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Weather: Partly sunny with a chance of showers. A slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. Chance of rain 30 percent. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Lows in the upper 60s. Chance of rain 30 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:
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
The Flagler Beach City Commission meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. 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.
Readings: Editor & Publisher, that old trade magazine that somehow is still in print, interviewed Gordon Borrell, an advertising and marketing guru, on the “tipping point” in local media: “Local media is at a tipping point — just as likely to tip into oblivion as to survive.” “According to Borrell, 85% of local media companies are capturing less than 10% of their obtainable digital advertising market. Worse yet, daily newspapers are the only legacy media segment with zero growth in digital revenue since 2020.” He’s against paywalls: ““We have 25 years of proof that people won’t pay for most of this content,” he said. “You’re limiting your audience, turning people off, and shrinking your reach at a time when scale matters more than ever.” […] Asked to reflect on two decades of trend-watching, Borrell didn’t hesitate. “If you told the 2001 version of me that newspapers would hold less than 4% of the total local market — including digital — I would’ve laughed in your face,” he said. “That’s what shocked and disappointed me the most.” On the flip side, what surprised him most was the long-term viability of the “build audience first, monetize later” model. “We used to laugh at Google and Facebook — how would they make money? But they built massive audiences and then turned on the revenue engine,” Borrell said. “That’s the model local publishers need to adopt: grow reach, then turn on monetization when you have something advertisers want to be part of.”
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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
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
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
For the full calendar, go here.
“We have reached, I believe, a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word. To be sure, there are still readers and there are many books published, but the uses of print and reading are not the same as they once were; not even in schools, the last institutions where print was thought to be invincible. They delude themselves who believe that television and print coexist, for coexistence implies parity. There is no parity here. Print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens. Like the fish who survive a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still dwell among us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by older and clearer waters.”
–From Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986).
Sherry says
A MUST READ:
The Hidden Provision in the Big Ugly Bill that makes Trump King.
Don’t let this happen
Robert Reich
May 22
Friends,
I’ve been following with a mixture of dismay and disgust Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill, soon to emerge from the House. I’ll report back to you on it.
But I want to alert you to one detail inside it that’s especially alarming. With one stroke, it would allow Trump to crown himself king.
As you know, Trump has been trying to neuter the courts by ignoring them.
The Supreme Court has told Trump to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of the United States whom even the Trump regime admits was erroneously sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador. Trump has essentially thumbed his nose at the Court by doing nothing.
Lower federal courts have told him to stop deporting migrants without giving them a chance to know the charges against them and have the charges and evidence reviewed by a neutral judge or magistrate (the minimum of due process). Again, nothing.
Judge James Boasberg, Chief Judge of the federal district court for the District of Columbia, issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump regime from flying individuals to the prison in El Salvador without due process.
Judge Boasberg has found that the Trump regime has willfully disregarded his order.
What can the courts do in response to Trump’s open defiance of the judges and justices?
The courts have one power to make their orders stick: holding federal officials in contempt and enforcing such contempt citations against them.
Enforcing a contempt citation means fining or jailing the Trump lawyers who argue before them, and possibly invoking contempt all the way up the line to Trump.
Boasberg said that if Trump’s legal team does not give the dozens of Venezuelan men sent to the Salvadorian prison a chance to legally challenge their removal, he’ll begin contempt proceedings against the administration.
In a separate case, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis has demanded that the Trump administration explain why it is not complying with the Supreme Court order to “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia.
Xinis questions whether the administration intends to comply with the order at all, citing a statement from U.S. Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem that Abrego Garcia “will never be allowed to return to the United States.” According to Xinis, “That sounds to me like an admission. That’s about as clear as it can get.”
So what’s next? Will the Supreme Court and lower courts hold the administration in contempt and enforce contempt citations?
Not if the Big Ugly Bill is enacted with the following provision, now hidden in the bill:
“No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued….”
Translated: No federal court may enforce a contempt citation.
Obviously, courts need appropriated funds to do anything because Congress appropriates money to enable the courts to function. To require a security or bond to be given in civil proceedings seeking to stop alleged abuses by the federal government would effectively immunize such conduct from judicial review because those seeking such court orders generally don’t have the resources to post a bond.
Hence, with a stroke, the provision removes the judiciary’s capacity to hold officials in contempt.
As U.C. Berkeley School of Law Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law Erwin Chemerinsky notes, this provision would eliminate any restraint on Trump.
‘Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored. There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law. …
‘This would be a stunning restriction on the power of the federal courts. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the contempt power is integral to the authority of the federal courts. Without the ability to enforce judicial orders, they are rendered mere advisory opinions which parties are free to disregard.”
With this single provision, in other words, Trump will have crowned himself king. No congress and no court could stop him. Even if a future Congress were to try to stop him, it could not do so without the power of the courts to enforce their hearings, investigations, subpoenas, and laws.
What can you do? To begin with, call your members of Congress and tell them not to pass Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill.
While you’re at, demand that they preserve the federal court’s power to enforce their rulings by holding an administration in contempt. (The Capitol Hill switchboard number is (202) 224-3121.)
Laurel says
He’s like the devil, and his sycophants have sold their souls to him. Either they do exactly as he says, or he will ruin them.
Feel the pain, folks. That big, beautiful concept of a plan for healthcare is on its way some day, but first, the jet and Trump bitcoin. The crime in Chicago “stops right here, right now!” “Mexico will pay for the wall.”
– Trump 2016