To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 70s. West winds around 5 mph. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy in the evening, then becoming mostly cloudy. Patchy fog after midnight. Lows in the upper 50s. Light and variable winds.
- 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:
Kwanzaa Celebration at AACS: The African American Cultural Society, 4422 North U.S. Highway 1, Palm Coast (just north of Whiteview Parkway), marks the annual Kwanzaa celebration, including information/explanation of Kwanzaa, an exceptional program, with drumming, dancers, African fashion show, food trucks and local vendors with a variety of articles. 50/50 drawing and raffle tickets for $200. Baobab Money tree.
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.
Gamble Jam: Join us for the Gamble Jam—a laid-back, toe-tappin’ tribute to the legendary Florida folk singer and storyteller, James Gamble Rogers IV! Musicians of all skill levels are welcome to bring their acoustic instruments and join the jam. Whether you’re strumming, picking, singing, or just soaking in the sounds, come be part of the magic at the Gamble Jam pavilion! The program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
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: Raja Shehadeh is the Palestinian native of Ramallah, the son of a lawyer, a lawyer himself, and a writer. He is the author of Palestinian Walks, a wonderful 2007 book about seven walks he took over the years in the Occupied West Bank (what invaders, Florida legislators, Randy Fine and “settler” terrorists prefer to call “Judea and Samaria,” for roughly the same reason Trump prefers to call it the “Gulf of America” and the “Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”). The book chronicles the changes and desecration of the land resulting from the indiscriminate building of massive Israeli colonies from expropriated land. The book won Britain’s Orwell Prize for best political writing in 2008. Shehadeh is also the co-founded of the human rights organization Al-Haq, which got the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize in 1989, and which the Trump administration naturally added to its list of sanctioned organizations a few weeks ago, along with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights for, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Soul-selling Mephisto Rubio, “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.” I’m sorry. Since when do justice prosecutors seek the perpetrator’s consent? Anyway, Shehadeh was the New York Times’s David Marchese’s interview on Dec. 20, and it was an excellent one. You can watch it in full below, or read the full transcript here if it’s not paywalled. Some excerpts though. Shehadeh, prompted by the interviewer, rejects the favored Western habit of chucking off the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a “thousand year-old conflict.” Not at all. “The reality is it’s a little over 100 years old,” the interviewer says. “And there’s a long history of what you just described: a different kind of living in that region than is often assumed to be the case.” Shehadeh says: “That’s absolutely true. Palestine has always been a place for three religions, and the three religions lived side by side and enriched life, because it’s enriching to have the differences. And now one religion is trying to dominate and say it’s the only one that is going to be allowed in that land, and that’s perverse.” In a different segment, he says: “the suffering at the time of the Holocaust is always used as We have suffered most, and nobody can suffer as much. Every suffering is a suffering, and it shouldn’t be underestimated. But to use that as a justification for causing more suffering is untenable, wrong, immoral. That is why when this friend was justifying what was happening in Gaza because of trauma, I did not accept it. I thought it was very disappointing. But there’s a lot of it in Israel, and there’s this double consciousness of knowing and not knowing.” And: “I’ve been following the Israeli development of the apartheid regime in the West Bank since 1979, so I’m very familiar with how it came about. I didn’t use the term “apartheid,” because I didn’t want to alienate the readers and do exactly what you’re saying: focus on the term rather than on the facts. But now that it has become very clear that the situation is one of apartheid, I think it’s very important to use the term. And likewise with “genocide.” I didn’t use genocide until I became very clear that the definition of genocide exactly fits the case in Gaza, and then I thought it’s important to use the term because it has legal consequences, which I would like to see take place.” See the full interview below.
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
Contractor Review Board Meeting
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Jeff Brandes
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
Under Israeli law, Fareed and those members of my family who were not residing in the West Bank when Israel occupied it in June 1967 and carried out that first crucial census are considered absentees and their property outside the town has been taken from them. It was vested in the Israeli state for the exclusive use of Israeli Jews. I had read the law making this possible many times but its full import never struck me as it did now. A Palestinian only has the right to the property he resides in. Once he leaves it for whatever reason it ceases to be his, it “reverts back” to those whom the Israeli system considers the original, rightful owners of “Judea and Samaria,” the Jewish peo-ple, wherever they might be. Abandonment, which began as an economic imperative in some instances and a choice in others, had acquired legal and political implications with terrifying consequences.
–From Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2007).
Ed P says
Let’s start by thanking Flagler Live for allowing comments from the entire community, unlike Clay Jones who only allows comments from paid subscribers, wouldn’t that primarily be his fans and sycophants? Maybe Jones and Trump are both narcissists.
Jones draws with a fine point but paints the Republicans with a broom.
Laurel says
Being a cartoonist is a living. They deserve a paycheck like any other worker. Political cartoonists have been around since the beginning of printed time, and paint with any brush they want, just as you are allowed to comment here. The difference here is, you do not rely on a paycheck from your comments, and cartoonists financially rely on their acceptance. Quite brave, actually.
Sherry says
trump’s rant about the epstein files. . . This from wonderful Joyce Vance:
He Looks Like A Witness To Me
Joyce Vance
Dec 27
No one should be surprised by Donald Trump‘s Christmas day social media post. It’s completely in character.
But let’s look a little deeper and see what he’s really telling us. Donald Trump suggests that he has a lot of information to offer about Jeffrey Epstein, which makes sense given all the photographs of them together and documentation of their close their friendship, like the drawing included in Epstein‘s birthday book that has been attributed to Trump (he has denied it).
He looks like a witness to me!
In his social media post, Trump offered up some specifics that he might have more information about:
People who loved Jeffrey Epstein
People who gave Jeffrey Epstein bundles of money
People who went to Jeffrey Epstein’s island and parties
Why Trump dropped Jeffrey Epstein long before it became fashionable to do so
Given this public comment and the long-term relationship between the two, if I wanted to understand more about possible co-conspirators and accomplices, funding, and the full range of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminality—what his long time party buddy learned that was so bad that Trump dropped Epstein before the Florida prosecution made it all public—I would want an interview with Donald Trump. If I were still a prosecutor, I’d send out two FBI agents to have a chat with him. As far as I’m aware, the Supreme Court has never said presidents can’t be witnesses.
Of course, we’re tongue in cheek here. That’s not happening with Donald Trump, who is deploying his Justice Department in a defensive stance designed to protect him at all costs, while calling the files a Democratic hoax. But really, the president could do the survivors a great service by sharing what he knows. Trump has repeatedly said he’s the most transparent president ever, so why not?
It not unlikely that we’ll have congressional hearings on the matter at some point, although that may have to await Democratic majorities in one or both houses of Congress following the midterm elections. The man looks like a witness. I say, give him a subpoena if he won’t come in voluntarily to testify.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
Sherry says
steven miller’s BS about immigrants from Robert Reich:
Friends,
Trump’s Chief Bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News this month that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
In fact, the data show just the opposite. The children and grand children and great grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a new paper, Princeton’s Leah Boustan, Stanford’s Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome of Princeton, and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, used millions of father-son pairs spanning more than a century of U.S. history to show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago.
In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great great grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
For much the same reasons my great grandparents came to America — vicious pogroms that threatened his life — Wolf-Leib came to Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his pockets. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
Wolf-Leib’s son, Nathan, soon followed, and they raised enough money through peddling and toiling in sweatshops to buy passage to America for the rest of their family, in 1906 — including young Sam Glosser, Stephen Miller’s great grandfather.
The family settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming coal and steel town, where they rose from peddling goods to owning a haberdashery, and then owning a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, run by Sam, and Sam’s son, Izzy (Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather).
Two generations later, in 1985, came little Stephen — who developed such a visceral hate for immigrants that he makes up facts about them that have no bearing on reality.
In a little more than eleven months, Stephen and his boss have made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration to America.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children born to undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer be granted citizenship automatically.
The executive order, which was paused by the courts, could throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each year. Miller and his boss want the Supreme Court to uphold that executive order.
After the horrific shooting of two National Guard members on August 26, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national, Trump halted naturalizations for people from many African and the Middle Eastern countries.
Trump is also threatening to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.” He plans to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and aims to detain even more migrants in jail or in warehouses — in the U.S. or in other countries — without due process.
In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, they stir up the worst nativist and racist impulses in America — blaming and scapegoating entire groups of people.
As they make their case to crack down on illegal and legal immigration, Miller and Trump have targeted Minnesota’s Somali community — seizing on an investigation into fraud that took place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in the state, to denounce the entire community, which Trump has called “garbage.”
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities, mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.
As Ronald Reagan put it in a 1988 speech,
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals, more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump want to fuel bigotry. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire project depends on hate.
America is better than Trump or his chief bigot.
We won’t buy their hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hard working members of our community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking.
We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president who wants us to hate each other — or his bigoted sidekick.
Skibum says
If anyone would like to “see persistent issues in every subsequent generation”, all we would need to do is look deeply into Steven Miller’s ancestry to find out how he became such an intolerant bigot and so anti-immigrant despite the fact that he himself is not Native American and had to have ancestors who were immigrants to the United States.
There is some very dark history there somewhere that led him down that worm hole.
Laurel says
Psychopathy.