obviously appreciated a Bakunin thought such as: “There are times when creation can be achieved only through destruction. The urge to destroy is then a creative urge.”) I can see the attraction. Anthony Burgess believed, not in a flattering way, that Bakunin inspired the 1960s student movement in France and the United States. But Burgess was a reactionary at heart. Of course he wouldn’t approve, though he had every reason not to approve of Bakunin’s rank and ugly anti-Semitism: whether he as a man of his time or not, anti-Semitism isn’t the sort of thing you can excuse, whatever the time, whatever the circumstances. Nor slavery. No such thing as a man of his times in those circumstances. That aside, maybe we ought to read Bakunin a bit more often. So that line, epitaph to DeSantistan: “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.”
—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.
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
In Court: Splash Pad Case
Flagler and Florida Unemployment Numbers Released
Blue 24 Forum
988 Suicide Prevention Walk
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Jake’s Women, By Neil Simon, at City Rep Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler County Public Library Book Club
Jake’s Women, By Neil Simon, at City Rep Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
For the full calendar, go here.
In the rush to recognise Trump’s new victim status, nobody seemed to be thinking about his own invocations of brutality. Before he was banned from Twitter, he had been warned for ‘glorifying violence’. He said Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally should be shot in the leg. At the time of the Black Lives Matter protests relating to the murder of George Floyd, he tweeted: ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts.’ In July 2017, he advised police officers not to be ‘too nice’ when handling suspects. He praised someone for body-slamming a reporter and encouraged supporters at a rally before the Iowa caucus in 2016 to ‘knock the crap out of’ protesters, saying he would pay their legal fees. He has a history of inciting crowds: he awaits trial on an accusation of inciting the riot in the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. In Louisville, Kentucky in 2016, when confronted by protesters, he told his supporters to ‘Get ’em out of here.’ Trump has always understood that violence is comprehended by one portion of his base and relished by another. ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose voters, OK?’ he said at one campaign rally. ‘It’s, like, incredible.’ He has made his rallies places where the threat of violence might now and then be justified.
–From Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Hard Zone,” a report on the Republican National Convention, London Review of Books, Aug. 1, 2024.
Ray W says
From among the first of my comments to the FlaglerLive community, I argued over and over again that we are early in a wave of political violence that likely will last for many years, if not decades.
In my opinion, we are not at the end of the wave of political violence. We are not even at the beginning of the end of the wave. We may not even be at the end of the beginning of the wave. But we are at a point in time where two apparently disaffected white males have attempted to assassinate former President Trump.
Make no mistake. Misinformation, disinformation and outright lying will not bring to an end the wave of political violence that continues to build in this country.
Certain people, including politicians and political pundits and certain FlaglerLive commenters, i.e., those among us who purposely engage in deception, are a “pestilence” to us all.
As I have borrowed from Ryszard Kapuscinski, there are three “plagues” that affect us all: nationalism, racism, and religious extremism.
Ray W says
This is a thought exercise.
Current federal law prohibits “large scale” vote roll purges within 90 days of an election, arguably to prevent targeted late disenfranchising of large numbers of eligible voters. Individual purges can occur. For example, were Judge Perkins to adjudicate today a defendant guilty of a felony, that person can immediately be purged from the Flagler County roll of eligible voters.
If 40 days before our federal election, Flagler County were to announce today a “large scale” voter purge, there would be little time to send notice to each person affected and to allow them to gather proof of a lawful right to vote. Giving officials a deadline to seek to engage in “large scale” purges of voter rolls makes sense, but once the deadline passes, it opens a window of time for politicians to claim to the gullible among us that large numbers of voters plan to illegally vote and that voting officials are doing nothing to stop it.
To me, this amounts to a disingenuous act of deception by a politician. If a presidential candidate were to claim that vote officials were not doing enough to clear voter rolls of ineligible voters after the deadline has passed, he or she, by definition, would be lying, because voting officials can’t engage in large-scale vote purges after a certain date.
This year, August 8th was the deadline to engage in large-scale purges of voter rolls. Since that deadline passed, the Texas Attorney General and Alabama’s Secretary of State have issued press releases claiming that they have identified “thousands” of potential noncitizens who illegally registered to vote, with my emphasis on the term “potential.”
These two elected officials have to know that vote rolls cannot be purged at this late date, yet they plunge into the abyss of allegations of vote fraud anyway.
I found a USA Today article that addresses this issue. Jonathan Diaz, with the Campaign Legal Center, argued to a reporter that, historically, when “potential” lists of alleged noncitizen registered voters are analyzed, officials find that many turn out to be recently naturalized citizens.
If this is true, then it suggests that politicians who claim evidence of large-scale noncitizen voting may be intentionally relying on outdated citizenship data for their claims. If a presidential candidate were to claim that large numbers of noncitizens were registering to vote in 2024, using 2022 or 2023 immigration data, that means that anyone who became a naturalized citizen in 2024 could be called an ineligible voter.
So, I looked up how many immigrants became naturalized citizens in 2023, the latest year that has full-year data. 878,500 people became naturalized citizens.
Again, this is a thought exercise.
Texas is a big state with a significant immigrant population. If nearly 900,000 people nationwide became naturalized citizens last year, some of them have to live in Texas. Were Texas officials to use 2022 citizenship data, how many of them would be “potential” noncitizen voters in 2024? Any official who wanted to claim that large numbers of noncitizens were registering to vote in 2024 need only check 2024 voter registration data against 2022 immigrant data to claim that thousands of “potential” noncitizen have been registering to vote. To emphasize the point, again, historically, when someone claims that large numbers of noncitizens are registering to vote, checking the voter rolls against the latest available recently naturalized citizens data often disproves the claims.
I know this is inference, but I have to think that many of the nearly 900,000 2023 naturalized citizens immediately took the next step and registered to vote. Using 2022 immigration records to check on their eligibility to vote would exclude all of them. As the old computer aphorism holds, garbage in, garbage out.
I decided to look further into the numbers of immigrants who become naturalized each year. Over the past 10 years, the average is above 770k.
During the Reagan years, the highest number of 279,497 naturalized citizens, in 1986.
In 1991, the highest number was 307,394 naturalized citizens during the GHW Bush years.
In 1996, during the Clinton administration, 1,040,991 immigrants gained citizenship.
In 2008, the highest number was 1,046,539, during GW Bush’s two terms.
In 2013, the peak of 779,929 took place during the Obama years.
In 2019, 843,593 immigrants converted to U.S. citizenship under Trump’s watch.
In 2022, 969,380 naturalized citizens became eligible to vote during Biden’s oversight.
Make of all of this what you will. Me? I greatly suspect that certain politicians and political organizations are intentionally selecting outdated immigration data bases. They use the old data to match up against recent voter registration records to claim that large numbers of noncitizens are now registering to vote. When the claim is checked, the fact-checkers find that, yes, in 2022, the person was ineligible to register to vote. In 2024, the person became naturalized and then lawfully registered to vote.
Ohio just completed an investigation of its voter rolls. Out of the roughly 8 million Ohio voters, they found 600 instances of ineligible registrations. 135 had voted at an undefined time. 400 had not voted.
Since significant numbers of all population bases voted for Trump in 2020, can it reasonably be argued that many of the 135 ineligible Ohio voters voted Republican? Most of them?
Who can anyone actually ever know? Individual voting decisions are secret by law. A person can register as an Independent and vote Republican. No one looking in from the outside can determine which individual voted for which candidate.
In 2020, it was widely claimed that Hispanic voters trended toward Trump. Trump, on numerous occasions, claimed that the broad and diverse community of Hispanic voters leaned towards him. Now, suddenly, all immigrants vote blue.
Ray W says
An update on the issue of purging voting rolls within 90 days of an election.
84 days before November 5th, Alabama’s Secretary of State announced a plan to remove 3,251 potential noncitizens from its voter rolls, allegedly in violation of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act.
Today, the Justice Department filed suit seeking to reinstate the registered voters.
Make of this what you will. Me? The federal act is 31 years old. Alabama’s leaders have to have lawyers who can tell them what the law is. Had Alabama acted seven days earlier, the purge would have been lawful. Each potentially disenfranchised lawfully registered voter would have time to receive notice and appear with the necessary documents to force Alabama to restore them to the voting rolls. While I can’t say that Alabama’s leaders behind this action are “pestilential” partisan members of faction, as James Madison described the most worthless citizens among us, it sure looks like this is a political stunt designed to put a fake issue into the election marketplace of misinformation and disinformation. Again, the state only had 31 years of notice to act. Alabama is the state that waited beyond the cut-off date to act.
The gullible among us will shout and tear their hair. They will still be wrong.
Ray W says
Here we go!
In a Friday press release accompanying the DOJ filing of a lawsuit against Alabama’s Secretary of State for removing 3,251 registered voters after a 90-day deadline to remove such voters, the DOJ stated:
“The Justice Department’s review found that both native-born and naturalized U.S. citizens have received letters stating that their voter record has been made inactive and that they have been placed on a path for removal from Alabama’s statewide voter registration list.”
That’s right, FlaglerLive readers, Alabama’s Secretary of State apparently did not know that he could not purge voter rolls fewer than 90 days before a federal election, or did he? And in doing so he apparently did not know that he was purging both native-born and naturalized citizens from the rolls, thereby threatening to disenfranchise validly registered voters, or did he?
Almost immediately, the professional lying class of one of our major political parties jumped in.
America First Legal Foundation, founded by Stephen Miller, posted on X:
“The Biden-Harris DOJ sued the State of Alabama for fighting to remove potential noncitizen and illegal aliens from their voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.”
Make of this what you will. Me? The DOJ is suing Alabama for Alabama trying to remove validly registered voters from the state’s voter rolls. Stephen Miller is lying to us all. Alabama officials almost certainly know that what they are doing is illegal and has been illegal for 31 years. All this seems to be happening in order to gin up a fake controversy for political gain shortly before an election.
The gullible among us should know they are being duped by professional liars, but they never do.
Ray W says
Market Watch translated a summary issued by Russia’s central bank after its latest policy meeting: “There are signs of cooling domestic demand. However, there is no reduction in inflationary pressure.”
In a separate central bank report, it was announced the GDP would slow significantly in 2025.
Earlier this month, the central bank raised its lending rate to 19%
“Also at fault are labor shortages. As the Ukrainian front has required Russians, businesses have had to push up wages to attract new workers. By the end of last year, the country was thought to lack nearly 5 million workers.”
Make of this what you will. Me? Some argue that Putin is a “brilliant” leader. Oy, vey!
Ray W says
This comment is directed to the several gullible FlaglerLive commenters who think that using two different databases to analyze job creation means that something is wrong when one report revises downward the jobs created data for the past 12 months by 818k jobs.
A Reuters headline: “US economic growth, corporate profits revised higher in 2023”
“The U.S. economy grew faster than initially thought in 2023 amid upgrades to business investment and consumer spending despite hefty interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve, revised government data showed on Thursday.
“The annual benchmark revision from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the government agency that constructs the gross domestic product report, also showed a sharp upward revision to corporate profits last year. Revisions to inflation were minor, while the saving rate was raised.”
As I have repeatedly asserted, weekly, monthly and quarterly economic reports are snapshots into the status of the economy, intended to provide short-term data to those who need it to pivot their businesses or governmental policies, based on limited datasets. Longer term assessments based on more comprehensive and complete data offer greater accuracy but take more time to develop.
The Reuters reporter wrote:
“The BEA revised the national accounts data from the first quarter of 2019 through the first quarter of 2024 to incorporate newly available and more comprehensive source data as well as improved estimation methodologies.”
Here is a list of the changes to long-ago issued temporary reports:
GDP growth for 2023 was initially estimated at 2.5% for the year. Now, it is revised upward to 2.9% for the year.
GDP growth for 2022 was initially estimated at 1.9%. Now, it was 2.5%.
2023 estimates of corporate profits were revised upwards by 8.9%, or $288.5 billion. “Companies have enjoyed greater pricing power amid rising inflation.”
“When measured from the income side, the economy grew by 1.7%
last year, revised up from the previously estimated 0.4%.”
Gross domestic income (GDI) in 2022 was 2.8%, up from the previously estimated 2.1%.
“The average of GDP and GDI, also referred to as gross domestic output, increased 2.3% in 2023”, up from the initial estimate of 1.5%.
The previously estimated 2023 savings rate was 4.5%; it was revised upward by 0.2% to 4.7%.
Make of this what you will. Me? I will take more comprehensive long-term economic data over short-term estimates based on smaller sample sizes every time.
We continue to pull ourselves out of the hole dug by the pandemic. We continue to surge towards a normal and fully healthy economy. We still have the strongest economic recovery in the world. It took years to recover from the economic damage that was the Great Recession. The Pandemic Recession was a bigger shock than was the Great Recession, and it might take even longer to fully recover from its ravages. There is still a chance we will go into recession. Two years ago, almost every economist thought it more likely than not that we would be in recession right now. Almost no economists now think that recession in the near future is more likely than not. Only time will tell.
One thing is certain. We are far better off as a national economy than we were four years ago. No doubt about it. Yes, problems remain. During my entire adult lifetime, there has never been a day when our national economy hasn’t had problems. The national debt looms over us all.
Ray W says
Here is how the NYT reports on the revised BEA figures cited above:
“The Commerce Department released updated estimates of gross domestic product over the past five years, part of a longstanding annual process to incorporate data that isn’t available in time for the agency’s quarterly releases.
“The new estimates show that G.D.P., adjusted for inflation, grew faster in 2021, 2022 and early 2023 than initially believed. The revisions are relatively small in most quarters, but they suggest that the rebound from the pandemic — already among the fastest recoveries on record, was stronger and more consistent than earlier data showed.
“Perhaps most notably, the government now says G.D.P. grew slightly in the second quarter of 2022, rather than contracting as previously believed. As a result, government statistics no longer show the U.S. economy as experiencing two consecutive quarters of declining G.D.P. in early 2022 — a common definition of a recession, though not the one used in the United States. (The revised data still shows that G.D.P. declined in the first quarter of 2022, but more modestly than previously reported.) …
“Few economists in 2022 believed that the U.S. economy met the requirements for a recession. But many feared it was heading for one because of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive efforts to bring down inflation with high interest rates. Instead, growth quickly resumed and has remained surprisingly resilient.”
Again, to the gullible FlaglerLive commenter who thinks the economy has been destroyed, don’t ever listen to those who lie for political gain.
According to the Times reporter, our recovery from the pandemic hole is among the fastest of all economic recoveries in history. Yet the lying liars among the professional class of one of our political parties continue to lie about the recovery.
We, as a national economy, are better off today than we were four years ago. No doubt about it. Four years ago, our economy was facing destruction. Over $5 trillion later in unfunded stimulus money and we just might reach the never-before attained “soft landing.”
Laurel says
Ray W.: Let me preface my following comment by stating that I really, really, really hope that those who have such a negative view of our country, are actually reading what you write, and it is having a positive change of heart. Facts do matter, and I do believe, now, it is having an effect.
My question to you is, when you were providing such facts, in a logical, intelligent way, did the juries listen, and use the best judgement?
I’m wondering if facts and logic prevail.
Ray W says
Yes, Laurel, sometimes fact and logic prevail.
Pogo says
@DDSOS (different day, same old stuff)
Florida, the turd in American democracy’s Holy Grail…
https://www.google.com/search?q=purge+of+black+voters+in+duval+county+florida+2000
And so it goes.
Ban the box now? says
Fact don’t matter to republicans. They just make up new lies. Can’t argue with stupid. The criminal cult is set to try and steal the election. They face no repercussions for their last failed attempt so expect them double down. America should fail quickly if the orange cult leader becomes dictator.
El chapo for governer says
If a convict can hold the highest position in the land then all positions should follow suit and remove felon questions from all job applications, loan applications, and professional certifications.
Corruption runs deep