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Weather: Partly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 90s. Lows in the mid 70s. Chance of rain 50 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:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at its new location on South 2nd Street, right in front of City Hall, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
The Flagler Beach All Stars hold their monthly beach clean-up starting at 9 a.m. in front of the Flagler Beach pier. All volunteers welcome.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
Flagler Woman’s Club, the civic and social organization, invites you to the organization’s biggest fundraiser ever on Saturday, September 6 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. The Casino Night event will be held at the Italian American Social Club, 45 N. Old Kings Road in Palm Coast. Proceeds will underwrite the club’s 20-some annual charitable initiatives, including scholarships for college-bound Flagler County students. Information and tickets can be purchased at The Woman’s Club website: flaglerwomansclub.org A few more details here.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Juxtapositions: Harry Elmer Barnes (1889-1968), the historian whose name should always be shadowed by the word problematic for his latter-day ideological insanities and Holocaust denialism, and whose pre-folly Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World Ive been quoting on occasion, tells of Marcus Varro, the Roman scholar of the first century BC, known as the era’s greatest thinker and slight chauvinist (he wanted to do to Latin what Emerson wanted American literature to do to Europe’s: assert itself independently). Prolific as he was (600 books, putting him in league with our own Cotton Mather) Varro was himself problematic. “Varro’s facts,” Barnes writes, “are mainly taken from books and embody little personal observation in this way, too, setting an example for medieval compilers with their sublime trust in the written word rather than in the observed fact.” The italics are mine: those medieval compilers have a lot in common with our self-styled “researches” of social media who so triumphantly emerged during the Covid pandemic and have been with us since, rewriting our health protocols, demolishing our school libraries and reducing human dignity to whatever happens to be white and preferably confederate in the moment. The italicized line occurred to me Sunday as I was shopping at Aldi while listening to Zach Helfand’s piece on fact-checking in current The New Yorker. He quotes the novelist Susan Choi, a one-time fact-checker at The New Yorker: “Who cares, in the end? Does it really matter? I think we can safely say no. But, especially right now, we’re in this catastrophic moment where so many people assume they know things that either they don’t know or that aren’t even forms of knowledge. There’s this strange disappearance of humility before the incredible complexity of the world. It’s sort of an epidemic. The deep value in checking is just as a confirmation of how hard it is to know stuff.”
—P.T.
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.
October 2025
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone
‘Avenue Q,’ at City Repertory Theatre
‘Nunsense,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
‘Sweeney Todd’ at Athens Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
‘Nunsense,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
Al-Anon Family Groups
‘Avenue Q,’ at City Repertory Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
“And there could be no question about it: on TV, Reagan won that debate. Then, however, Buckley, devoted a newspaper column to fact-checking him. “We’re being asked to turn over a $10 billion investment,” Reagan had said; the actual amount was $1.02 billion. He said we were bailing out “a Panamanian government that has accumulated the highest per capita debt… of any nation in the world”; actually, U.S. debt was 4.5 times greater. Reagan said Panama got a quarter of its gross domestic product from the Canal; it was 12 percent. Reagan had also spun out terrifying visions of the Canal as a superhighway for enemy warships—but Buckley devastatingly countered that “during the past two world wars, no enemy ship used the Panama Canal,” and that if they ever tried, “our Navy or our Air Force will sink them—just like that!” Re-score it on points for William F. Buckley. If only newspaper columns had as much impact as TV shows that had run many weeks earlier, facts had as much power as stories.”
–From Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 (2020).
Dusty says
The Flagler Womens club is sponsoring the Casino Night this evening but it is actually being held at the Italian American Club in Palm Coast.
Sherry says
trump weaponizing the federal government against his perceived enemies. . . this from the AP:
Trump, his aides and allies throughout the executive branch have trained the government, or threatened to, on a dizzying array of targets:
—He threatened to block a stadium plan for the Washington Commanders football team unless it readopted the racial slur it used as a moniker until 2020.
—He revoked security clearances and tried to block access to government facilities for attorneys at law firms he disfavors.
—He revoked billions of dollars in federal research funds and sought to block international students from elite universities. Under pressure, Columbia University agreed to a $220 million settlement, the University of Pennsylvania revoked records set by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas and presidents resigned from the University of Virginia and Northwestern University.
—He has fired or reassigned federal employees targeted for their work, including prosecutors who worked on cases involving him.
—He dropped corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams to gain cooperation in his crackdown on immigrants living in the country illegally.
—He secured multimillion-dollar settlements against media organizations in lawsuits that were widely regarded as weak cases.
—Attorney General Pam Bondi is pursuing a grand jury review of the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and appointed a special prosecutor to scrutinize New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff.
Sherry says
The ridiculous “SPIN” regarding trump’s weak and stumbling economy. . . This from the AP:
By many measures, Trump has dug himself into a hole on the economy as its performance has yet to come anywhere close to his hype.
— Trump in 2024 suggested that deporting immigrants in the country illegally would protect “Black jobs.” But the Black unemployment rate has climbed to 7.5%, the highest since October 2021, as the Trump administration has engaged in aggressive crackdowns on immigration.
— At his April tariffs announcement, Trump said, “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country and you see it happening already.” Since April, manufacturers have cut 42,000 jobs and builders have downsized by 8,000.
— Trump said in his inaugural address that the “liquid gold” of oil would make the nation wealthy as he pivoted the economy to fossil fuels. But the logging and mining sectors — which includes oil and natural gas — have shed 12,000 jobs since January. While gasoline prices are lower, the Energy Information Administration in August estimated that crude oil production, the source of the wealth promised by Trump, would fall next year by an average of 100,000 barrels a day.
— At 2024 rallies, Trump promised to “end” inflation on “day one” and halve electricity prices within 12 months. Consumer prices have climbed from a 2.3% annual increase in April to 2.7% in July. Electricity costs are up 4.6% so far this year.
The Trump White House maintains that the economy is on the cusp of breakout growth, with its new import taxes poised to raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually if they can withstand court challenges.
At a Thursday night dinner with executives and founders from companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta, Trump said the facilities being built to develop artificial intelligence would deliver “jobs numbers like our country has never seen before” at some point “a year from now.”
But Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that Trump’s promise that strong job growth is ahead contradicts his unsubstantiated claims that recent jobs data was faked to embarrass him. That accusation prompted him to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month after the massive downward revisions in the July jobs report.
Strain said it’s rational for the administration to say better times are coming, but doing so seems to undermine Trump’s allegations that the numbers are rigged.
“The president clearly stated that the data were not trustworthy and that the weakness in the data was the product of anti-Trump manipulation,” Strain said. “And if that’s true, what are we being patient about?”
Sherry says
Hypocrisy knows no bounds in the trump administration. . . this from Reuters:
BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Michigan, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Close relatives of the federal official who has accused a Federal Reserve governor of improperly claiming primary residence on two properties have declared the same status on two homes in two different states, public records show.
Mark and Julie Pulte, the father and stepmother of Bill Pulte, President Donald Trump’s appointee as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, since 2020 have claimed so-called “homestead exemptions” for residences in wealthy neighborhoods in both Michigan and Florida, according to the records. The exemption is meant to give a discount to homeowners on taxes for properties they use as their primary residence.
Ray W. says
Reuters reports that OPEC meets tomorrow to discuss whether to once again this year raise crude oil production, beginning in October.
Here are some bullet points from the article:
– “Until April, OPEC+ had been curtailing production for several years to support oil prices.”
– At its August meeting, OPEC voting member nations raised crude oil production by 547,000 barrels per day, beginning in September. According to the reporter, OPEC+ member nations produce “about half of the world’s oil.”
– Thus far this year, OPEC has increased its overall crude oil production by 2.5 million barrels per day.
– An “OPEC+ source” said that October’s production increase will be 135,000 barrels per day. Another source said that the increase will be between 200,000-350,000 barrels per day.
– There has been a difference between this year’s announced output increases and actual output increases, with actual output increases falling short of the announced output increases.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Mr. Tristam hit the nail on the head. Far too many FlaglerLive commenters simply type things that, perhaps, make themselves feel good, regardless of whether the comment is accurate or true. Typing lies and engaging in lie laundering has become endemic on the FlaglerLive site, as if such actions are virtuous. Lies laundered for political gain will never be an act of virtue.
This is something no one can dispute without lying. OPEC member nations, including its associate members, have been manipulating international crude oil prices for profit since the original vote to do so occurred in February 2021, yet a small number of FlaglerLive commenters repeatedly claim that Biden administration policies were to blame for the high gasoline prices at the pump over the ensuing months, at least until OPEC member nations voted to reverse their prior output cuts.
Here is another thing no one can dispute without lying. In 2022, a new and highly virulent strain of the bird flu was detected in an American egg farm, spread by wild birds during migration. Since that time, egg farmers have been culling infected birds in huge numbers. Egg prices have been rising and falling, depending on whether wild birds are defacating over American egg farms while migrating. We are in a pause between migrations, and egg prices are down. A small number of FlaglerLive commenters claimed then and continue to claim that Biden administration policies drove up egg prices.
Ray W. says
According to an Alternet reporter, during a recent Fox News broadcast segment, Stephen Miller stated:
“The Democrat Party … is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
From the earliest days of my commenting to FlaglerLive readers, I have argued that we as a people are entering a long-term age of increasing political violence, i.e., that there is a sickness across the land, a sickness spread by members of a professional lying class that sits atop one of our two political parties. A number of FlaglerLive commenters, infected by the sickness, launder on this site lies issued by those members of the professional lying class, to everyone’s detriment.
Stephen Miller is not issuing a warning, he is issuing a call to violent political action.
Ray W. says
Yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Services (BLS) issued its first monthly paychecks report since President Trump fired its director. The report for the month of August showed that 22,000 more workers earned paychecks in August compared to those earning paychecks in July. The unemployment rate rose from 4.2% to 4.3%. June’s job growth figure was revised downward from the previously released positive number to a job decline figure for the month. Excepting the two months of negative jobs numbers during the initial phases of the pandemic, June’s job loss figure was the first monthly negative job figure reported by the BLS since 2010.
Of the many news outlets that covered the BLS report, Business Insider posted a story titled: “3 big things you need to know about the economy following today’s brutal jobs report”
The reporter framed the story on several points.
First, economists had expected a paychecks added figure of 75,000.
Second, given the revised negative number for June, David Kelly, chief global strategist for JPMorgan Asset Management, said:
“The numbers this morning are quite consistent with other things we’ve been seeing on the jobs market, and it suggests that the economy is running out of momentum.”
Third, data released before the Friday BLS report revealed that for the first time since 2021, there were more unemployed persons than there were posted jobs openings.
As an aside, an ideal open jobs ratio to the number of the unemployed ranges between 1 to 1 and 1.2 to 1.
So what are the three things the reporter wanted readers to know?
1. “Job seeker’s frustrations about a frozen market are even more justified”
Nine major sectors of the economy saw job declines in August, compared to a “handful” of sectors that saw job gains, suggesting that certain limited employment sectors are propping up the overall economy.
Manufacturing employment fell for the fourth straight month, in particular in the “durable goods” sector. Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the reporter that the durable goods manufacturing sector is where “we would expect to see the clearest effects of tariffs.”
Mr. Kelly told the reporter that businesses do not yet want to lay off workers, but they are “too uncertain” to hire them.
2. “Interest rate cuts are coming”
The next FOMC meeting chaired by Fed Chair Powell is set for September 17.
Given the “dismal” jobs reports over the past few months, many economists predict a lending rate cut announcement after that meeting.
But a lending rate cut, according to Mark Hamrick, Bankrate’s senior economic analyst, “would not have hugely consequential implications for the lives of most Americans. … However, if it is the beginning of a sustained rate reduction campaign, that would be more meaningful, reducing economic headwinds and potentially giving the housing market a boost.”
The reporter opined that whether there is a cut, either by 25 basis points or 50 basis points, might depend on the upcoming release of the consumer price index (CPI) figures.
3. “Despite how the job market looks, the US is still not in a recession”
In the estimations of a number of economists with whom Business Insider reporters have talked, America is not in recession yet, nor is it inevitable that a recession is coming. But there are indicators trending in that direction.
Wrote the reporter: “Real gross domestic product growth looked healthy in the second quarter on its surface, but its growth was largely due to a fall in imports after businesses previously stocked up due to tariff tensions. Real personal consumption expenditures have had modest growth recently.”
One issue is one of perception. Said Mr. Kelly to the reporter:
“I think that people who’ve lived through the great financial crisis and the pandemic recession don’t recognize a slow slowdown in the economy. … That’s what we’ve got.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
For months now, I have cautioned restraint over conclusions drawn from implementation of the current administration’s policies, particularly tariff policies. People should not react too strongly to short-term economic news, but they shouldn’t ignore them, either.
For example, GDP growth in the second quarter of 2025 was 3.3%, a very healthy figure. But that healthy figure followed an unhealthy decline in GDP of 0.5% in the first quarter of 2025.
Numerous reports attribute the decline in GDP during the first quarter of 2025 to the billions and billions of dollars that flowed out of our economy prior to the widespread imposition of tariffs on “Liberation Day.” Businesses that rely on imports stocked up on foreign-made goods in order to mitigate the impact of the coming tariffs, a very wise tactic. But with inventories bulging from the first-quarter purchasing binge, businesses significantly reduced their purchases of foreign-made goods in the second quarter.
Combining the large outflow of money during the first quarter with the large drop in the outflow of money during the second quarter, over the first six months of 2025, GDP growth was an average of 1.4%, a figure that cannot be considered healthy. Yet one of our more myopic, and consistently gullibly innumerate FlaglerLive commenters has been crowing about the 3.3% second-quarter GDP growth figure ever since it was released, not knowing what the figure really means.
Laurel says
Terrible jobs report. Trump has fall guys all around him. Must fire more. Maybe “Big Balls” can help him with better numbers next month.