Be aware

Early voting for this year's general election is underway in most states, and it's occurred to me that many have already voted for rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump – now 78 years old and in obviously questionable mental health – for a second term as president of the United States.

If you voted early and voted for Trump...

• You voted for a racist. You can jump up and down and shout all you want in denial, but Trump has an obvious history of racism behind him. As a young man, Trump was sued by the Justice Department for violating the Fair Housing Act in 1973. Evidence shows his management corporation refused to rent to Black tenants. Then there was the Central Park Five incident in 1989, where Trump called for the execution of five innocent men of color for an alleged rape of a jogger. Even more recently, during the pandemic, Trump called Covid-19 the "China" virus. The evidence just goes on and on, too numerous to list. Look it up yourself.

• You voted for a convicted felon. Why he hasn't been sentenced four-and-a-half months after 34 convictions for fraud is beyond me. A two-tiered justice system? You bet. And it favors Trump. Who else gets to wait more than four months for sentencing? He should be in jail.

• You voted for a rapist. More than a year ago, a jury found Donald Trump guilty of sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll. A federal judge, Lewis Kaplan, said Carroll was digitally raped by Trump, which, in any meaning of the word "rape," is still rape. It was a civil case so no jail time was involved. Trump was fined $5 million for that, and then later fined $83.3 million for denials Trump made in his defamation countersuit. Clearly, presidential material.

• You voted for an insurrectionist. Trump rallied (fooled) his followers into assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to block certification of the vote that elected Joe Biden to office. Not only were members of Congress threatened with their lives, but more than 140 Capitol police officers were injured in the most treasonous action since the Civil War. You not only voted for an insurrectionist, but for a fascist. Or, in simpler terms, you voted for the most unAmerican president in American history as he attempted to subvert the will of the people.

• You voted for a pathological liar. The Washington Post has documented more than 30,000 lies, untruths or misleading claims during his four years in office. My rule of thumb: whenever Trump speaks, believe in the opposite of what he says because that is most likely the truth. I also love how most of his lies are either admissions or projections.

• You voted for an evil heart. Trump had his own four years to "fix" the southern border, but all he came up with was the separation of children from their parents. To this day, there are more than 1,000 children who are seeking to be reunited with their families. To me, this is the most egregious episode in the most profane presidency in American history. And now, if elected, he wants to create detention camps for illegal aliens. Pick up a history book and see if you can find something similar in world events. It won't take long. Our own country had internment camps for Japanese citizens during World War II that ultimately resulted decades later in $1.6 billion in reparations for those interred or their offspring. And then there's those camps in Nazi Germany. Don't talk to me about border issues when Trump was a spectacular failure during his own administration. How's that wall coming along, by the way?

• You voted for a misogynist. Trump managed to stack the Supreme Court with enough of his lackeys to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus inciting a war against women and their reproductive freedoms that should be nobody's business but their own. Women are dying now because of this. They're being arrested for miscarriages. They are being punished by men who feel themselves losing power.

• You voted for a murderer. Okay, I might be splitting hairs here. But it seems to me when Covid-19 first appeared in this country, we had all those refrigeration trucks filled with corpses and not enough ventilators to keep afflicted people alive. Remember those days, or is our memory so short? Although Trump did come up with Operation Warp Speed to quickly develop a vaccine for Covid, he almost immediately downplayed its effectiveness. And people died. Republicans who listened to him died. This pandemic was so mismanaged that, yes, I think I can say he murdered those people.

I know my rants about Trump the past few years mostly have fallen on deaf ears for those who need to hear them. That's OK. It's just the way it is. But I feel good writing them. I know they are the truth.

And the truth shall set us free.

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.