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Today, President Joe Biden signed the continuing resolution Congress passed yesterday to fund the government until December 20. The measure has none of the poison pills Trump and MAGA Republicans wanted, but it does add $231 million to the budget for the Secret Service to enhance its ability to protect presidential candidates. “This is a good outcome for the country. There will be no shutdown, because finally, at the end of the day, our Republican colleagues in the House decided to work with us,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said.
Congress will recess tomorrow as members head back home to campaign. Members will not return to Washington, D.C., until after the November 5 election.
Trump demanded that Republicans shut down the government unless the continuing resolution contained a measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and the measure was widely seen as an attempt to suppress voting. Trump was unable to command Republican loyalty on this issue as he did earlier this year when he insisted Republicans kill the bipartisan border bill.
That recognition of his slipping power might have been behind his hastily announced press conference this afternoon at Trump Tower in New York, a press conference best described as the September 10 presidential debate 2.0.
Trump reiterated his vision of the United States as a hellscape. He insisted that the nation’s booming economy is actually hemorrhaging jobs, that the FBI statistics showing crime falling are all lies, and that inflation, which has fallen close enough to the target of 2% that the Fed recently began to lower interest rates, is at an all-time high.
Trump reserved his greatest rage for the ABC debate moderators who, he complained, fact-checked him after agreeing not to—“I want an apology,” he said—and for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. To her he attributed what he insists is a flood of undocumented immigrants drowning states in a welter of crime, although we know immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born Americans.
In words that sounded quite a bit like his advisor Stephen Miller, he recounted in some detail a number of horrific rapes he claimed were committed by immigrants. He did so apparently with no self-consciousness about his own liability for sexual assault that the presiding judge said would commonly be understood as rape, although his focus on rape could have been an attempt to push back on the recent spate of ads by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psychopath PAC featuring women who claim Trump sexually assaulted them.
Trump had a number of reasons to melt down today.
Special counsel Jack Smith filed with U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan his detailed report on the evidence he will use to prove that Trump broke the law when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump lawyers tried unsuccessfully to put this filing date off until after the election. The filing is sealed and includes previously unseen material, including interview and grand jury transcripts. Trump’s team can respond; its answer is due October 17.
The filing is clearly on Trump's mind. This morning, he posted on social media that “Deep State subversives” had ignored his orders to prevent unrest on January 6, 2021. Then, in his press conference, Trump bizarrely suggested that he was not at fault for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The person to blame, he said, was then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), whom he also accused of stock fraud.
In his press conference, Trump again took Russian president Vladimir Putin’s side as he did yesterday in North Carolina, deploring the mounting deaths and the terrible destruction in Ukraine without mentioning that it is the Russian invasion that is causing that death and destruction. He claimed to be on the side of “humanity” in his desire to end the war, as he has suggested he would do as soon as he takes office in a second term, by permitting Putin to keep the land he wants.
This recalled Trump’s 2016 “Russia, if you’re listening,” statement asking Putin to hack Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s emails. We now know that Russian operatives helped Trump’s campaign in 2016 in part because of what Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort knew as the Mariupol Plan, which called for Trump to look the other way as Putin installed puppets in the oblasts of eastern Ukraine, permitting him to take through political manipulations the land that he ended up in February 2022 trying to take by force.
Trump might also be concerned about money. After recently putting commemorative coins on the market, today he advertised Trump watches at prices from $499 to $100,000, although the fine print specified that the watches in the ad might not “be an exact representation of the final product.”
The Commerce Department reported today that the country’s economic growth from April to June was a strong 3.1%, making the rate under Biden-Harris 3.2%, higher than the rate of economic growth the country enjoyed under Trump before the pandemic. Today, on the stock market, the S&P 500 hit another record high.
But stock in Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent of his Truth Social, has been falling and is now about 82% less valuable than it was in March when it debuted. Today a new regulatory filing showed that one of the biggest investors in the company has sold more than 7.5 million shares, or about 4% of the company’s outstanding shares. Trump owns about 60%.
Trump might want Russian help again because he is worried about losing the election. When reporters asked him today about whether he would continue to support the Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson—whose recently-revealed postings on a pornographic site included his declaration that he is a “black NAZI!”—Trump answered: “I don’t know the situation.”
And this time around, it might be harder to find people and media outlets willing to lie about the election’s outcome. The highest court in Washington, D.C., disbarred Trump’s former ally Rudy Giuliani today because of his efforts to help Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election; also today, the voting machine company Smartmatic settled its defamation case against Newsmax over the media company’s lies after that election. The trial was set to begin Monday. The terms of the settlement are not public.
But there was one bright spot for Trump today. For all MAGA Republicans have tried to convince people that individual Americans engage in voter fraud, there is the much bigger game of election fraud afoot.
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections announced in a press release that over the past 20 months they have removed 747,000 voters from the state’s list of registered voters. Officials said these voters either had moved or were inactive because they had not voted in the past two federal elections. The state has 7.7 million registered voters. Trump must win North Carolina to have a plausible chance at victory in 2024, but the Robinson scandal will hurt Republican turnout. In 2020, Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes.”
Last night, at about 11:10 local time, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida, where the state’s panhandle curves down toward the peninsula. It was classified as a Category 4 storm when it hit, bringing winds of 140 miles per hour (225 km per hour). The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane wind scale, developed in 1971 by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and meteorologist Robert Simpson, divides storms according to sustained wind intensity in an attempt to explain storms on a scale similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes.
The Saffir-Simpson scale defines a Category 4 hurricane as one that brings catastrophic damage. According to the National Weather Service, which was established in 1870 to give notice of “the approach and force of storms,” and is now part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a Category 4 hurricane has winds of 134–156 miles (209–251 km) per hour. “Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.”
Hurricane Helene hit with a 15-foot (4.6 meter) storm surge and left a path of destruction across Florida before moving up into Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky with torrential rain, flash floods, high winds, and tornadoes. A record level of more than eleven inches of rain fell in Atlanta, Georgia. At least 45 people have died in the path of the storm, and more than 4.5 million homes and businesses across ten states are without power. The roads in western North Carolina are closed. Moody’s Analytics said it expects the storm to leave $15 to $26 billion in property damage.
Officials from NOAA, the scientific and regulatory agency that forecasts weather and monitors conditions in the oceans and skies, predict that record-warm ocean temperatures this year will produce more storms than usual. NOAA hurricane scientist Jeff Masters noted that Helene’s landfall “gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017–2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.”
President Joe Biden approved emergency declarations for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina before Helene made landfall. Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, did not ask for such a declaration until this evening, instead proclaiming September 27 a “voluntary Day of Prayer and Fasting.” Observers pointed out that with people stuck on a hospital roof in the midst of catastrophic flooding in his state, maybe an emergency declaration would be more on point.
After a state or a tribal government asks for federal help, an emergency declaration enables the federal government to provide funds to supplement local and state emergency efforts, as well as to deploy the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help save lives, protect property, and protect health and safety. Before Helene made landfall, the federal government placed personnel and resources across the region, ready to help with search and rescue, restore power, and provide food and water and emergency generators.
The federal government sent 1,500 federal personnel to the region, as well as about 8,000 members of the U.S. Coast Guard and teams from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide emergency power. It provided two health and medical task forces to help local hospitals and critical care facilities, and sent in more than 2.7 million meals, 1.6 million liters of water, 50,000 tarps, 10,000 cots, 20,000 blankets, 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and 40,000 gallons of gasoline to provide supplies for those hit by the catastrophe.
FEMA was created in 1979 after the National Governors Association asked President Jimmy Carter to centralize federal emergency management functions. That centralization recognized the need for coordination as people across the country responded to a disaster in any one part of it. When a devastating fire ripped through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the day after Christmas in 1802, Congress agreed to send aid to the town, but volunteers organized by local and state governments and funded by wealthy community members provided most of the response and recovery efforts for the many disasters of the 1900s.
When a deadly hurricane wiped out Galveston, Texas, in 1900, killing at least 6,000 residents and destroying most of the city’s buildings, the inept machine government proved unable to manage the donations pouring in from across the country to help survivors. Six years later, when an earthquake badly damaged San Francisco and ensuing fires from broken gas lines engulfed the city in flames, the interim fire chief—who took over when the fire chief was gravely injured—called in federal troops to patrol the streets and guard buildings. More than 4,000 Army troops also fed, sheltered, and clothed displaced city residents.
When the Mississippi River flooded in 1927, sending up to 30 feet (9 meters) of water across ten states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, killing about 500 people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to coordinate the federal disaster response and pull together the many private-sector interests eager to help out under federal organization. This marked the first time the federal government took charge after a disaster.
In 1950, Congress authorized federal response to disasters when it passed the Federal Disaster Assistance Program. In response to the many disasters of the 1960s—the 1964 Alaska Earthquake, Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and Hurricane Camille in 1969—the Department of Housing and Urban Development established a way to provide housing for disaster survivors. Congress provided guaranteed flood insurance to homeowners, and in 1970 it also authorized federal loans and federal funding for those affected by disasters.
When he signed the Disaster Relief Act of 1970, Republican president Richard Nixon said: “I am pleased with this bill which responds to a vital need of the American people. The bill demonstrates that the Federal Government in cooperation with State and local authorities is capable of providing compassionate assistance to the innocent victims of natural disasters.”
Four years later, Congress established the process for a presidential disaster declaration. By then, more than 100 different federal departments and agencies had a role in responding to disasters, and the attempts of state, tribal, and local governments to interface with them created confusion. So the National Governors Association asked President Carter to streamline the process. In Executive Order 12127 he brought order to the system with the creation of FEMA.
In 2003, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the George W. Bush administration brought FEMA into its newly-created Department of Homeland Security, along with 21 other agencies, wrapping natural disasters together with terrorist attacks as matters of national security. After 2005’s Hurricane Katrina required the largest disaster response in U.S. history, FEMA’s inadequate response prompted a 2006 reform act that distinguished responding to natural disasters from responding to terrorist attacks. In 2018, another reform focused on funding for disaster mitigation before the crisis hits.
The federal government’s efficient organization of responses to natural disasters illustrates that as citizens of a republic, we are part of a larger community that responds to our needs in times of crisis.
But that system is currently under attack. Project 2025, a playbook for the next Republican administration, authored by allies of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and closely associated with Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate Ohio senator J.D. Vance, calls for slashing FEMA’s budget and returning disaster responses to states and localities.
Project 2025 also calls for dismantling the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and either eliminating its functions, sending them to other agencies, privatizing them, or putting them under the control of states and territories. It complains that NOAA, whose duties include issuing hurricane warnings, is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”
Word salad….what someone who doesn’t comprehend what they heard or read, calls that something.
elg……
Nah... it's more a holistic middle class thing.... and I guarantee nobody comprehends this little ditty. Not even herself
There's about a thousand more of these out there.
your Welcome Sir, mmmmm elg also 
