Years ago, Trump falsely predicted that President Barack Obama would start a war with Iran because he would be incapable of negotiating. Except it was President Obama who successfully negotiated for Iran to end its nuclear program, and the treaty was working. Iran was complying with all the conditions. It was Trump who canceled the agreement and is now bombing Iran because he’s incapable of negotiating. And why would Iran want to negotiate with Donald Trump when they know they can’t trust him. How many treaties and agreements has Trump broken? Iran doesn’t have a nuclear bomb today, or Trump and Bibi would not have bombed them. But Donald Trump just taught Iran that they need a nuclear weapon. We may be slow learners of history, but the Iranians may not be. We forgot the history lessons of Vietnam and invaded Iraq. Iran probably remembers our demands on Iraq and Libya to lose their nuclear programs, only to see their regimes overthrown later.” Read more at Clay Jones’s Substack.
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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Sunny. Highs in the lower 90s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the lower 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph, becoming south after midnight.
- 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 City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. The council will discuss property taxes, the potential sale of the Palm Harbor Golf Club, and its public works’ hauling operations. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 1 p.m. in an information workshop. The board meets in the training room on the third floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here.
Budgeting by Values: A Free, Virtual Class to Learn Budgeting Skills, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. every fourth Tuesday of the month organized by Flagler Cares and Truist Bank, and presented by Financial Inclusion Leader Vladimir Rodriguez. To sign up or get information, call 386/319-9483, text 386/986-0107, or email [email protected].
The NAACP Flagler Branch’s General Membership Meeting is scheduled for 6 p.m. at the African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway). The meeting is open to the public, including non-members. To become a member, go here.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 6 p.m. in Board Chambers on the first floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here. The meeting is open to the public and includes public speaking segments.
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club at the Flagler Beach Public Library meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Notably: After our Dear Leader bombed Iran, the LAPD posted the tweet above, a nice bit of humanism and reassurance. Our hearts should go out to “the victims and families impacted by the recent bombings,” not just in Iran. We are not at war with that country. The people working under Fordo’s mountain are not exactly revolutionary guards taking Americans hostage. Imagine if, say, Hitler’s or Tojo’s storm troopers had managed a bombing raid on Los Alamos in the early months of 1945. Oppenheimer. Fermi. Rabi. Segré. Teller. Bethe. Wiped out. All of them brilliant. All of them civilian. Whatever we may think of the ethics of the atom bomb, the ethics of humanism preempt. An attack like that would have been brazen and in its own way brilliant, as ongoing attacks on Iran are more cheap shots and cowardly. But our hearts would have gone out to the victims and their families. So the LAPD’s tweet was courageous and welcome. Then came the apology. The offensive, inappropriate, unacceptable apology that tells you where we are as a nation, how low we are willing to fall. The apology called the earlier statement a “failure” that would be investigated. It is as if John Winthrop and John Cotton gangraped Anne Hutchinson. In this case, someone was about to be defenestrated.
—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.
July 2025
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Food Truck Tuesday
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Contractor Review Board Meeting
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
Derek Barrs Senate Confirmation Hearing
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
For the full calendar, go here.
The town’s ever-vigilant curiosity, which saw in the dark, found them out. And he did not care. The talk went around under cover of righteousness. Need was the cause of it. The little groups that the talk stirred in the stores and the kitchens and the street were like people lighting torches at a fire. It was as if Jack and Rose, like other lovers before and after them, had been elected to stir from the ashes of pretense and fear the light of a vital flame. While it condemned them the town needed them and praised them in the darkness of its heart. The town talked and looked askance, and waited eagerly for more news out of that dark and fragrant garden from which it felt itself in exile. And so this coupling went into the town’s mind, to belong to its history and its hope, even against its will. Even as the knowledge of it fades, it remains, an inflection of the heart, troubling and consoling the night watches of lonely husbands and wives like a phrase from a forgotten song.”
–From Wendell Berry’s The Memory of Old Jack (1974).
Dennis C Rathsam says
Ask IRAN….. That was a all beef taco, that brought IRAN to its knees. What a great plan! While democrats were changing their tampons, TRUMP was taking care of business. It’s a new dawn in America! PROUD TO BE AN AMERICA!!!!
Skibum says
The Islamic clerics who control the government of Iran are certainly no paragons of virtue, and from their repeated threats over many years touting death to America and death to Israel, they would probably love nothing more than to see the annihilation of both American and Israeli citizens if they could do such a thing. But our current president, a convicted criminal himself, has been poking that beehive country with a stick for a very long time, tearing up a previously in effect agreement that many around the world praised because Iran was mandated to allow unfettered access to all of it’s country’s nuclear enrichment facilities to ensure they were in compliance and only able to enrich low levels of uranium for power plants, NOT weapon grade production. And by all accounts, that was working just as it was intended.
Then along comes drumph in his first presidency and despite every single dissenting voice of caution and reason from leaders here and around the world that were involved in making that historic agreement with Iran, he unilaterally ripped it to pieces. Fast forward to now, and he is trying to be both a bully and a peace maker in his usual asinine and unhinged way. To think that someone as dumb as him could both start the fire and then turn around and try to put it out, and then tell everyone that he is some kind of hero, is preposterous. One middle east expert has put it this way: “When you start a fire and then grab a hose to put it out you don’t suddenly become a firefighter, you are just an arsonist with a hose”. I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment.
The dude says
Why do old men like to yell at the sky?
Pogo says
@Also notable
… are the material allies (historically, and currently) of Putin, and the erstwhile USSR.
In an imperfect world, led by imperfect people — it is still possible to discern the difference, between Putin, et al., and us.
SMH in utter disgust:
https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+nuclear+weapons+iran
Sherry says
And, now for something intelligent and wise. . . Robert Reich’s 79th birthday conversation:
Friends,
I’m 79 years old today.
I’m spending most of my time with people 50 years younger — my graduate students, my colleagues at Inequality Media Civic Action, and young people to whom I give lectures and seminars.
We communicate over a vast chasm of half a century. They have no direct memories of Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt, the Vietnam War, or when JFK was killed. They barely remember 9/11. They find it hard to believe that I grew up before the internet. That I was born before television. When I tell them I once worked for Gerald Ford, they look at me like I’m a fossil.
I am a fossil.
A few days ago several of them sat around a big oak table in my house and asked me questions.
Do you remember anything as bad as what’s now happening to America?
1968 was almost as bad. Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Our cities were in flames. Tens of thousands of us were being drafted and sent to Vietnam. The Democratic convention in Chicago was a disaster — National Guard teargassing young people. And Richard Nixon was elected president. I thought the nation would never recover.
Was Nixon as horrendous a president as Trump?
Nixon was bad, but Trump is far worse — the worst president in my lifetime or arguably all of American history.
Did you lose your optimism in 1968?
I despaired for America, as I do now, but I was never pessimistic.
How about cynical? Did you ever think America was hopeless?
No! Cynicism is the enemy of positive change. The Trump regime wants us all to become cynical so we give up and let them take over everything.
Are you angry at Trump?
Of course. Furious! But he’s only the culmination and consequence of decades of neglect.
Neglect of what?
The system!
What do you mean?
My parents’ generation bequeathed my generation a great legacy. They had endured the Great Depression and won World War II. They gave us peace, prosperity, and the largest middle class the world had ever seen. What did we do with that legacy? We squandered it. Oh, we accomplished some good things. But we took the system for granted. We let big money take it over. We let inequality get out of control. We allowed big corporations to become monopolies. We abandoned the working class. We allowed distrust and cynicism to sprout like poisonous mushrooms.
And that led to Trump?
It made America susceptible to a so-called “strong man” demagogue.
So Trump was inevitable?
Not necessarily Donald Trump. But someone like him. You see, we couldn’t have stayed on the road we were on — with widening inequality, ever-greater money in politics, and ever-more powerful corporate monopolies. Something had to give.
But why didn’t it “give” in a progressive direction?
Because Democrats were (and many if not most still are) afraid of progressive populism. They didn’t want to attack the hands that fed them campaign funding — big corporations and the wealthy. So they ceded the populist ground to the Republicans’ cultural bogeymen: the so-called “deep state,” socialists, transgender people, immigrants.
You think they’ve learned their lesson?
Shit, I hope so.
You think the damage Trump and his lackeys have done will be reversible?
Of course. But it will take time. It will be up to you guys to rebuild this country and the world.
Thanks a lot (laughter).
I mean it. Your generation is unbelievably talented, and America is extraordinarily resilient. We’ll bounce back. We bounced back from Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. From Vietnam. From Nixon and Watergate. From 9/11. From George W. Bush’s cruel war on terror. But we’ve bounced back a bit lower each time. That’s why you guys will have to make big, fundamental reforms.
Make America great again? (laughter).
No. Not go backward! Forward! Strengthen democracy. Make the economy work for everyone. Give America renewed moral authority in the world.
What do you think America and the world will be like by the time we’re your age — in 50 years?
You think America and the world will still be here by then? America will survive climate change, AI, more pandemics, the threat of nuclear war, and Trump?
We’re trying to share your hopefulness (laughter).
Well, I do believe America will survive, and I don’t believe America’s days are numbered.
Won’t China take over?
No. China may become the world’s technological leader, but an authoritarian mono-culture won’t be able to lead the world in terms of ideas and ideals.
What would you say we should do with our lives?
I can’t tell you and shouldn’t even try. But I can urge you to do something that makes you feel purposeful, makes moral sense to you, and engages you. And marry someone who you’ll love to bits and who’ll love you to bits back! (Laughter).
Okay. I have a question: What does it feel like to be so old?
Fuck you. I’m not so old. (Laughter.)
You’re old. You could be our grandfather.
I wouldn’t want to be your grandfather! (Laughter.)
Why are you so grouchy?
You’d be grouchy too if your joints ached.
We thought you were grouchy because everything you’ve worked for your entire life has gone to shit.
Yes. There’s that, too.
So what do you do for fun?
Listen to music, write pieces for Substack, make videos and movies, walk, write books, talk with you guys.
Sounds really boring (laughter).
To the contrary, it’s absolutely wonderful. I’m grateful I can still do it. I admit I’ve lost much of my enthusiasm for travel. I’d like to visit China, but, as Philip Larkin once wrote, only on condition I could return home that night. (Laughter.)
Are you afraid of dying?
What kind of a shitty question is that? (Laughter.)
It’s a real question. We assume that anyone who reaches your age must think about it a lot.
I’m not afraid of dying. I’ve had a long and good life. I have a wonderful family and great friends. And as the Grateful Dead said, no one gets out of this alive. Do you guys remember the Grateful Dead?
Um?
I can’t believe how young you all are! A half-century separates us! When I was your age I’m not sure I’d make as much time for anyone as old as I am now. So, I want to thank you for this conversation.
Awww.
Not just for this one conversation but also for keeping me young. I consider myself blessed for having the good fortune to spend most of my time with you and your peers. You inspire me. You push me. You make me laugh. You keep me optimistic and sane. And even though you’re going to inherit the mess my generation left you with, you’re not bitter or angry. You’re eager to rebuild the world!
Yes! Happy birthday! (Laughter and hugs.)
Sherry says
trump’s ICE is the Gestapo . . . this from Adam Kinzinger:
Let’s get one thing straight: in the United States of America, law enforcement officers work for the people. They are public servants, sworn to uphold the Constitution, bound by law, and answerable to those they protect. That’s the theory, anyway.
So why—why—are we now seeing federal agents storm the streets in masks?
This isn’t about undercover work. It’s not about imminent danger or some classified mission. No—this is about ICE raids, street-level detentions, and protest crackdowns where agents—often in full tactical gear—are wearing masks to conceal their identities from the very public they are policing.
Let’s be clear: this is not normal. It is not acceptable. And it is not compatible with a functioning democracy.
Federal officers are now being deployed in American cities to conduct ICE raids and snatch people from sidewalks and demonstrations—without visible name tags, without badge numbers, and often without even identifying what agency they work for. Just masked men grabbing citizens off the street and throwing them into unmarked vehicles. That’s not law enforcement. That’s authoritarianism. It’s what we expect from Putin’s Russia, not the United States of America.
And let’s dispense with the excuses. There is no valid reason why agents operating in public, on American soil, engaging with American citizens, should be wearing masks that shield them from accountability. None. Masks in this context are not about safety—they’re about impunity. Wearing a mask emboldens some to do bad things, similar to comments behind a fake name on the internet.
You can’t file a complaint against a badge number you can’t see. You can’t document misconduct from an officer whose face is hidden. You can’t demand justice when the enforcer of the law is acting like a member of a secret police force.
Sherry says
trump’s big bad bombs did NOT completely destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities:
The US military strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities last weekend did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back by months, according to an early US intelligence assessment that was described by four people briefed on it.
The assessment, which has not been previously reported, was produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm. It is based on a battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command in the aftermath of the US strikes, one of the sources said.
The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing, and could change as more intelligence becomes available. But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also said on Sunday that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “have been obliterated.”
Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely “intact.”
“So the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops,” this person added.
Sherry says
More financial corruption from both Democrats and Republicans:
Meet the DC Bigwigs Literally Profiting of Trump’s Deportations
Joe Perticone
Jun 24
Palantir, the Peter Thiel–founded software and technology company that has played a central role in helping ICE round up and deport as many migrants as possible,¹ is becoming one of the hottest and most lucrative stock picks among members of the 119th Congress.
Since President Donald Trump assumed office in January, seven members of Congress have traded the stock, according to the most recent financial disclosures. In that same time, Palantir’s value has skyrocketed, rising from $73 per share on Trump’s first full day in office to around $140 today.
The members of Congress who have traded Palantir stock in the last few months are:
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)²
Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas)³
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.)
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.)
Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-Pa.)
Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.)
Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-Ind.)⁴
Beyond the halls of Congress, a new report published Tuesday by the Project on Government Oversight revealed that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller owns a large portfolio that includes as much as $250,000 worth of Palantir stock. That means the official directly behind the mass deportation effort is profiting from the very company being boosted by those efforts.
These types of financial entanglements have caused major headaches for past White Houses—think back to Dick Cheney’s financial holdings in Haliburton during the Iraq war. But what’s notable about the Palantir stock holdings is just how widespread it is. In addition to Miller, a dozen more White House officials and appointees are cashing in on the administration’s partnership with Palantir, according to the POGO report.
Ethics experts say Miller’s deep involvement in ICE’s efforts and his financial stake in Palantir raises conflict of interest concerns.
Palantir has attracted controversy in recent months, in part due to bipartisan anxiety about the privacy impacts from its widespread access to government databases and former employees who have decried its work with ICE.
ICE and Palantir’s yearslong relationship continues to deepen, with the technology company recently receiving a lucrative ICE contract without any competition. It’s the type of arrangement that may not bother Republicans in Congress. But it’s one that seems ripe for Democrats to look into should they retake power. That may make for some interesting oversight hearings. But it could also make for some discomfort for those Democrats who traded the stock.