The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, May 30, 2025

To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.

Weather: Partly sunny with a chance of showers. A slight chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs around 90. Chance of rain 40 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the upper 60s. 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:

Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.

Public Workshops to Discuss Impact Fees, 10 a.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. The City of Palm Coast invites residents, business owners, and stakeholders to attend two upcoming public workshops to discuss potential amendments to the City’s Transportation, Fire, and Parks Impact Fees. These meetings provide an opportunity for the community to learn more about the impact fee structure, understand the proposed changes, and share feedback directly with City staff and City Council. Impact fees are one-time charges assessed on new development to help fund the infrastructure and public services needed to support a growing community. All members of the public are encouraged to attend and participate. Your input is an important part of this process as the City evaluates how to maintain and improve the quality of life, public safety, and sustainable growth. For more information, please contact the City’s Planning Division at 386-986-3736 during regular business hours, Monday through Friday, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.

Notably: Am I the only one who finds the above cartoon racist? I don’t like to be too prickly about these things: cartoonists should have a very, very wide berth, and the line between stereotyping and caricaturing can be foggier than November in London. I was not consciously familiar with Becs, the cartoonist, until now. Becs is Alejandro Becares, an Argentine artist and teacher. He’s syndicated through Cagle, which we use, but this piece gave me pause. I was all for the Muhammad cartoons–for all their tastelessness in some cases–to have free rein (I even ran them on a site I edited before FlaglerLive, in solidarity) and I’ve always loved Charlie Hebdo’s style. We not only have the right, but occasionally the duty, to offend, at least in thought (not as much in deed). I am of course not on all fours for Trump, but in this case the piece makes me uneasy. Arab stereotypes tend to bother me. But all stereotypes do. This reminds me of how the FBI used Arab stereotypes to run its Abscam sting back in the late 1970s, dressing up some of its agents in flowing garbs. The darkened scruff around Trump’s jaw also seems to me an added touch of the Arab as a sinister character, not to mention the garb itself–as if our own western dress were somehow more acceptable, less eyebrow-raising, when both types of dress are beyond judgment, being neutral cultural facts, the way driving on the left side is in Britain and driving on the right is in Saudi Arabia. But for the cartoon to have its intended effect, a different judgment must apply to the Arab dress, doesn’t it? Obviously Becs isn’t intending to make Trump look like TE Lawrence. That would have been a more interesting (if inaccurate but ironic) twist, but I just don’t see this as more than exploitative, kind of like when the reprehensible Randy Fine equated the Palestinian-Lebanese Keffiyeh with terrorism. But I’m just not sure about the cartoon. 

—P.T.

Now this:

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.

For the full calendar, go here.

Yet even the British caricaturists never reached the level of pure loathing achieved by the Russian Ivan Terebenev or the Prussian Johann Gottfried Schadow, let alone the Bavarian Johann Michael Voltz, whose caricature The Triumph of the Year 1813 depicted Napoleon’s head entirely composed of corpses. Of course there were also pro-Napoleon engravings on sale in London for as much as 2s 6d in 1801, a reminder that he had his British admirers. Yet overall, British Francophobia easily matched French Anglophobia. The market for highly abusive prints of Napoleon was much larger than for positive images of him, and the standard work on English anti-Napoleonic caricature and satire covers two full volumes, even without the illustrations. Meanwhile, as one contemporary noted, the sheer number of British biographies of Napoleon published in the years after 1797 meant that they had ‘to out-Herod each other in the representations they give alike of the hateful and malignant cast of his features, and of the deformity and depravity of his moral character’. As well as newspapers, caricatures, books and even nursery rhymes, Napoleon was the regular butt of British ballads, songs and poems. In an age when absolutely everything was regarded as a fit subject for an ode–one was entitled ‘On a Drunken Old Woman Who was Accidentally Drowned on a Ferry Crossing’–Napoleon’s supposed crimes excited an avalanche of poetry, none of it memorable.

–From Andrew Roberts’s, Napoleon: A Life (2014).
.

 

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.