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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the upper 70s. Northwest winds around 5 mph. Thursday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the lower 50s. Light and variable winds, becoming west around 5 mph after midnight.
- 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:
Schools are off all week.
Click here for holiday schedules of government services, courts, garbage pick-up, library hours, etc.
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: Let us now praise Willie Nelson: 92, still writing songs, still recording, still performing, still smoking weed. These days he preludes his shows with “Living in the Promiseland,” a 1986 single. It’s not quite showing Baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph in ICE-tightened zip ties, but it’s the same idea “‘Promiseland’ joined Nelson’s preshow in the spring, after ICE ramped up its raids on immigrants,” Alex Abramovich writes in a profile of Willie in the current New Yorker. “The lyrics speak on behalf of newcomers: “Give us your tired and weak / And we will make them strong / Bring us your foreign songs / And we will sing along.” The video cuts between footage of Holocaust survivors arriving on Liberty ships and of Haitian migrants on wooden boats. In Camden—two nights after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one night after the State Department warned immigrants against “praising” his murder, hours after bomb threats forced the temporary closure of seven historically Black colleges—the images hit hard. When the video ended, three things happened at once: stagehands yanked the scrim away, Nelson sang the first notes of “Whiskey River,” and a giant American flag unfurled behind him.” But that’s as political as the piece gets, which is unfortunate, given the headline: “How Willie Nelson Sees America.” We do not learn much about how today’s Willie sees today’s America. Trump isn’t mentioned once. It’s a nice break. It’s also an insightful profile of his music, which is all that matters really. As Annie Nelson, his wife, put it: “Let’s face it, we’re being divided intentionally. That’s part of the playbook—divide and conquer. It’s been around a long time. When somebody’s saying hello to somebody without knowing their political ideology, and they’re just enjoying music together, that’s church. That’s healing. That’s really important right now. Really, really important.”
Merry Christmas.
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
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Flagler County Cultural Council (FC3) Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
The Rainbow Bridge Dedication at Holland Park
‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
“Shotgun Willie” is the first Nelson album I fell in love with. I’d heard some of his stark Nashville demos in college—they’d floored me—but “Shotgun Willie” threw me for a loop. The beat on some songs sat so far back, it sounded like it was calling, long distance, from a Wilson Pickett session. (Nelson’s producers, Arif Mardin and Jerry Wexler, had worked with Pickett, too.) Donny Hathaway wrote the string charts; the Memphis Horns played on the title track. Country radio didn’t know where to put it, and it didn’t sell, but “Shotgun Willie” gave Nelson a sound closer to what he heard in his head, and material that he still plays. For the follow-up, “Phases and Stages,” Wexler took him to Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, to work with the rhythm section that had backed Pickett and Aretha Franklin. The album, which Nelson recorded in two days, told a divorce story, twice: side one from the wife’s point of view, side two from the husband’s. It sold about as well as the previous record. Atlantic shuttered its Nashville office soon afterward. Bleak as the album is, it has an emotional sophistication that Nelson’s early songs lacked, with narrators working their way through the wreckage rather than wallowing: “After carefully considerin’ the whole situation / I stand with my back to the wall / Walkin’ is better than runnin’ away / And crawlin’ ain’t no good at all.” Texas Monthly, which keeps a running list of Nelson’s albums—all hundred and fifty-five of them, ranked—puts “Phases and Stages,” a “perfect record,” at No. 1.
–From Alex Abramovich’s profile of Willie Nelson, The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2025.
Dennis C Rathsam says
MERRY CHRISMAS to all my friends here at Flagler Live. & to all P/C ! May we all get along, in peace, thru out the coming year!
Endless dark money says
No doubt data center drive up utility prices for consumers so we can subsidize the corporations energy use. They also pollute but no worries tax payer may pay to clean it up if it gets bad enough. The trillions in ai investment main goal is to eliminate your job. 3 degrees C by 2035. Let’s go!
Pogo says
@The cartoon is right on point
However, the world’s economy grinding to a sudden halt will make borders, indeed any lock and key — on anything, absurd.
After that fire, the darkness will be measured in the company of epochs.
Merry Christmas
Mark says
For us here in Flagler, this new cable landing station is said to create jobs, be a minimal hit to the electric grid and other resources and help support our tax base. All of it will be “minimal”. I’ve worked supporting such equipment and systems in the past. Once the building is built and the systems installed, configured and in production there will be little more than a few security guys hired to support the site’s physical security requirements. There will likely be ZERO local technical jobs dedicated to supporting that site. Occasionally someone will need to be dispatched to replace or update a piece of physical equipment, but that dispatch will in all likelihood be from a third party and likely out of Orlando, Daytona, Jacksonville or the like. Beyond that, the software support needs will be met by a team that will certainly not be local to Flagler, probably not even Florida. As to taxes, perhaps a bit from the building assessment, perhaps a little from the assessment of business equipment but that’ll be a drop in the bucket I think, nothing more. I hope it’s worth it but I don’t expect most of us will see much if any sort of benefit from it.
Sherry says
Great questions regarding “ethics” and the lack of action from the Bar Association and the American Medical Association! This from Robert Reich:
Friends,
Sorry to burden you with this question on Christmas day, but it nags at me.
Why haven’t the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association, stood up against the unethical behavior of professionals in the Trump regime?
I was always told that professional associations existed to maintain professional standards, not merely restrict the number of licensed professionals to maintain professional prices.
But Lindsey Halligan, now the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, is ethically unmoored.
She was appointed by Trump and Pam Bondi for the express purpose of prosecuting Trump enemies James Comey and Letitia James.
Halligan is a former insurance lawyer with no criminal law experience. (She had helped Trump “de-wokify” the Smithsonian.)
On November 17, 2025, a federal magistrate judge identified multiple instances of Halligan’s misconduct, including making “fundamental misstatements of the law” to a grand jury.
Halligan admitted she never showed the final indictment to the entire grand jury after it had rejected her first submission, a remarkable failure.
A judge subsequently found that Halligan had been illegally appointed U.S. attorney to begin with, and dismissed the indictments against Comey and James. The Justice Department is now appealing.
According to the American Bar Association’s model rules of conduct (adopted by every state bar association), a prosecutor in a criminal case must “refrain from prosecuting a charge that the prosecutor knows is not supported by probable cause.” It is also considered professional misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
If legal ethics mean anything, Halligan should be disbarred.
If medical ethics mean anything, Dr. Vinay Prasad should no longer be a doctor.
Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, recently claimed that Covid vaccines were dangerous for children and had caused the deaths of “at least 10 children.”
Twelve former FDA commissioners said Prasad’s claim broke sharply from long-standing scientific norms and posed “a threat to evidence-based vaccine policy and public health security.”
Inside Medicine reported that Prasad used incomplete information and that the pediatric death toll from Covid shots was between zero and seven.
More to the point, how many children would have died without the Covid vaccine? The Centers for Disease Control reported that more than 2,100 American children died of Covid since the pandemic began.
I could have used many other examples of doctors now ostensibly serving the public in the Trump regime who have thrown their own integrity and ethics out the window an into the Potomac.
What is unfolding among doctors inside the Department of Health and Human Services is an attempt to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. public health system based on ideology rather than science.
Likewise, I could have found many other examples of attorneys in the Trump regime who are violating professional standards.
What’s occurring among lawyers in the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s offices is an attempt to rewrite the rules governing the entire U.S. system of criminal justice based on Trump’s vindictiveness rather than the rule of law.
If professional associations have any legitimate purpose in our system, it is to enforce ethical standards and hold professionals accountable to them.
Hell, if the American Economic Association can permanently ban Harvard economist (and former Treasury Secretary) Larry Summers for conduct “fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity” (Summers had repeatedly asked Jeffrey Epstein for advice on Summers’s pursuit of a younger economist), surely the American Bar Association should ban Lindsey Halligan, and the American Bar Association, Vinay Prasad.
Where are the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association during Trump’s unscrupulous reign?
Laurel says
Republican politicians, individuals, institutions and professional groups are scared to death of Trump. He puts out dog whistles, such as “dead man walking” (which are blatant threats) to stir up his maga base. If maga stopped acting like dogs, Trump wouldn’t have a chance. If these politicians, individuals, institutions and professional groups would band together, likewise, Trump wouldn’t stand a chance. He relies completely on fear tactics.