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Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high near 76. Light west wind becoming northwest 8 to 13 mph in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 20 mph. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 46. Windy, with a north wind 21 to 24 mph, with gusts as high as 34 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:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students: 9:30 to 10:25 a.m. at Grace Presbyterian Church, 1225 Royal Palms Parkway, Palm Coast. Improve your English skills while studying the Bible. This study is geared toward intermediate and advanced level English Language Learners.
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre, Limelight Theatre, 3 p.m., 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. The beloved musical about the optimistic orphan who captures hearts (and maybe even saves a billionaire). Perfect for families and the holiday spirit. Book here. (Note: all Sunday matinees are sold out, but there is a wait list you may join.)
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy, Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. 2 p.m. Box office: (386) 255-2431. tickets, $15 to $25. A comedy about a young man who brings home his Jewish atheist fiancée to meet his very Catholic parents on Christmas Eve. With the inevitable family explosion comes an out-of-left-field miracle that propels the family into a wild exploration of love, religion, personal truth, and the nature of earthly reality.
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn, at Athens Theatre, 124 North Florida Avenue, DeLand. 386/736-1500. Tickets, Adult $37 – Senior $33. 2:30 p.m. Student/Child $17. Book here. Celebrate the magic of Christmas with Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn—a heartwarming holiday treat packed with show-stopping dance numbers, dazzling costumes, and a treasure trove of timeless tunes. When Broadway performer Jim leaves the bright lights behind for a quiet Connecticut farmhouse, he ends up transforming his home into a seasonal inn, open only on the holidays. But with love in the air, rivalries heating up, and performances for every festivity, the holidays get a lot more exciting than he ever imagined. Featuring 20 beloved Irving Berlin classics—including “White Christmas,” “Happy Holiday,” “Blue Skies,” and “Cheek to Cheek”—this delightful musical delivers all the laughter, romance, and seasonal sparkle of a Christmas card come to life. Presented through special arrangement with Concord Theatricals.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 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.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at the Bridges United Methodist Fellowship at 205 North Pine Street, Bunnell (through the gate, in room 8), and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings 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.
Notably: “Presentism,” Joseph Ellis writes in American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997), is “the presumption that the past can be judged by the standards of the present.” Ellis was discussing another Jefferson scholar trying to distance Jefferson from Bill Clinton’s womanizing, at a time when a majority of American scholars still preferred to think that nothing happened between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the mother of five children by Jefferson. Presentism is a cheap temptation. I’m certainly guilty of it all the time. Politicians are terrible with it. The moment you hear the word founders, or worse, founding fathers, you know you’re in for a soaking of cherry-pricked (stet) presentism. The other day I was writing a paragraph about all the things we universally perpetrated, accepted and applauded as a nation (during the “founding fathers” era and for a few generations after it): slavery, massacring Indians, Jim Crow, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, all those things we are now universally against (not yet for Reagan, alas). Then I read the introduction to a 1775 poem called “To His Excellency General Washington.” The poem itself is standard classical versification with endless classical allusions in a style almost as florid as FlaglerLive’s reports. But it’s the introduction that caught my attention: “Sir, I Have taken the freedom to address your Excellency in the enclosed poem, and entreat your acceptance, though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies. Your being appointed by the Grand Continental Congress to be Generalissimo of the armies of North America, together with the fame of your virtues, excite sensations not easy to suppress. Your generosity, therefore, I presume, will pardon the attempt. Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in. I am, Your Excellency’s most obedient humble servant, PHILLIS WHEATLEY. Providence, Oct. 26, 177s.” And here’s the kicker, which of course you’ve figured out by now: Phillis Wheatley, one of America’s earliest non-native poets (its native poets preceded the “founders” by millennia) was not only Black. She had been a slave herself–born in West Africa, sold in 1761–and had been freed only two years before she wrote that poem, though Washington was still very much a slave-holder at the time. But she wrote him admiringly, reverentially, even lovingly, as she doubtless would Jefferson or Madison or any of the other founders and slaveholders who were to sign the Declaration a year later and draft the Constitution at Philadelphia a few years after that. Don’t let the DeSantis Education Department catch wind of her. They’d have a field day triumphally putting her back in the field and saying: look how her “masters” treated her well, educated her, gave her skills and recognized her talent. (Too late: the White House’s nationalists got to her.) All true, incidentally. But hopelessly tainted by presentism. I’d stick with Henry Louis Gates Jr.
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.
January 2026
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Community Traffic Safety Team Meeting
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
St. Johns River Water Management District Meeting
Flagler County School Board Workshop: Agenda Items
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 10-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
Flagler County Planning Board Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Public Safety Coordinating Council Meeting
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
For the full calendar, go here.
To His Excellency General Washington
Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light,
Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom’s cause her anxious breast alarms, She flashes dreadful in refulgent1 arms.
See mother earth her offspring’s fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven’s revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!
The goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds Her golden hair:
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise.
Muse! bow propitious2 while my pen relates
How pour her armies through a thousand gates,
As when Eolus3 heaven’s fair face deforms,
Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms;
Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar,
The refluent4 surges beat the sounding shore;
Or thick as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign,
Such, and so many, moves the warrior’s train.
In bright array they seek the work of war,
Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in peace and honors—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!
One century scarce perform’d its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive5 head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! cruel blindness to Columbia’s state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.
Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, Washington! be thine.
–Phillis Wheatley (1775)
Laurel says
“Woke font!” OMG! Who the hell cares? Oh. Rubio. The stupidity is never ending.
Laurel says
Okay, I just got it. Times New Roman is a font that goes back to old newspapers, and to use that font makes the propaganda look more official and believable. Slimey! Poor Rubio, he sold his soul already, so why not go full out?
Dennis C Rathsam says
More Epstien photos released!!! A Bipartisan BUST!!!! Jackasses on a fishing expedition…. they can bait the hook, but they cant catch the fish!
Ray W. says
From a Statista article published on March 28, 2025, the reporter writes that the Trump administration, in order to justify the imposition of tariffs, argued that Article 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 provided President Trump with the executive authority to impose tariffs in order to adjust the import of cars and light trucks if import levels arrive “in quantities or under circumstances that threaten to impair national security.”
The reporter then asks the question: Is the American car and light truck sector “in such bad shape?”
According to data released by the Fed’s Board of Governors, the reporter writes, “10.25 million passenger cars and light trucks were assembled in the United States last year. That number has been relatively stable over the past two decades with the exception of the financial crisis impacting sales and production volume in 2008 and the following years and the Covid-19 shock that resulted in reduced production in 2020 and 2021. Looking back until 1980, domestic production of light vehicles peaked in 1999 at 12.6 million vehicles – just 23 percent higher than the 2024 output.”
1.5 million units of the 10.25 million vehicles assembled in the US in 2024, 1.5 million were exported.
Wrote the reporter:
“Of the 15.9 million unit sales in the US in 2024, 8 million units were imported. “Since 2008, the share of imports in domestic sales has fluctuated between 41 percent in 2021 and 50 percent in 2010 and 2024.”
Meanwhile, from a news portal named The Daily Overview, many of the nation’s oldest car dealerships are buckling under pressure from new car sales models, leaving their sales volumes to drop by as much as 45% in key sectors, drops that challenge the dealership’s bottom line.
According to that reporter:
“What looks like a simple sales slump is, in reality, a structural reset that is reshaping who sells cars, how they make money, and which communities are left without a local showroom at all.”
Per the reporter:
“Analysts tracking the growth of electric mobility argue that the unstoppable electric car will have far-reaching consequences for auto retailers.” Customers are increasingly demanding “digital experiences and different ownership models as electric vehicles gain momentum. At the same time, the rise of plug-in models is disrupting the traditional business model of franchised stores, since EVs require less routine maintenance and therefore threaten the steady stream of service and repairs that has long underpinned dealership profitability.”
When he talked to “store owners”, the reporter found that “they describe a decade defined less by boom and bust than by a grinding erosion of traffic, with each downturn cutting a little deeper into the cushion that once protected century-old rooftops.”
At the height of the shutdowns brought about by the coronavirus crisis, car dealerships had already witnessed a year’s-long steady downward trend in sales. The lockdowns then brought unit sales to a near-complete stop. Dealerships still had to cover “floorplan interest and property taxes.” Some closed their showrooms or “pivoted overnight to remote paperwork and driveway deliveries.” Long-established dealerships, those that heavily relied on walk-in traffic and paper-heavy processes, struggled to match those dealers who turned to remote paperwork and driveway deliveries. Customers began to accept a new sales standard of convenience.
Another issue is the fact that many dealerships still carry unsold 2024 models on their lots. This inability to move aging inventory is impacting older, smaller dealerships that “lack the financial backing” available to larger dealership groups.
Among the five major car manufacturers, in 2024, nearly 75 dealerships were culled. Industry “buy-sell” specialists told the reporter that, with unprecedented financial headwinds in the sector, more and more families are choosing to exit the dealership business.
The story closes:
“For some communities, the loss of a century-old lot is about more than where to buy a pickup, it is about the disappearance of a civic anchor that sponsored Little League teams and hosted charity barbecues. Yet the forces driving these closures are not sentimental, they are structural, rooted in a decade of sliding sales, a pandemic that rewired shopping habits, and a technological shift that is rewriting the economics of selling and servicing cars. Unless those trends reverse, the next ten years are likely to bring more shuttered showrooms, more consolidation into large groups, and fewer places where a family name on the sign still means the owner lives just down the street.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Although I remain unconvinced that the import of cars and light trucks in the amount that actually occurred constitutes a threat to our nation’s national security, I recognize that change is coming to the American car culture.
Economists commonly describe “creative destruction” as not only normal but that it is a crucial facet of capitalist thought.
When cars began destroying the horse and buggy industry, hundreds a small-time car makers sprung up all over the country. Buggy makers went out of business.
When Henry Ford debuted and then began a decades long refinement process of the Model T, nearly all of those hundreds of small-car makers failed. Can it be argued, today, that those may long-established small car dealerships in decline because a new process of creative destruction is gaining momentum? Is this a natural process? Should it be?
Just as the rise in natural gas extraction brought on by the Shale Revolution destroyed the economic competitiveness of the coal-fired electricity industry, so too will the emerging solar- and wind-power industries continue to eat into the natural gas electricity business model.
Is it fair to assert that looking backwards may not necessarily be a good “personal transport sales” business strategy, unless you restore cars for a living?
Can the same be said about the utility electricity sector?