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Weather: Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 80s. Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph. Friday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the mid 60s.
- 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:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today: Pastor Charles Silano will talk about the Trump-ordered cuts that have drastically reduced the budget of the Grace Community Food Pantry. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. Join a Ranger the First Friday of every month for a garden walk. Learn about the history of Washington Oaks while exploring the formal gardens. The walk is approximately one hour. No registration required. Walk included with park entry fee. Participants meet in the Garden parking lot.  The event is free with paid admission fee to the state park: ​$5 per vehicle. (Limit 2-8 people per vehicle) $4 per single-occupant vehicle. Call (386) 446-6783 for more information or by email: [email protected].
First Friday in Flagler Beach, the monthly festival of music, food and leisure, is scheduled for this evening at Downtown’s Veterans Park, 105 South 2nd Street, from 5 to 9 p.m. The event is overseen by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and run by Laverne M. Shank Jr. and Surf 97.3
Uptown Motown at the Fitz, 7 p.m. at the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center/Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast. $54 to $64. Fusing Bruno-Mars-caliber stage presence with top-tier vocals and wall-to-wall choreography, the men of UPTOWN combine the smooth stylings of R&B with the fresh hits of today in a unique and modern show that gets every crowd on their feet! Born in New York City (the epicenter of contemporary pop and soul music), the group exudes unparalleled energy with their blend of contemporary radio hits and classic Motown music. Every single member of UPTOWN is a world-class soloist, with frequent comparisons to the artistry of icons like Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye; when they come together as one collective, the resulting remix creates “the most electrifying show you’ll see this decade!” (Agua Caliente, Palm Springs CA).
‘Sense and Sensibility’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, with a Tuesday, April 15 performance at 7:30 p.m. Oh the story of the impoverished Dashwood family! Based on Jane Austen’s novel, this play follows Elinor and Marianne who become destitute upon the death of their father, who leaves his estate to their half-brother, John. Due to his wife’s interference, they must survive on a meager allowance.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Campaign diary: I too was caught up in the low-grade fever that radiated from all things Josh Weil once I started paying attention to the race, 24 hours before it ended. Until then I had committed a cardinal sin of journalism. I had taken its outcome for granted, its conduct revolting, since Randy Fine, one of the most distasteful characters in American politics today, was involved (the bigot called Weil “jihad Josh,” then turned around and called anyone critical of him anti-Semite). Then came those Iowa-style polls showing Weil within the margin of error. You remember the famous Des Moines Register poll showing Harris ahead of Trump last October, the poll by the great Ann Selzer, who’d hardly ever been wrong before. Those polls. I was part of the scrum of reporters at the gaggle at Flagler Democratic headquarters the day before the election, and again on Election Day at the library, a poor judgment call since I missed covering live the 10 interviews for that Palm Coast City Council appointment. There was some excitement of course. National press all hirsute with mics in Weil’s face (I was flat-handed with iPhone in Weil’s face), Weil saying all those things every candidate in the history of elections saying, whether from 30 points behind or, as it turned out, 10. An honorable loss, given the CCCP-redness of our district, but still a loss. I included a few qualifiers in the reporting, and by the time I started writing my story a few hours before the polls closed, my headline was set: Randy Fine After All, and so on. It took only returning to my desk and merely glimpsing the turnout numbers to know that a Weil victory was impossible. It would have been nice. But Democrats have a long way to being that good, when they’re having trouble being relevant. I don’t blame them. They haven’t yet conceded that democracy is over, though the thug’s election last November should have been proof enough. All else from here on is idealistic window dressing. At least we had that good win in Wisconsin and Corey Booker to console us (his plagiarism of a line from Grey’s Anatomy aside–”why are so many women dying in childbirth in the post-partum period in America. Shameful”–and seed new illusions.Â
—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.
May 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Pool Safety Day
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
SunBros Cafe Celebrates the Life of Travis Sundell
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
 Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.” It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car. It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.
–From M. Gessen’s “Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived,” the New York Times, April 2, 2025.Â
FlaPharmTech says
Please please please President Obama come back!!!!!!
Nobama says
OMG. NOT another Obama disaster !!!!!!
Pogo says
@Reactionaries doing what they do
… supercilious snobs and perfectionists prating about the impossible and weeping over what they enabled.
Eat up. You made it.
Laurel says
Nobama: Clearly you do not understand economics. President Obama guided us out of a great recession. President Biden guided us out of Trump’s first folly, gave us a soft landing, reduced inflation and gave us more jobs. Kamala Harris was going to see that we could spend our last days at home, instead of in an institution. All that and more, and I’m not a Democrat!
In case you haven’t noticed, the previous four years, restaurants and big box stores were full of people all the time.
This current idiot is tanking the world! You do not take a good economy, and drastically experiment with it! You do not experiment with our lives and livelihood.Nobody knows what the f**k he’s doing, especially him. He wants to give the wealthy tax cuts at the cost of $5,000.000.000.00 to our deficit, while the middle class goes to shit, and we become the most hated country in the world.
Open your eyes, it’s all right in front of you! And yes, the market does matter.
The dude says
A lot of people in this town watched a lot of their retirement vaporize over the last couple days as a direct consequence of their voting habits.
It takes seconds to destroy what takes many years to build up… this is by design.
Unfortunately for all the boomers whose 401k just got decimated, you don’t have the time to build it all back up. Especially since you just spent the last decade and a half recovering from W’s decimation of the economy…
Pogo says
@Common cause for a common dream
“…Historic Stand Against Trump-Musk…”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/cory-booker-speech
… used to be common fare; now, supplanted by pompous “conversations” speaking over the head of those who need to know, and still and always ignored; worse still, distorted and/or defamed by the malign, apologists for the indefensible, and the rest of the human comedy slouching into extinction.
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
— Mark Twain
“Don’t forget the moggies.”
— Pogo
Robjr says
Have the Magas taken a look at their; 401ks, IRAs, stock portfolios this morning?
No worries the rapist in chief says he loves the uneducated.
Thanks trump.
Felonious expectations says
Haha funny part is we could have done nothing and still be dominating the world in five years. But nope the orange felon want economy to go boom stock market go boom, your government go boom. Lolol we deserve it. Tell me more about intricacies of the stains global microeconomic policy haha.
Skibum says
However pleasing it would be for me to personally bear witness to Barak Obama’s landslide victory over drumph if both were to run again in 2028, I can pretty much guarantee such a historic beat down will actually never occur. Simply put, the U.S. Constitution is clear and unambiguous, and prohibits it, period. Thus, the only individual who would even consider trying such an unconstitutional trick is someone who has no regard for the U.S. Constitution, no regard for our nation’s rule of law, no regard for the other two co-equal branches of the federal government (both of which would, in the end, have to go along with it), someone who wrongly thinks they are above the law and can do whatever the hell they want without consequences or repercussions. Does any of this sound like the person that we all know Barak Obama to be? Of course not! But it sounds exactly like the lawless, convicted felon, twice impeached, wannabe dictator-for-life buffoon that currently occupies our nation’s WH, so all bets are off at least on his part. We can only hope that he quietly goes away and disappears forever once this current debacle of a presidency is over, unless he departs early after chocking on greasy french fries or has a somewhat tragic and fatal fall after slipping on some ketchup he has thrown all over one of the WH walls, floor and antique furniture in one of his infamous rages after seeing his fauxinfotainment ratings sink to new lows over his tariff tempest. Either way, there is a growing number of republicans who would not shed one little tear, and I dare say there would be so very many parties and celebrations going on simultaneously all across the U.S. and abroad that they would have to bring back the defunct Party City just to keep up with all of the orders for balloons and other party favors!
Laurel says
Dude: Now you are getting it! Excellent! All, and I mean all, generations wanted their offspring to do better than themselves. The real enemy will use anyone they can to blame all our ills on, and that’s known as “divide and conquer”. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev said “We will take America without firing a shot. We do not have to invade the U.S. We will destroy you from within….” Russia is now Trump’s ally. We need to stick together, and not let the current administration conquer us!