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Weather: A 30 percent chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 75. Monday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 63.
- 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: No felony court docket today.
The Flagler County Commission meets at 9 a.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell, and again at 1 p.m. for a workshop. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here. Meetings stream live on the Flagler County YouTube page.
Palm Coast Charter Review Committee Meeting: The city’s committee, appointed by the City Council to propose revisions to the city charter, meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall, 160 Lake Ave. The committee is made up of Patrick Miller, Ramon Marrero, Perry Mitrano, Michael Martin and Donald O’Brien. The meeting is moderated by Georgette Dumont, an independent moderator and the Director of the Master of Public Administration program at the University of North Florida. The meeting is open to the public and includes a public-comment segment.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements here.
Holiday Plant Class Series: Discover the joy of plants this December with the Master Gardener Volunteers. UF/IFAS Extension Flagler County, 150 Sawgrass Road Bunnell (county fairgrounds.) This special class series offers expert tips, seasonal inspiration, and a take-home plant to enjoy all winter long. Proceeds directly support the Master Gardener Volunteer Program, helping us cultivate community and share the love of gardening. Join us each day for hands-on classes with our Master Gardener Volunteers and take home beautiful plants! Plant sale: 2–3 p.m. daily, December 1-7, first come, first served. You may make your reservation here.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 57 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
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.
Storytime: Peter Taylor’s “Allegiance,” from 1947. An American soldier, posted in England late in the war, responds to an invitation to visit an aunt who lives there and who’s long been estranged from the family back in Nashville over an unclear but, as the unnamed narrator describes it, deep betrayal of his mother, “a sister she cheated in a manner so subtle and base that we have never known nor wished to know its nature, and now never shall.” How often have we all known those conflicts that poison extended family lines, time and distance more than the original slight fueling the estrangement into irremediable truths and with the carcereal dogma of founding myths. The soldier is conflicted about having accepted the invitation. His inner conflict maintains a distance during the visit as he recalls how the aunt used to write unanswered notes and letters to his mother, who would read them out loud and burn them. The invitation, he feels, was one more way for the aunt to get an advantage. “I feel now how right were my mother’s claims that this woman could endure anything to gain her ends.” But we still never know what those ends are. The myth is too powerful not to have turned into a prism that refracts every act, forbidding the soldier to break his allegiance to his mother. She invites him back in the same breath as she asks him to leave, claiming to have an engagement she had forgotten about. Maybe she was merely toying with him. He is bothered, and is brutal: “But I cannot come here again,” he tells her as she “shrouds herself again in her grand ignorance.” He is “filled with disgust for her” and “shall leave now believing what I wished to believe and what this room and this woman have for a time caused me to doubt: that my mother was good because she was simple and unworldly, that my aunt is evil because she is complicated and worldly.” It isn’t exactly an indictment of the aunt, nor of the soldier’s allegiance even as he confesses to a mind “troubled by a doubt for the reaklity of all things” as he wanders the streets of London, “haunted for a while by an unthinkable distrust for the logic and rarefied judgments oof my dead mother,” and feeling as if “still a prisoner in her parlor at Nashville.” Allegiance is rarely a single-edged sword.
Now this: Peter Taylor and John Updike:
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.
December 2025
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
Al-Anon Family Groups
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Nar-Anon Family Group
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
I am remembering little notes that my mother used to read aloud, notes placed unanswered on the fire in the parlor at Nashville. Now I can visualize their being penned at this little desk shielded by the Japanese screen. I can picture her counting such notes among correspondence that she must “take care of” on a day when the weather isn’t fine. Mere polite inquiries they were into the health of us all with a few chatty words at the end about how early a spring London was enjoying that year or some amusing and endearing household incident-something about her ancient, now dead, but once ever-ailing English husband or about her adored stepchildren. They were notes written in an even hand and there was never any rancor or remorse in them. And there was no reference, ever, to my mother’s failure to reply. Their tone presumed it to be simply a matter of temperament. She was a person who did write let-ters, my mother a “quiet” person who didn’t. But my mother used to say, “It’s beautiful, beautiful. Her selfish ends are long since accomplished. Now she develops a sort of mystical, superhuman ignorance of what has been transpiring.”
–From Peter Taylor’s “Allegiance” (1947).
Dennis C Rathsam says
TRUMP Derangement Syndrone, echos through the emptey minds of Democrats everywhere.
YankeeExPat says
D.C.M.
Trumpilstilskin cant even cut it as a legitimate Dictator, he is more like a cut rate mopey Mussolini.
But you have to admit he is a Dick!
“Merry Christmas from an Independent N.P.A. since 1999 to present, and former Reagan Republican from 1980” !
Laurel says
In my opinion, the man is completely evil. What’s worse, is Vance is there should Trump leave early.
I saw a video where three men in masks jumped out of an unmarked van, surrounding a young woman in a parking lot. They blocked her path, in a threatening way, and started asking a lot of questions that were none of their business, while closing in on her. If that woman was me, I’d be screaming for help at the top of my lungs! There is NO excuse for this!
Our country is currently in a very bad place.
Laurel says
Fellow Americans:
Those of you who don’t know how fascism works, or maybe you think you know how fascism takes over, do yourselves a favor and go to YouTube and look up “Are We Witnessing Fascism?” By Robert Reich. It is 41 minutes long, and explains how it is brought on, step by step. It also explains Project 2025, and how it is infiltrating our country. Don’ t assume anything before you watch it, just watch it. Then, come back here, and tell me if this is what you voted for, and what you wanted for our country. It you truly watch the video, I’m gambling that this is NOT what you want for your country.
Thanks,
Laurel
Ray W. says
Perhaps it is time again to point to Winston Churchill’s radio address to the world the evening after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
In the words of Martin Gilbert, the official Churchill family historian:
“Churchill’s broadcast began with a survey of his own attitude to Communism since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The Nazi regime, he said, ‘is indistinguishable from the worst features of Communism. It is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination. It excels all forms of human wickedness in the efficiency of its cruelty and ferocious aggression.'”
Then the speech:
“No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. The past, with its crimes, its follies, and its tragedies, flashes away.
“I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray – ah, yes, for there are times when all pray – for the safety of their loved ones, the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.
“I see advancing upon all this in hideous onslaught the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldiery plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. I see the German bombers and fighters in the sky, still smarting from many a British whipping, delighted to find what they believe is an easier and safer prey.
“I have to declare the decision of His Majesty’s Government – and I feel sure it is a decision in which the great Dominions will in due course concur – for we must speak out now at once, without a day’s delay.
“I have to make the declaration, but can you doubt what our policy will be? We have but one aim and one single, irrevocable purpose. We are resolved to destroy Hitler and every vestige of the Nazi regime. From this nothing will turn us – nothing.
“We will never parley, we will never negotiate with Hitler or any of his gang. We shall fight him by land, we shall fight him by sea, we shall fight him in the air, until, with God’s help, we have rid the earth of his shadow and liberated its peoples from his yoke. Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. Any man or state who marches with Hitler is our foe.
“That is our policy and that is our declaration. It follows therefore that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people. We shall appeal to all our friends and allies in every part of the world to take the same course and pursue it, as we shall, faithfully and steadfastly to the end. …
In Gilbert’s words, “[t]he German invasion of Russia, Churchill said, was ‘no more than a prelude’ to an attempted invasion of Britain. Hitler hoped, no doubt, to defeat Russia ‘before the winter comes’, and then to turn his forces upon Britain, ‘before the Fleet and air power of the United States may intervene’. By continuing to destroy his enemies one by one, a process by which ‘he has so long thrived and prospered’, Hitler hoped the scene would be clear ‘for the final act’, the subjugation of the Western Hemisphere ‘to his will and system.’
“The Russian danger is therefor our danger, and the danger of the United States, just as the cause of any Russian fighting for his hearth and home is the cause of free men and free peoples by such cruel experience. Let us redouble our exertions and strike with united strength while life and power remain.”
Then the aftermath of the speech:
Later that night, Gilbert portrays, the debate over the finer points of Britain’s government policy continued at Churchill’s home.
From the diary of one of Churchill’s personal assistants:
“Eden and Cranborne took the Tory standpoint that if there was [a debate in the House of Commons] it should be confined to the purely military aspect, as politically Russia was as bad as Germany and half the country would object to being associated with her too closely. The PM’s view was that Russia was now at war; innocent peasants were being slaughtered; and we should forget about Soviet systems or the Comintern and extend our hand to fellow human-beings in distress. The argument was brilliant and extremely vehement. I have never spent a more enjoyable evening.
“Later, the night being very warm, we all walked in the garden and I gossiped with Edward Bridges while the PM continued an onslaught, begun at dinner, on the people who had let us in for this most unnecessary of all wars. He was harsh about Chamberlain whom he called ‘the narrowest, most ignorant, most ungenerous of all men’. At dinner, it had been Chatfield whom he belaboured and the people at the Admiralty and elsewhere whose desire for ‘absurd self-abasement had brought us to the verge of annihilation’.
“On going to bed the PM kept on repeating how wonderful it was that Russia had come in against Germany when she might so easily have been with her. He is also very pleased with our daylight sorties by fighters which, today and yesterday, accounted for 58 enemy planes over France for the loss of 3 pilots. We seem to command the daylight air over enemy territory as well as our own.”
Make of this what you will whenever, if ever, you think of what Putin and his gang are doing to the Ukraine. Putin intends to destroy all vestiges of the Ukrainian people, their government, their military, their language, their customs, their very being as a free people.
Does every FlaglerLive reader understand Churchill’s resolve to crush at whatever cost Prussian militant aggression and Nazi nationalism? Does everyone understand the import of Churchill’s bitter words directed at those of his countrymen who appeased at every step save one Hitler’s deceptive aim of subjugating the Western Hemisphere?
The evident display of Russian militant aggression is why nearly every European nation, save two, supports the Ukraine against Russia’s cruel aspirations. They understand Churchill’s admonitions. When these European nations openly state that the Ukraine must be supported economically and militarily until Russia leaves every square meter of Ukrainian soil and sovereignty, including Crimea, are these nation’s giving voice yet again to Churchill’s theme and his government’s policy?
Is China watching? Japan? Taiwan? Vietnam? The Philippines? Australia? What effect will ripple if the United States appeases Russian militant aggression at the expense of the Ukraine?
Ray W. says
Fortune reports that, in the opinion of a former New York Fed president, Bill Dudley, President Trump’s appointment of Stephen Miran to the Fed had little impact on the Fed’s September vote to lower lending rates by 25 basis points, or 0.25%.
Prior to his appointment, Miran had openly called for larger rate cuts of at least 50 basis points, or 0.5%. At the September Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, Mr. Miran maintained his position. The 12 FOMC voting members voted 11-1 to limit the rate cut to 0.25%.
When asked after the meeting of how “seriously” the committee viewed a larger rate cut, Fed Chair Powell said:
“[T]heir wasn’t widespread support at all for [that].”
Mr. Miran had also previously mentioned that the Fed has a “third mandate”, which is to, in the reporter’s words, “target moderate long-term rates”.
The two widely accepted Fed mandates are to seek price stability and to maximize employment.
Said Fed Chair Powell of Miran’s described third mandate:
“We haven’t thought about that for a very long time as a third mandate that requires independent action. … So that’s where that is. And there’s no thought, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no thought of considering that we somehow incorporate that in as something in a different way.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I have repeatedly posted comments to the FlaglerLive community about Fed policy and Fed mandates.
Every five years or so, Fed members meet to determine which policies will drive future debate over lending rate decisions. Leading economists are invited to pose possible policy changes to the 19-member Fed management team. A wide spectrum of economic thought is encouraged, after which testimony the Fed chooses its policy parameters for the next five years. Policy changes are not discussed during FOMC meetings.
For example, it wasn’t until the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 that Fed members, in 2012, finally accepted 2% inflation as a Fed policy directive. Many other nations select different percentages as a policy target. But after decades of debate, the Fed finally selected 2% as its policy in which to frame discussion.
Our president has long pushed for an immediate and massive lending rate reduction from the mid-3% range to 1%, a cut that many economists oppose. Mr. Miran has openly supported quicker and larger rate cuts. But when he met with the other 18 members of the Fed’s team, 12 of which possessing voting powers, the voters chose 11-1 to deny the appropriateness of a larger rate cut under the existing economic policy framework.
I am not arguing that Miran is wrong in seeking to add a third mandate to the policy discussion at each FOMC meeting. In time, that position may come to pass.
What I am arguing is that once the FOMC adopts a five-year policy framework, then anyone named to the Fed team must consider their vote from the policy framework in existence at the time, else monetary policy careen and bend to whichever political winds blow the hardest.
Fed members learned long ago to not bend to political winds. The last time a Fed chair bent to a president’s whims occurred during the Nixon administration. That Fed chair manipulated economic policy to keep lending rates excessively low during a high inflation environment. We call that period a time stagflation, a period that lasted some 15 years and spanned five presidencies. Finally, a new Fed chair persuaded committee members to jack up lending rates to as high as 20%. Inflation was finally tamed, but it took years to tame it.
Ray W. says
I just framed a comment around recent appointee Stephen Miran’s argument that a “third” mandate exists that supports a push for the Fed to rapidly lower lending rates, despite a history of policy caution pointing in the other direction.
Here is an article by Fortune that supports the exercise of Fed policy caution.
According to the reporter, the Fed’s recently issued “Summary of Economic Projections” holds that the American economy will grow through 2028, albeit at a rather slow growth rate. GDP growth is expected to be 1.4% during 2025 and 1.8% during 2026. Unemployment is projected to fall from 4.5% to 4.2% by 2028.
Given this projected outcome of two rather important economic activities trending in a positive direction, the reporter asked why did the Fed continue to cut the lending rate at the September FOMC meeting?
The reporter opined:
“Normally, if a central bank believes the economy is growing and unemployment is falling, then it would keep interest rates on hold or even raise them to guard against the inflation that usually occurs when a tightening labor market meets increased demand from employers.”
According to the reporter, the head of investment strategy at SoFi, Liz Thomas, thinks the Fed “might be playing with fire” with this continuing trend of rate cuts.
Ms. Thomas said:
“The problem is, the Fed’s rate cut projection moved down in both 2025 and 2026, meaning the committee sees more rate cuts coming than it did in June. Why cut more if the economy is expected to strengthen and inflation is expected to rise? Something isn’t adding up.”
And the reporter did not rely on Ms. Thomas alone.
According to a Deutsche Bank analyst, Jim Reid, in the reporter’s words, “the Fed appears to be behaving as if a recession is on the cards, even though [Deutsche Bank] projections show that it’s not.”
Said Mr. Reid:
“The Fed has now delivered 125bps of rate cuts since September 2024, and both the dot plot and market pricing are pointing towards another two rate cuts by year-end. This is an interesting backdrop, as even with the 125bps already delivered, you have to go back to the 1980s for the last time they cut that rapidly in a non-recessionary environment.”
The story concludes with a quote from Ms. Thomas:
Make of this what you will.
Me?
I began seeking out economic articles on government policies a few years after the Japanese commercial sector melt-down that started in the late-1980s. I knew I did not know enough to understand what had happened, so I began to pay attention to it.
Over 30-some intervening years, I have read about numerous political policy interventions from governments all over the world, governments that repeatedly undermined central bank policy, many to negative economic effect.
That does not make me an economist, far from it. At best, I am a curious student.
But I am not ready to agree that stacking our central bank policy committee with pestilential political wannabes is a good thing. The last thing our economy needs is a mercurial president putting pestilential political wannabes at the helm of our central bank.
Ray W. says
Here is a third article about economic risks to our economy should the Fed cut lending rates too rapidly.
According to a reporter for Fortune, a financial news outlet, “[t]he Federal Reserve faces a daunting challenge in seeking to guide the U.S. economy clear of stagflation.”
After a September meeting of the Federal Open Markets Committee, at which the twelve voting members of the committee elected to cut Fed lending rates by 25 basis points, or 0.25%, Fed Chair Powell delivered a remark that the is “no risk-free path” for the central bank.
In the reporter’s words:
“[Fed Chair Powell’s] frank admission highlights how policy makers are navigating an environment marked by persistent inflation and slowing economic growth, with significant risks on every side.”
He added:
“So we have a situation where we have two-sided risk … and that means there’s no risk-free path.”
In an FOMC “policy statement” following the meeting, “uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated. The Committee is attentive to the risks to both sides of its dual mandate and judges that downside risks to employment have risen.”
The reporter then defined “stagflation” as a “toxic mix of sluggish growth and elevated prices.”
To this point about stagflation, the reporter focused on August’s CPI rise of 0.4% over one month, a rise that pushed the year-over-year inflation rate to 2.9%, well above the target inflation rate of 2.0%. Job growth over the last quarter had slowed to 35,000 per month, as against 168,000 per month in 2024. Unemployment crept up, too, to 4.3%, the highest in years.
Posting to Bluesky, Harvard economist Jason Furman wrote:
“[T]he whiff of stagflation is getting stronger. … Given the current situation, the Fed has limited options.”
The reporter added:
“Powell’s comments reflect the fundamental difficulty: cutting rates too agressively could reignite inflation, while keeping them high risks deepening the economic slowdown.
E-mailed Bill Adams, Comerica Bank’s chief economist:
“The Fed is in a pickle, with inflation pulling them one way and a softening job market pulling the other.”
According to Bank of America Research:
“… [C]utting rates against a backdrop of rising inflation has only happened 16% of the time since 1973, and the last time was in late 2007, which in retrospect was shortly before the onset of the Great Financial Crisis.”
The reporter then shifted to the subject of political pressure being applied to the Fed. Not only our president, but also Congress, according to the reporter, demand lending rate relief to prevent recession and curb inflation. Fed Chair Powell, when asked what the Fed would do should inflation continue to rise: “Our expectation … has been that inflation will move up this year”, but he added that because this rise in inflation was due to the impact of tariffs on the prices of goods, it might be a one-time increase.
In Powell’s words, as presented by the reporter:
“‘The situation we’re in is that we see, we see inflation. We continue to expect it to move up, maybe not as high as we would have expected it to move up a few months ago,’ but still moving up. He said the Fed will ‘do what we need to do,’ but it’s ‘quite an unusual situation. How do we decide what to do? Because our tools can’t do two things at once.'”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
There are a number of FlaglerLive commenters who launder our president’s lies that there is no inflation. Fed Chair Powell is in a pickle, trying to solve two different problems with one tool set. The hint of stagflation is in the air, yet the professional lying class that sits at the top of one of our two parties seemingly can’t smell it, should anyone listen to them.
As an aside, that 2.9% inflation rate, year-over-year, presented by the reporter in this article, is now 3.0% inflation, year-over-year. Some of that inflation is attributable to the Fed cutting a full percentage point from the lending rate in mid- to late-2024, after the year-over-year inflation rate had dropped to 2.3%. Once the lending rate was cut three times in a row, inflation jumped up. Then it trended down for a few months until tariff policies bit. We don’t know the current inflation rate because our government happened to shut down for seven weeks or so, and we will never see some of that important data, because it wasn’t collected.
Skibum says
… and the orange faced idiot “aced” his MRI, according to his self proclamation! Yet he told reporters he didn’t know what part of his body was looked at in the MRI.
I’m sure it must have been Dr. Seuss who ordered drumph’s procedure, followed by a time spent in the recovery room eating a plate of green eggs and ham.
Ray W. says
According to a news outlet named Dagens.com US, Germany’s “top” general, Christian Freuding, recently said that “his once-constant line to Washington has gone quiet.” Where he once talked with American counterparts “day and night”, contact has stopped.
The General said that German officials have had to turn to the German embassy for updates on US policy, as no one at the Pentagon will clarify recent American decisions.
The reporter quoted General Freuding:
“Not only do you have an enemy knocking on your door, but you’re also losing a true ally and friend.”
Make of this what you will.