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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 91. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Monday Night: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly before 8pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 75. Chance of precipitation is 60%.
- 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 Flagler County Commission holds a 1 p.m. workshop to discuss the potential leasing of Bull Creek, and to discuss next year’s budget. The commission meets again in a regular session at 5 p.m. Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
The Flagler County Library Board of Trustees meets at 4:30 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The meeting of the seven-member board is open to the public.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, where the City Commission is holding its meetings until it is able to occupy its own City Hall on Commerce Parkway in 2025. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Notably: Carnac. It is one of my favorite places in France, in the world. It’s one of my favorite place names. It is like the Fargo, North Dakota of pre-historic Brittany, its Neolithic dolmens as enigmatic and beautiful in their own way as the caves of Lascaux and Altamira, even without the refinement of the cave paintings. The emotion is there, but it’s different. The cave paintings could have been painted yesterday. They are so alive that you can see the bison breathe and the horses fly. The stones are rooted in time and place with a weight of history you can rarely taste so ruggedly anywhere else. It is those same stones, 2,934 of them, that men and probably women of those tens of thousands of years ago brought here and lined up straight, not with as much symmetry as Stonehenge. The stones of Carnac remind me of the endless caravans of matchbox cars my son used to create across our carpeting in what now feels like our own family pre-history, when we were all so foreign to wrinkles. It’s funny. George Sand didn;t like the dolmens. From her memoirs: “We were indignant about dolmens and menhirs, and we came across festivals where we saw all the costumes that are said to have been abolished and that the old people still wear. Well, it’s ugly, these men of the past with their canvas breeches, their long hair, their jackets with pockets under the arms, their stupid look, half drunk, half devout. And the Celtic debris, undeniably curious for the archaeologist, has nothing for the artist, it is poorly framed, poorly composed, Carnac and Erdeven have no physiognomy. In short, Brittany will not have my bones, I would like your opulent Normandy a thousand times better.” I’m not certain the translation does her justice, but you get the idea. Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban novelist who spent most of his productive years in France (he died in 1980) called them “a few menhirs–piles of stones without art or charm.” Flaubert, in a more jovial mood, called them, with a wink to Onan, “pierres branlantes” (“branler” is the French verb for wanking). Of course on this side of the Atlantic any “Carnac” search usually brings up Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. The magnificence, however, is elsewhere. Like that magnificent scene from Casablanca, below, which one day will drown out our own maggoty maga era. Happy Bastille Day.
—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.
August 2025
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Flagler Beach Planning and Architectural Review Board
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
At nightfall I go alone to the menhirs: the last harvesters returned on carts full of hay, with songs that were lost in the distance, songs that answered each other, the wheat rustled with the cries of crickets. In a bend in the path, indistinct by the darkness, the gray mass of the menhir, lying on the ground in a collapse of four enormous rocks, broken from the same monolith: the impression of a titan knocked down by lightning, fierce and still proud despite its fall. Climbing to the highest point, for a long time I saw the headlights light up one by one in the night, then the stars clearer.
–From André Gide’s Journal, 1887-1925 (1996).
Pogo says
P.T.
The quote of André Gide is quite moving. Thank you.
Pierre Tristam says
Yes, he’s not read as much these days but worth a look.
Ray W, says
This from a Raw Story article on perception changes by Americans toward deportation of immigrants.
Here are some bullet points from the opinion piece:
– Paul Krugman recently published an opinion piece that starts with the fact that President Trump had initially called for mass detentions and mass deportations; he told the American people that “America is facing a huge immigrant crime wave.”
As an aside, I don’t suppose that any FlaglerLive reader would dispute with a straight face that Trump said what Krugman wrote that he said.
– As recently as last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that Los Angeles was not so much a city of immigrants as it was a city of criminals.
As an aside, I don’t suppose that any FlaglerLive reader would dispute with a straight face that Noem said the Krugman wrote that she said.
– During that same last week, LA officials reported that the city “is on track to have the fewest murders in 60 years.”
– A recent Gallup poll shows that when asked whether immigration is a good or bad thing, 79% of respondents call it a “good thing”, whereas 17% see it as a “bad things.”
– Last year, 55% of Americans responded to a poll by answering that immigration numbers should be decreased. This year, the number of respondents who told pollsters that they wanted a decrease in immigration had dropped to 30% of Americans.
From a different perspective, Krugman wrote that:
– Preliminary numbers from a pending report show that 78,000 of all undocumented immigrants had made their way across the border with any type of criminal record, and of those 78,000, 14,000 of those border crossers had been convicted of “violent crimes.”
– Given that Stephen Miller has demanded of ICE agents 3000 arrests per day, it is no surprise, according to Krugman, that we are seeing ICE agents chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots.
– Krugman writes that Americans are beginning to realize that they have been lied to about immigrants, that Trump’s claims that “rapists, murderers, and the worst-of-the-worst from ‘insane asylums'” are coming into the country, and similar claims by other members of the administration, are not true and that because there are so few undocumented immigrants with violent convictions ICE officials are having a hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest.
– Krugman concludes:
“So, Americans may be turning on Trump’s immigration policies in part because they are starting to realize that they’ve been lied to. But an even more important factor may be that more native-born Americans are beginning to see what our immigrants really look like, rather than thinking of them as scary figures lurking in the shadows.”
In a similar story, this one not an opinion piece, the Associated Press (AP) reported on immigration detainee numbers revealed by a recent ICE study (remember that this is an ICE report, not a report from an independent body):
As of June 29, 2025, 57,861 immigrants remain in detention by ICE. Of those, 71.7%, or 41,495, have no criminal convictions. 14,318 of the more than 57,000 detainees face criminal charges. 21,177 are subject to immigration enforcement but have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges.
ICE has established a threat assessment level for detainees, ranging from 1 to 3. If a detainee has no prior record, the assigned assessment number is zero. 84.9% of all detainees at the time of the study had a threat assessment of zero. Seven percent had the highest threat assessment of 1, the highest of the three levels of risk. 4% have been assessed at level 2. 5% received a level 3 threat assessment.
According to the AP story, the Cato Institute (a conservative-leaning think tank that has long maintained a section devoted to immigration issues) developed its own study of those detained in fiscal year 2025.
As of June 14, 2025, more than 204,000 immigrants have been processed into ICE detention facilities for this fiscal year, which began on October 1, 2024.
35% of those processed had a prior conviction of any kind. 6.9% of those with any type of conviction had a record of a violent criminal conviction. 53% of those with any type of conviction had committed non-violent acts that “fell into three main categories — immigration, traffic, or vice crimes.”
The AP reporter, Melissa Goldin, investigated whether immigrants are driving a violent crime wave in the US.
“A 2023 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, reported that immigrants for 150 years have had lower incarceration rates than those born in the U.S. In fact, the rates have declined since 1960 — according to the paper, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated.”
A co-faculty director of UCLA Las School’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy told the reporter:
“There’s a deep disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. … This administration, and also the prior Trump administration, they consistently claim to be going after the worst of the worst and just talk about immigration enforcement as though it is all about going after violent, dangerous people with extensive criminal histories. And yet overwhelmingly, it’s people they’re targeting for arrest who have no criminal history of any kind.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
It is pretty clear from several sources that a significant portion of the detained population of the undocumented have never been arrested for the commission of any type of crime, and that the undocumented, as a group, have long been far less likely than native-born Americans to be incarcerated for the commission of serious crimes.
Nonetheless, a number of FlaglerLive commenters insist on persisting in their efforts to laundering the many lies issued by the professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties.
The quality of one’s educability is key to this issue. Should a FlaglerLive commenter form credulity for a liar, then the liar obtains credibility in the eyes of the commenter. The liar may not have credibility with anyone else, but that is not important to the commenter. The only thing that is important to the commenter is that the liar has become worthy of belief. By this process of forming credulity for a liar, thereby giving credibility to the wrong person, does a commenter make himself uneducable.
Ray W, says
Established in 2021, the joint battery manufacturing venture between GM and LG took another step earlier today, when it was announced that an already existing $3.2 billion Spring Hill, Tennessee, factory would be upgraded in order to manufacture LFP (lithium ferrous phosphate) EV batteries by late 2027.
LFP batteries are cheaper to manufacture, in part, because they do not need expensive materials like cobalt or nickel.
Said Kurt Kulty, vice president of batteries, propulsion and sustainability at GM, in a release:
“This upgrade at Spring Hill will enable us to scale production of lower-cost LFP cell technologies in the U.S., complementing our high-nickel and future lithium manganese rich solutions and further diversifying our growing EV portfolio.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
It is being reported that a disabled U.S. veteran was seized in an immigration roundup and held for three days without access to the court; he was then released without charge.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
If the reporting is true, then is it possible that the constitutional right of an accused to be brought before a judge within 24 hours of detention so that the accused could be notified of the charges on which he or she is being held was violated? And is it possible that the right of an accused to have the issue of bond settled, if appropriate, was violated?
Is it just another day in the life of an executive branch agency charged by an administration official with making 3,000 detentions per day? If bound by a quota, what does that mean for going after only the worst of the worst.
There is only one reason why the Supreme Court resorted to creating the remedy of First Appearances within 24 hours, and that is because before the Court ruled that way people were held for days and weeks without ever seeing a judge. If the executive branch could ever have forced itself to follow the law, judges would not have had to step in.
There is only one reason why the Supreme Court resorted to creating the remedy of an accused being entitled to one phone call upon detention, and that is because before the Court ruled people were being held incommunicado for days and weeks without being able to contact anyone. If the executive branch could ever have forced itself to follow the law, judges wouldn’t have had to step in.
There is only one reason why the Supreme Court resorted to creating an exclusionary remedy for illegal searches and seizures, and that is because before the Court ruled law enforcement officers were routinely violating what the Supreme Court had deemed illegal fifty years earlier. If the executive branch could ever have forced itself to follow the law, judges wouldn’t have had to step in.
Let’s face facts. It’s been 60 years since the Supreme Court applied the exclusionary remedy to state agencies in Mapp v. Ohio, via the 14th amendment. The Court ruled that it had been warning state law enforcement officers since 1914 that what they were doing was illegal, but the state agencies just wouldn’t stop doing what they were doing.
In all those sixty years since the remedy was created, the remedy might have been retracted were prosecutors ever been able to prove to the Court’s satisfaction that law enforcement agencies had taught themselves how to comport with the law.
There will always tension between the necessity to preserve individual liberties and the executive’s demand for more political power, under the guise of safety. And we all know Franklin’s famous quote on that subject.
Ray W, says
Per Fortune, this past weekend Deutsche Bank released a research note based on the question: What if?
What if President Trump forces Fed Chair Powell out of the chairman’s seat early and replaces him with someone who agrees with Trump’s effort to force the Fed to immediately lower short-term lending rates to lending institutions?
From the note:
“We believe the market reaction would be large. … The empirical and academic evidence on the impact of a loss of central bank independence is fairly clear: In extreme cases, both the currency and the bond market can collapse as inflation expectations move higher, real yields drop and broader risk premia increase on the back of institutional erosion.”
More from the note:
“It is stating the obvious that investors would likely interpret such an event as a direct affront to Fed independence, putting the central bank under extreme institutional duress. With the Fed sitting at the pinnacle of the global monetary system, it is also stating the obvious that the consequences would reverberate far beyond U.S. borders.”
Even more from the note:
“It is hard to quantify the impact on FX and rates, but on the first 24 hours of an announcement of a Powell removal, we would expect a drop in the trade-weighted dollar of at least 3%-4%, accompanied by a 30-40bps sell-off in U.S. fixed income led by the back-end. Similar to the experience in April, we would expect the correlation between the bond market and the dollar to turn sharply positive (both down).”
Finally, from the note, Deutsche Bank compared today’s financial conditions to the financial conditions that existed when a U.S. president last attempted to place at the head of the Fed an appointee who was “fixated on lowering interest rates.” At that time, President Nixon appointed Arthur Burns to the Fed’s Chairmanship. Stagflation ran rampant for the rest of the decade. Deutsche Bank wrote of the differences then and now:
“[T]he U.S. is running a much larger twin deficit and negative foreign asset position, capital markets are far more open and disproportionately skewed towards U.S. asset allocation, and the global exchange rate system is free-floating as opposed to fixed. All these ingredients argue for significantly greater global disruption than in the 1970s.”
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
Nearing the end of a 90-day pause in implementation of Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs on the EU, Trump sent a warning letter to EU leadership that if a deal isn’t done by August 1st, then a 30% blanket tariff will be installed on exports to the U.S.
EU trade chief, Maros Sefcovic, told a Newsweek reporter that trade “would become ‘almost impossible.'” He added that “trans-Atlantic supply chains would be heavily affected on both sides” if the EU retaliates with “proportionate countermeasures” after Trump’s tariffs begin.
According to the reporter, “goods” trade between the U.S. and the EU in 2024 totaled more than $1 trillion. As an aside, “services” trade is not included in this figure. The goods trade deficit in favor of the EU was $235.6 billion.
Denmark’s foreign minister, Lars Rasmussen told reporters: “So we want a deal, but there’s an old saying: If you want peace, you have to prepare for war.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I still have no idea how this is going to turn out. Each day seems to bring surprises. Anyone who says otherwise, in my opinion, is just talking trash.
Sherry says
Thank you Ray W.! While you have certainly pointed out “factual” data regarding the crime rates of detained migrants, the troubling problem is that core Maga believers simply do not care what “facts” say. The most passionate Maga cult members refuse to let “factual reality” get in the way of what they have been trained by Fox to believe. Their fear and hate, their prejudices, their biases are now part of the core of their being. They will defend, at all costs, their toxic/immoral point of view no matter what the data says. They are ruled by their negative emotions, not their long lost “thinking ability”. They are victims addicted to the far right winged fear and hate filled ethos.
Is there a cure? Dear God, I certainly hope so, for the sake of all humanity!