The last thing I need...

Including today, there are only four Sundays remaining before election day.

So the last thing I need to hear is adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, telling me that the FEMA response to Hurricane Helene is a disaster when his idea of hurricane relief is tossing rolls of paper towels to a small crowd of Hurricane Maria survivors in Puerto Rico in 2018.

Trump then waits three years before he releases $13 million in relief just before the 2020 elections. It's estimated that 2,600 persons died within a year as a result of the hurricane.

The last thing I need to hear is Trump criticizing current hurricane relief efforts when, after Hurricane Matthew in 2017, the Trump administration allocated just 1% of the aid North Carolina requested primarily because the state was run by a Democrat, Gov. Roy Cooper. Childish immaturity for all to see as people suffer.

The last thing I need  to hear from Trump is how poorly the border is being handled by the Biden/Harris administration when in fact, Trump built only 80 miles of new border wall during his term as president. And Mexico did not pay for it as he promised.

By contrast, the Obama administration built 128 miles of wall where none had existed before.

Trump already had a four-year term (2016-20) to solve the border question, but all he managed to do was separate children from their parents as administrative policy. A revised estimate claims that 1,300 children are still waiting to be reunited with their families.

The last thing I need to hear from Trump is how a presidency under Kamala Harris would destroy the Constitution when Trump himself has threatened to suspend the Constitution and that he would be a dictator on the "first day" of a potential return to the presidency.

The last thing I need to hear is Trump talking about a "Biden crime family" when he is the one convicted of 34 charges of falsified business records.

The last thing I need to hear is how great the economy was under Trump when he inherited a booming economy from the Obama administration. Economic growth under Obama was 2.4 percent. The average quarterly growth under Trump was 2.5 percent.

The last thing I need to hear from Trump is his concept of plans for health care. When Covid arrived in 2019-20, more than 400,000 people died during his administration because of conspiracy theories, mismanagement and incompetence ("Maybe we can inject bleach").

Covid brought with it supply chain issues and ultimately world-wide inflation and loss of jobs. All of those issues can be brought to Trump's incompetence. Don't even start with me.

The last thing I need to hear is Trump talking about rebuilding the military when it's already the most effective fighting force in the world. I especially don't want to hear him call our troops "suckers" and "losers." Why would any veteran vote for this insult? 

The last thing I want to hear is Trump deriding President Biden's mental acuity when his own early onset dementia is evident with every campaign speech he gives.

The last thing I need is another four years of Trump.

Lying liars

I didn't know we could control the weather. Did you? How'd I miss that one?

But Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insists that the devastation caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee 10 days ago is the result of weather control. 

And, specifically, by Democrats.

Hmm. Let me wade through my cognitive dissonance and lack of critical thinking skills to look at this a bit closer.

Apparently, in 2001, there was a patent application submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office by an Andrew Waxmanski of Chipley, FL, for a hurricane and tornado control device.

Weather control patent.

 Well, so far, that makes sense. A guy in Florida wanting to control hurricanes. I'll buy that.

But his idea incorporates the use of sound waves set at a certain frequency which in turn are supposedly used to affect the formation of a storm. 

Or to move the storm to a desired location. You know, to cause havoc and chaos by one political demographic to gain influence over another, or perhaps to make certain members of a certain political party look foolish – or maybe even heroic and informed – to their followers.

Well, don't worry. There was no way in hell this device was going to work and the patent application was abandoned in 2003.

And yet, the hurricane and tornado control device story was resurrected after Helene stormed through the mountains. The hurricane, manipulated by man, was designed and executed by Democrats to prevent Republicans from voting in next month's presidential election. Or so goes the accusation.

As if the Democrats don't have enough to do trying to win an election. Now they're creating hurricanes in their spare time to disrupt Republican voters. It's so outlandish that this doesn't even qualify as Artificial Intelligence (AI). More like Zero Intelligence.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene supports it.

There is plenty of misinformation to go around in this disaster. Former president and convicted felon/adjudicated rapist Donald Trump suggests the Biden administration is diverting funds from FEMA to aid illegal migrants. claiming that FEMA has no money remaining for hurricane relief. So far, the only president to ever do that is, umm, Trump. Back in 2019, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and used it to pay for detention space for immigrants seeking asylum.

Trump is out of office. How would he know how much money FEMA has? Good grief, the man never even read the daily presidential briefs unless they contained pictures. And that was when he was in office.

Some have criticized the Biden administration's response to this disaster, claiming the National Guard hasn't been alerted or that crucial supplies are not reaching impacted areas.

But according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, 1,500 National Guardsmen have been deployed, along with 775 FEMA personnel.

Biden actually approved emergency relief two days before Helene made landfall. 

One thing I think we must keep in mind is that we're talking about the mountains here and not the coastal plain. Roads have been washed out. Landslides and tree falls are still possible. Remote areas will be inaccessible for a long time. Weeks may go by before we think we see progress. A person living in one area of the disaster field likely has no clue what is happening somewhere else.

There are just too many false claims out there, most of them politically oriented, for me to address. 

But you can do what I do. Check with trusted news sources, especially the Associated Press. And Heather Cox Richardson. Use logic instead of conspiracy theory to sort through the information and draw your own conclusions.

It's the kind of relief that could help everybody.