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Weather: Partly sunny. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. Northeast winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Wednesday Night: Partly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then a slight chance of showers after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. 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 Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board meets at 10 a.m. every first Wednesday of the month at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For details about the city’s code enforcement regulations, go here.
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 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.
The Flagler Beach Library Book Club meets at 1 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
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]
“Inside Project 2025: A blueprint for America’s future?”: A Presentation by Flagler College’s Michael Butler, 6 p.m. at the VFW Post 8696, 47 Old Kings Road, Palm Coast. The event is free. Cash bar available. Dr. Michael Butler is Kenan Distinguished Professor of History at Flagler College. He will discuss the political initiative known as Project 2025. All are welcome to attend the informational session hosted by “Work Together Flagler,” a grassroots community organization. The format includes background information on the policies outlined in the Project by The Heritage Foundation. The themes of the Project appear to align with the policies of Agenda 47, the platform promoted by Republican Party candidate Donald Trump. The event includes a Question & Answer period following the program. For more information, contact [email protected]. See details here.
The Flagler County Republican Club holds its monthly meeting starting with a social hour at 5 and the business meeting at 6 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn, 55 Town Center Blvd., Palm Coast. The club is the social arm of the Republican Party of Flagler County, which represents over 40,000 registered Republicans. Meetings are open to Republicans only.
The Flagler Beach Parks Ad Hoc Committee meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 105 S 2nd St, Flagler Beach. The Committee’s six members, appointed by the City Commission, provide recommendations related to the maintenance of existing parks and equipment and recommendations for new or replacement equipment and other duties as assigned by the City Commission.
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at a private residence in Palm Coast 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] for location and information.
 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. |
Excerpts: The Art of the Deal prefaced Trump’s method as president. He became the most powerful man in the world and its biggest celebrity. But for age’s crustier venom, the change in his personality from real estate broker and Manhattan’s gossip schist to president to Mar-a-Lago exile is hard to detect. He joked that the attempt on his life on July 13 may have changed him, but for no more than a few hours. To media’s limited horizon he’s been done with being nice since his first campaign. But nice, like good taste, was never part of Trump décor. The words “nice guy” appear in The Art of the Deal twice, not even about himself. The words “kill,” “killer,” “killed” and “killing” appear 20 times.So it is with Vance, whose venom flows as tactically today as it did in 2016. When he went from calling Trump “America’s Hitler” and calling himself a Nevertrumper to calling him a man of “extraordinary vision” as he accepted the nomination for vice-president, the apparent change was mistaken for the apotheosis of an opportunistic pivot and a betrayal of his memoir’s affective nuances. But it was the reflection and perfection of a skill Vance displayed throughout Hillbilly Elegy: the construction of a persona scaled to a chameleon’s tongue.
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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 County Drug Court Convenes
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Carlos M. Cruz
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
For the full calendar, go here.
The same impulses would soon be used to refashion the redneck and embrace white trash as an authentic heritage. It was moonshiners known for trippin’ whiskey and outrunnin’ the law who started the rough and wild sport of stock car racing. By the seventies, with money from Detroit automobile companies and celebrity drivers, an outlaw sport had become NASCAR, the tamer pastime of arriviste middle-class Americans. Mean-while, country crooners Johnny Russell and Vernon Oxford released the hit singles “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer” (1973) and “Redneck! (The Redneck National Anthem (1976). Vernon Oxford defined “redneck” as “someone who enjoys country music and likes to drink beer.” In 1977, the year Elvis died, the new queen of country rock music, Dolly Parton, was featured in the elite fashion magazine Vogue. “Redneck chic” (the cleaned-up redneck) reached Hollywood in the 1981 film Urban Cowboy, in which Jersey boy John Travolta took on the role of hard-hat-wearing, honky-tonk-loving Texas two-stepper Buford Davis. In 1986, Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking was published, celebrating low-down lingo and rural recipes. When Mickler, a country singer as well as a caterer, gave his book to his seventy-two-year-old aunt, she remarked, “Well, that’s what they call us, ain’t it?”
–From Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (1976).
Jake From State Farm says
Cartoon is wrong. Hezbollah is the tail…. the head is Iran.
Ray W says
From John Toland’s acclaimed account of the final year of WWI, a year that saw the German army transferring millions of soldiers from the Eastern Front after the fall of the czar and the collapse of the Russian army. Confident of ultimate victory over the Allies, Kaiser Wilhem issued a message on the eve of the third major assault during the second Battle of the Marne.
‘Like his son, the Kaiser wanted to watch the artillery softening-up. But he didn’t arrive at his observation post north of Reims until 1 A.M., July 15. It was the thirtieth anniversary of his accession to the throne, a fitting day for the offensive that could crush the enemy. Already he had issued a message describing the war as ‘a conflict between the two approaches to the world. Either the Prussian-German approach — Right, Freedom, Honor, Morality — is to remain respected or the Angl0-Saxon, which would mean enthroning the worship of gold.’ Like Ludendorff, he saw England as the main enemy, not the French.”
Make of this what you will. Me? It is all too human to be chameleon-like in our thinking. The Kaiser, a member of a royal family who ascended to his position by accident of birth, actually thought that an entire people being ruled for thirty years by an all-powerful king who controlled the entirety of Germany’s civil government was the best way to preserve freedom and rights and honor and morality. So is it ever so often with tyrants and kings.
So what of today’s theme of “the construction of a persona scaled to the chameleon’s tongue (thank you, Mr. Tristam)? Is there more than one way to construct a chameleon’s persona? Is there such a thing as a positive chameleon?
I have on several occasions referred to a lawyer’s duty to become a chameleon in a courtroom, within the ethical and professional rules that control a form of legal reasoning that serves the public so well. This form of reasoning can also be called “argumentation.”
Two of the primary concepts of our legal system are “notice” and a “right to be heard”, known in our Constitution as “procedural Due Process”.
“Notice” is somewhat easily achieved. In the criminal law, Florida has a section devoted to “Discovery”. Strict compliance with these rules aid in the achieving of notice. The charging document must also be sufficiently detailed in its allegations due to the concept of notice.
The “right to be heard” heard is more nuanced. Yes, the right belongs to the client. If the client’s voice is not heard in the courtroom, procedural Due Process is denied.
Sometimes a judge actively denies that right, but in my experience that is a rare occurrence.
But procedural Due Process is most often denied when counsel presents his own voice to a court or jury, instead of his client’s voice. Many is the time that I have discussed and even argued with a client over how his voice was to be heard. If a client insists on presenting a false story to a jury or to the court, then I had the option to withdraw from the case, or in some instances, to ask the client to present a narrative to the court or to the jury without my directing the narrative.
But when a client’s voice is based on the evidence, no matter how implausible, an attorney has to adapt his voice to that of the client. Simple as that.
What is a negative chameleon? Imagine a “pestilential” partisan member of faction who is running for office. Bereft of a moral anchor, such a candidate will say anything, make up anything, to gain elective favor. There is no oath to tell the truth. No ethical rules to constrain the imagination.
And then there is the anti-chameleon. Imagine two common FlaglerLive commenters who most commonly repeat, over and over again, demonstrably false claims. But at least no one can say they ever learn.
Today, a Moneywise article focuses on the “10 most important words in the history of economics”, according to Warren Buffet during a 2014 interview.
In 2008, the Great Recession was rapidly spreading. A number of banks, eventually deemed too big to fail, were faltering. Americans, long accustomed to thinking that “money market funds”, usually comprised of “mutual funds that invest in highly liquid, near-term instruments such as U.S. Treasuries”. were safe.
According to Buffet, in 2008, thirty-five million Americans held $3.5 trillion in “safe” money market funds. Suddenly the funds were no longer safe. As Buffett describes the time, “Then, in one week, they got worried about it.”
People began panicking.
At this critical time, President Bush said: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.”
Buffet, it is said, thinks that these simple words gave the heads of the Treasury and the Fed safe harbor to aggressively loosen the money marketplace.
“What it took to rescue the economy was an unorthodox program known as quantitative easing. Effectively, Bernanke and Paulson coordinated a series of actions, including the purchasing of securities, to inject money into the financial system. This lowered borrowing costs and increased the money supply.
“From 2008 to 2015, the Fed’s balance sheet surged more than fourfold, to about $4.5 trillion.
“Money was loosened up.”
At around the same time, President Bush signed an executive order pledging the full faith and credit of the Treasury should the big banks go under. While FDIC insured accounts up to $100k, Bush’s executive order covered all accounts, no matter the size. Every person’s accounts suddenly became safe again. This immediately calmed the markets. Only one major bank failed. This, coupled with Bush signing into law some $2 trillion in unfunded stimulus funds, of which the $770 billion TARP Act was but a part, proves to me that for all the other things Bush stumbled and outright erred on, he got this one right. At a critical time in history, he listened to competent economists and acted against his party’s wishes. He put country above party.
Today, the situation is the opposite. Money isn’t tight, it is too loose. Instead of quantitative easing, the Fed is quantitatively tightening the money marketplace.
“The biggest challenge in recent years apparently hasn’t been the lack of cash, but too much of it. Money supply in the economy boomed during the pandemic, which may have been a key reason for heightened inflation, according to Christopher J. Neeley, Senior Economic Policy Advisor, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
“To tame inflation, Fed chairman Jerome Powell engaged in a quantitative tightening program in June 2022. In other words, money would be tightened up in the system. Since then, the Fed’s balance sheet has declined from nearly $9 trillion to $7.2 trillion.
“Raising interest rates has also been part of the quantitative tightening program. The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate from 0.25% to between 5.25% and 5.5%.”
Make of this what you will. Me? Yet another source that supports the argument that the nearly $6 trillion in unfunded stimulus money signed into law by both former President Trump and President Biden pulled us out of the economic hole created by the pandemic. But the excess cash pumped into the economy also triggered the inflation that vexed us all.
President Biden is not solely responsible for inflation. Both presidents are. Simple as that. Trudenflation remains real today, if only barely so as inflation drops toward the 2% target rate.
Ray W says
The WSJ reports that “key members” of the 23-nation bloc known as OPEC+ met today to discuss whether to ease previously agreed group production cuts this December.
Bullet points from the article:
— Last week, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister chided three member nations for exceeding their assigned quotas: Russia, Kazakhstan and Iraq. Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman purportedly told fellow members that if some members continue to flaunt production limits, crude oil prices could drop to $50 per barrel.
— “[T]here is no point in adding more barrels if there isn’t room for them in the market.”
— Oil prices for benchmark crude grades have decline by 16% last quarter.
— “The group’s production cuts mean their share of the oil market has shrunk. This year it reached 48%, down from 50% in 2023 and 51% in 2022.”
— “Planned production increases in the U.S., Guyana and Brazil are expected to add over 1 million barrels of oil a day to global oil supply.”
— While crude oil prices for crude have been under $75 per barrel recently, “Saudi Arabia needs prices at $85 per barrel to help fund its economic transition, analysts say.”
— Saudi Arabia is capable of turning on the wells at will. In March 2020, it engaged in a price war with Russia, driving international prices down by 65% in just one quarter.
Make of this what you will. Me? We are all being fleeced by foreign actors who possess outsize power over the crude oil marketplace.
If Saudi Arabia really did engage in a price war with Russia in 2020, was that the primary reason that gas was selling for $2 per gallon in Flagler County? Does that put the lie to claims by JimboXYZ and Dennis C. Rathsam that Trump administration policies caused the drop in prices?
I lean toward the argument that the worldwide shutdowns caused by the pandemic also drove down worldwide demand for oil.
Either way, Trump administration policies seem to have had little to do with the low gas prices.
Ray W says
As for redneck music, I remain partial to the cult folk classic “All the Oil’s in Texas, but the Dipsticks are in D.C.”
Ray W says
I almost forgot the mean woman done me wrong blues hit: “I Bagged Me a Trophy Wife and Now She Shoots Back!”
Pogo says
@You missed a spot
G.W.’s role is accorded its due, but it was Nancy Pelosi in particular, and moreover the Democratic party en masse who were his indispensable partners in any good he accomplished.
And the Republican party? Let them eat cake.
From the past darkly
https://www.bing.com/search?q=romney%20auto%20industry%20bailout
As stated
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-bailout-was-11-years-ago-were-still-tracking-every-penny#:~:text=Over%20a%20decade%20ago,%20we%20started%20a%20database%20to%20track