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Weather: Sunny. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Southeast winds around 5 mph, becoming east with gusts up to 20 mph in the afternoon. Chance of rain 30 percent. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the lower 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph.
- 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:
In Court: It’s pre-trial day, 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m..
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) meets at 9 a.m. at the Airline Room at the Daytona Beach International Airport. The TPO’s planning oversight includes all of Volusia County and the developed areas of eastern Flagler County including Beverly Beach and Flagler Beach as well as portions of the cities of Palm Coast and Bunnell, with board member representation from each of those jurisdictions. See the full agendas here. To join the meeting electronically, go here.
‘Let’s Talk Palm Coast’ Town Halls with Council Members: The City of Palm Coast is hosting a series of town halls, offering residents the chance to meet face-to-face with their City Council Members, ask questions, and learn more about the inner workings of their local government. At 6 p.m. today in the Waterfront Room at the Palm Coast Community Center, residents can meet with Vice Mayor Theresa Pontieri in a relaxed and conversational setting. This new initiative provides an open forum for residents to share feedback, ask questions, and engage in meaningful dialogue about city services, community development, and the future of Palm Coast. Council members Charles Gambaro, Ty Miller and Dave Sullivan are holding town halls in subsequent months. Mike Norris is refusing to do so. See: “Abandoning Most Public Responsibilities, But Not Pay, Palm Coast Mayor Norris Forces Council Members to Pick Up Slack.”
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.
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]
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.
Notebook: We now deny transgender people the right to exist. It’s that simple. They’re America’s Palestinians, if America were Israel–not a stretch, Israel being the 51st and most-favored state, redder than Wyoming, Alabama and West Virginia’s combined pride-smashing flags. So many commonalities. Palestinian history, geography and identity are not recognized. Flying the Palestinian flag is prohibited in Israel and the territories under military occupation. In Fagler schools flying the Pride flag is prohibited, safe spaces are prohibited (compliments of Christy Chong), recognizing a student’s gender preferences and gender pronouns is prohibited. I’d be curious to know the death tally. Of course Israel made that no contest in the past couple of years with its obliteration of Gaza, but in the aggregate, the suicides in the LGBTQ community add up, and must have at least some commonality with the killing of Palestinians. This is human rights today, a revanchist erasure of entire populations, triumphantly and mostly to the silence of a world that lets it happen. Then again, what are we to expect from, say, the Arab world, where both Palestinians and LGBTQ people are more repressed, hated and marginalized than anywhere else in the world, with rare exceptions? Underground support groups in those places must be fascinatingly tragic.
—P.T.
Now this: How an L.G.B.T.Q. HotLine Became a Lifeline: “The Callers” | The New Yorker Documentary.
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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
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
County Attorney Candidate Interviews
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
For the full calendar, go here.
Some of the most deplorable episodes in U.S. history involve the government wielding the power of the state against minority groups: Black people, Indigenous people and gay people, to name just a few. Though these campaigns might have received popular support at the time, history has consistently judged them as immoral, illegal and un-American. Rather than understanding this history, President Trump is borrowing from the worst of it. One of the very first acts of his second term was to order the government to view gender as immutable and discriminate against transgender citizens. “As of today,” he declared in his Inaugural Address, “it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” […] Anti-transgender politicians spent at least $215 million to scapegoat transgender people for a variety of social ills. The Republican Party has increasingly viewed attacking trans rights as a political winner, much as it did attacking civil rights during Richard Nixon’s presidency and attacking gay rights in George W. Bush’s. That posture was disgracefully reflected in the speed and glee with which House Republicans barred transgender women from using women’s restrooms on Capitol Hill after the election of Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender member of Congress. As for Mr. Trump, he won power by caricaturing and demonizing trans people; now he is using that power to harm trans people. […] Mr. Trump’s targeting of transgender Americans will go far beyond the military. And his instinct for demonization, his habit of dividing the public into those worthy of protection and those who should be cast aside, his habitual cruelty to those who can be pushed around without others speaking up will go far beyond a campaign against this one small, vulnerable group. As these campaigns continue, Americans would do well to remember the hard-won lessons of our history.
–From “Trump’s Shameful Campaign Against Transgender Americans,” New York Times editorial, Feb. 9, 2025. .
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Dennis C Rathsam says
Why is it, the only party that fights for America is the GOP! Obama gave Iran billions of dollars,which then they turned around & fueled terrorists in the Middle East? Obama gave them the monies to kill hundreds of Americans. Biden open the flood gates to Invaders from around the world….No one was vetted, democrates all wanted these people here so they could make them democratic voters, & control the USA for ever. Hence, the great deportation now that we have a real president, not an empty suit! Bush had the balls to use force, TRUMP, takes no shit from anyone, as you all have witnessed! Today America is safer, & so is the world! Putin called TRUMP to broker peace in IRAN! TRUMP told him, he didnt need help with the war. He needed someone to help him with you! TRUMPS like the eveready bunny, he works non stop. Now he,s engaging with the PM of the Neatherlands, & later this morning he will address NATO!
Ed P says
Criticism of the Trump administration is not actually rooting for failure. When someone believes a policy is wrong, of course they should voice their opinions.
However, chronic resistance of “everything Trump” is railing against America and our success.
If intellectual honesty still existed on the left, they would not be bashing even their own colleagues when a Trump success is apparent and their colleagues dare to agree. Not praise, just agree.
As the Dems continue to allow the extreme left to define the party, moderates are drifting away. The lunes are exposed. Common sense is more common than the Washington bubble knows.
As the resistance keeps moving left, irrelevance gets closer.
Scooby Doo says
To quote in my Dad’s Pittsburg vernacular, ………. ” Trump is as Useless as Tits on a Bull ” ( he being a Veteran and a lifelong Republican )
Ray W, says
During yesterday’s testimony to the House, Fed Chair Powell was asked to discuss the quality of currently produced Bureau of Labor Services statistics, on which statistics the politically independent Fed in large part relies when it considers economic policy decisions.
His answer?
“I wouldn’t say that I’m concerned about the data today, although there has been a very mild degradation of the scope of the surveys. … But I would say the direction of travel is something I’m concerned about. … It’s really important not just for the Fed, but for Congress and for businesses, frankly, to know what is really going on in the economy. … I don’t like to see the kind of stories I’m reading and the idea being that the data is going to become more volatile and less reliable. That’ll make it more difficult for the private sector and for you and for us.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I have been commenting off and on for the past few months about articles focusing not only on employee cuts to the government statistical oversight agency charged with the duty to ensure that other government data collection agencies follow statistically reliable methodologies, but also on employee cuts to the other government data collection agencies.
In summary, there has been a string of stories in the news about cuts in funding for positions to a number of agencies charged with producing statistical data on which Congress, the Fed and the private sector rely.
Here is yet another of such stories:
Markets Insider asked the great question (paraphrased): What would happen to data-driven government agencies should the inflation data or the employment data or the myriad of other economic data on which those agencies rely no longer be statistically accurate?
The Markets Insider reporter pointed out that a third Bureau of Labor Services data collection center, this one based in Buffalo, New York, suspended all data collection efforts on June 16, with two other data collection centers having already suspended their data collection efforts in Lincoln, Nebraska and Provo, Utah, respectively (I commented on these first two closures a short while ago).
According to the author, the number of open data collection centers across the country is now 75. Each month, data collection center employees, if there are enough of them, fan out across their data collection regions to collect price data on 200 “item categories.”
In a normal collection month, 10% of the 200 category prices collected for the overall CPI summary are “imputed” by the 75 individual data centers from data imported from other regions, because accurate prices for the items cannot be found in the particular region, either due to lack of manpower to find the products or an inability of the data collector to find the individual product at issue.
This past May’s BLS collected pricing data for use in calculating the consumer price index (CPI) had a 30% “imputation” rate. Not only have three data collection centers suspended all efforts of collecting data, there also appears that there are simply too few data surveyors in the remaining centers to collect the data in the more statistically reliable manner that they used to collect it.
This 30% imputation fact, according to Torsten Slok, Apollo’s chief economist, means that “data quality” has been reduced. “In other words,” he wrote in a note published to investors, “almost a third of the prices going into the CPI at the moment are guesses based on other data collections in the CPI.”
Is it a fair comparison to argue that the Fed is at the initial point of wondering how it is to come to grips with the fact that basing decisions for the future of a $30 trillion economy will have to come from statistical “guesses”, primarily due to federal statistical employee cuts and on data collection center “suspensions” of data collection?
My point?
Since WWII, the United States government has been the world leader in providing accurate statistically based economic data to the world, to the Fed, to the American government, and to the business sector. In a few short months, that long-established statistical foundation has gone from relative accuracy to increasingly guesstimating. What happens when the private sector can no longer rely on the accuracy of government data to make business decisions?
Steve says
I agree Ed.P . I may not like most of it, especially how its said and done bu I dont disagree entirely
Skibum says
It is exceedingly disingenuous, and actually laughable as well, for the president or anyone else at this early stage to speculate about 1) Iran’s nuclear capabilities having been totally “obliterated”, 2) Iran never being able to restart their uranium enrichment program, or 3) that none of Iran’s uranium discs had been moved out of Fordo or the other facilities that were just bombed a few days ago. Defense and intelligence experts who are NOT among drumph’s maga talking heads in his administration consistently say to have patience, as a comprehensive BDA (battle damage assessment) will take several weeks and we will need to have multiple sources of intelligence gathered in order to know how extensively damaged the three bombed sites were, and whether or not any or all of Iran’s centrifuges and existing uranium have been destroyed, or if some of it had been moved prior to the bombing run.
Drumph ALWAYS uses the most far fetched expletives and ALWAYS exaggerates to the fullest extent the things he does, as if nobody else on earth could possibly come close to the “excellence” of his grandiose actions… I would bet he thinks there isn’t one damn person on earth who has the capacity to tie their shoes as well as the man-child ties his shoes!
We ALL know how much he lies, and that whenever he opens his mouth nothing pours forth out of that hole in his face but more and more shit every time he talks, so there is no reason at all for anyone to get all excited about what may or may not have actually been accomplished in Iran at this early stage, no matter how many of his syncophants stand in front of microphones and tout the maga talking points without incontrovertible evidence to support their blabber.
Also, it was just reported earlier today that drumph says he is willing to negotiate with Iranian leaders and that includes offering to release confiscated Iranian funds that have been withheld from them if they are willing to cooperate in the negotiations. Well, well, well! That is exactly what he and other republi-cons had previously decried and condemned Barack Obama for agreeing to when the previous JCPOA was signed and president Obama released millions of dollars of withheld Iranian funds back to Iran! See, I told all of you maga mush brains to just wait and watch carefully because if there is any negotiations and agreements made with Iran we are going to see either the exact same thing or something very similar to what was already previously agreed to except this agreement will be one with drumph’s signature attached because he never likes ANY negotiated agreements except for the ones with his name on it. You can take that to the bank.
Ed P says
Skibum,
And yet, no one know if any of your claims about Iran are true or not. Why not just wait for the “real” intel to be exposed and then comment?
Guessing, forecasting, or hypothetical criticism proves to wrong most of the time.
Kind of like the tariffs. We still don’t know. Patience is a virtue.
Laurel says
Dennis: “Why is it, the only party that fights for America is the GOP!” That’s simply what you believe, and it’s all you listen to. Hubby and I just stayed at a hotel. The TV in our room, when turned on, went directly to Newsmax. Now, I’ve seen some Fox Entertainment shows, which were very misleading, and full of falsehoods, but this threw me for a loop! The commentator on Newsmax was saying all kinds of false things, such as “Democrats are communists,” like it’s a newsworthy fact. Wow! Would you call this “journalism?” There was a lot more, but I’m not going there. It was just awful the way he talked. Very biased, and nasty.
I’ve been watching PBS since I was a child, and I watch PBS News Hour now. I have never heard them call Republicans names. I have never heard them call magas fascists. They often interview Republicans. But Newsmax blatantly supports, and talks up Trump, who called our past President “incompetent” and “stupid,” while VP Vance called them “dumb.” This in front of all of us, and all the world to see. Is that maga “patriotism?”
So, when I look at these stations that maga listens to, all day long, it starts to make sense why they believe what they do. Sorry, man, it’s not the brain trust. They are being fed what they want to consume. Maybe you should change the channel, at least part of the time. Do yourself a favor. Most of your comments border on hysteria, and sound very much like the show I witnessed.
Laurel says
Past Presidents (plural)
“As US President Donald Trump announced raising tariffs on China to 125 per cent because of a “lack of respect”, in an interaction with the media, he said the step should have been taken years ago.”
“”Trump also blamed previous Presidents and said they had been “stupid”, “incompetent” and “did not have the courage” to do so.””
– News 18
In my opinion, no President of United States of America should call our past Presidents incompetent and stupid, to be heard around the world. This man doesn’t have courage, and he doesn’t have any shame though he should have a great deal of it. He calls our free press “scum.” He should hold a mirror to his own face.
I cannot believe anyone voted for this crap. Not here.
Republicans, it is up to you to take your party back from all this negativity and nastiness. Do it, or forever be stuck with it.