Bob Woodward’s new book alleges that Donald Trump “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use” during 2020 testing shortages. That’s even as FEMA fends off false MAGA allegations that FEMA diverted Hurricane Helene disaster monies aid migrants.
As the coronavirus tore through the world in 2020, and the United States and other countries confronted a shortage of tests designed to detect the illness, then-President Donald Trump secretly sent coveted teststo Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use.
Putin, petrified of the virus, accepted the supplies but took pains to prevent political fallout — not for him, but for his American counterpart. He cautioned Trump not to reveal that he had dispatched the scarce medical equipment to Moscow, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward.
Putin, according to the book, told Trump, “I don’t want you to tell anybody because people will get mad at you, not me.”
Four years later, the personal relationship between the two men appears to have persisted, Woodward reports, as Trump campaigns to return to the White House and Putin orchestrates his bloody assault on Ukraine. In early 2024, the former president ordered an aide away from his office at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, so he could conduct a private phone call with the Russian leader, according to Woodward’s account.
In 2020, Woodward writes, Trump had “secretly sent Putin a bunch of Abbott Point of Care Covid test machines for his personal use.”
“Please don’t tell anybody you sent these to me,” Putin said to Trump, according to Woodward.https://t.co/9avpfIWKEp
How will Helene impact the presidential election in North Carolina?
“To be determined” is the simple answer.
Hurricane Helene has upset many residents’ fall plans in western North Carolina, among which are plans for early voting set to begin on October 17. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is urging the annual inmigration of fall “leaf peepers” to stay home and away from the disaster area. Local businesses who count on that trade may not have beds or power or water for them anyway. Hotels are filled with relief workers or people whose homes are unlivable or gone. Local election boards will have to alter election plans that under normal circumstances are unalterable once submitted and approved by the state’s Board of Elections in August.
Permisssion for altering the unalterable came on Monday (Democracy Docket):
The North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) unanimously passed a resolution Monday allowing special accommodations for voters in the 13 counties most impacted by Hurricane Helene.
Karen Brinson Bell, NCSBE’s executive director, began the Monday morning meeting with a status update.
“What a difference a week makes,” Brinson Bell said. “When we were last together to consider the emergency authority regarding absentee board meeting schedules for these affected counties, we were looking at 14 offices that could still not open for work or to the public, and today, all county offices are open in North Carolina, and this is just quite the feat.”
However, she said many voters and election workers still face numerous struggles in the storm’s aftermath. One of the board members, Stacy Eggers IV, said that he has visited five of the counties impacted and has seen the damage firsthand.
“These areas received over 20 inches of rain in less than about 36 hours,” Eggers said. “As of today, we still have over 100,000 North Carolinians without power. Communication is significantly limited, and our roads remain in a crippled state.”
The five-member board determined that in multiple western North Carolina counties — Ashe, Avery, Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison, McDowell, Mitchell, Polk, Rutherford, Transylvania, Watauga and Yancey — the “infrastructure for elections administration and voters’ accessibility to polling places and mail service” was “severely disrupted as a result of the disaster.”
Therefore, the board members passed a resolution to allow election boards in these counties to make changes with a “bipartisan majority vote.”
They can amend their early voting plans — like adding or removing voting sites and changing hours or days that sites are open — and modify their Election Day polling places.
On Nov. 5, these counties can establish voting sites for a precinct outside of the actual precinct. If a county doesn’t have the infrastructure to operate an Election Day site in a certain precinct, they can create a site in a different area or county for their voters to go to.
Also, the election boards in these counties can bring in election officials and poll workers who are registered voters and residents of other North Carolina counties.
Additionally, county boards can make accommodations for absentee voters. They can process absentee ballot requests until the day before Election Day. Without this change, the request deadline would’ve been Oct. 29.
Under the proposal, voters in these counties can now hand-deliver their absentee ballots to any Election Day voting site by 7:30 p.m. that day. Otherwise, they would only be allowed to submit them to their county’s election office.
Voters can also return their ballots to a different North Carolina county’s election board by 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5 if they were displaced to another county after the storm.
Only two of those 13 are “blue counties” (Buncombe and Watauga). The rest are pretty solidly red, and their combined populations are over 100,000 more than the blues. Republicans in Raleigh could balk at plans that would allow Buncombe (Asheville) and Watauga (Boone, Appalachian State) flexibility for citizens to access voting sites post-Helene, but they could be shooting themselves in the foot to try.
Of course, voters here in Asheville will crawl over broken glass to vote beginning next week (as many as possible on Day1, please). Fourteen early voting sites were planned in Buncombe County. How many remain in operational condition and accessible after the flooding is under review. Some of the 80 Election Day precincts may have to be moved or combined. Giving advance notice to voters (given that informational literature is already printed) will prove a challenge, but there are still weeks to tackle that problem. Buncombe’s local Board will meet today to draft Plan B.
What’s not clear is what happens in other counties. Watauga (which saw extensive flooding) planned for five EV sites. The rest of the 13 have two EV sites at best.
Democrats’ plans for seeing North Carolina go blue could turn on voting access here in the west and on which voters can and cannot access voting by Nov. 5
In an interview on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” that aired Monday morning, former President Donald Trump criticized Vice President Kamala Harris for her policies on the southern border and suggested that migrants have “bad genes.”
“When you look at the things that she proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue. How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers,” he said, referring to the vice president’s immigration proposals.
“Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States,” he added. “You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.”
This isn’t the first time that Trump has invoked race science. In 2020 he praised a nearly all-white crowd at a rally in Minnesota for having “good genes,” pointing to a belief that has been touted by white supremacists called “racehorse theory.”
“You have good genes. You know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota,” Trump said at the 2020 rally.
Sidney Blumenthal has a fascinating piece in the Guardian today about Trump’s belief in eugenics and his affinity for Naziism. He traces Trump family lineage back to Germany and even reveals some literal Nazi ties. He also explores Trump’s long held beliefs in his “good German blood” and his evocation of Hitleriam rhetoric. It’s all very interesting. I thought this was especially sharp on Trump’s beliefs in the Great Replacement Theory:
Trump’s footsie with Nazis mingles narcissism with Nazism. But it is his belief in the far-right “replacement theory”, which is the central idea of his campaign, that provides the greatest illumination on what are more than overlapping coincidences. The historical lineage of poisonous ideas, rather than “poison in the blood”, explains Trump’s doctrine of a master race, whether Trump is aware or not of the origins of his venom.
[…]
Trump’s replacement theory is derivative of the nativism of eugenicists and “race scientists”, especially Madison Grant, whose 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned against “the old stock being crowded out” by “swarms of Polish Jews” and other aliens, who were pushing aside “the Nordic man”, and fostering “suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race”.
Grant served as an adviser to the congressional members who wrote the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted immigration of those ethnic groups from eastern and southern Europe that he deemed inferior, closing out Italians and Jews. He also helped write laws in the south banning interracial marriage.
Hitler regarded Grant’s book in his speeches as scientific proof and wrote him an admiring letter telling him it was his “Bible”. “It was America, in spite of its enormous territory, that was the first country to teach us by its immigration law that a nation should not open its doors equally to all races,” Hitler told the New York Times in an interview on 20 December 1931, before he seized power. “Let China be for the Chinese, America for the Americans and Germany for the Germans.” In 1936 the Nazis promoted The Passing of the Great Race as essential reading for Germans.
“The irony is that by putting Madison Grant’s theories into practice, the Nazis discredited those theories forever,” wrote the historian Jonathan Spiro in his biography of Madison Grant, Defending the Master Race.
That is, until Trump.
When Trump says immigration, he means race. When he says crime, he means race. When he says communism, socialism, or Democrat, he means race. When he says America is declining, he means race. When he says “American First”, he means race. When he says blood, he means race. When he says poison, he means race.
When he says race, he means Black people. When he says race, he means Hispanics. When he says race, he means Muslims. And when he says race, he means other white people, too, some less white, less pure, less clean, less acceptable depending on their ancestral origin, than others. When he says race, he means the replacement theory.
His “good German blood” will save us all.
If you found this as interesting as I did, I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s quite long but worth the time if you can spare it.
The West Virginia House has introduced a resolution that lays the foundation for the state to officially reject the national presidential election results in the case they suspect fraud in a Democratic victory.
I don’t know if this means they will refuse to submit their electoral votes but if that’s what they’re saying they’ll only hurt Donald Trump who will certainly win them. So I guess they’re just preparing for secession then by saying they won’t “recognize” a Democratic president? What else could it be?
The real point of this is ginning up their rubes to commit violence by pushing the idea that the Democrats are trying to kill Trump. If he loses, who knows what they’ll do?
One of the most heavily contested voting demographics this cycle is the so-called “Bro” vote. Don Jr’s got Trump all over the Bro podcasts trying to grow the gender gap in his favor. But there’s a tensy problem, I’m afraid:
Seventeen pornographic film actors on Monday announced that they had launched a $100,000 ad campaign on porn sites warning that Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation blueprint for a Republican administration that has been a centerpiece of some Democratic campaigns — wants to ban pornography and imprison people who produce it. The online ads will run in the states that will decide the presidency: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.
The architects of the “hands off my porn” campaign are nothing if not aware of the polling. Vice President Kamala Harris is losing to former President Donald J. Trump among men, but younger men might be winnable — and pornographic websites are among the most heavily trafficked on the internet.
Quoting the Survey Center on American Life, the group said younger men are the biggest consumers of the industry’s products: Among men aged 18-29, 44 percent had watched porn within the past month. Among men aged 30-49, it was 57 percent.
“I have been in this industry for over 25 years and have witnessed many attacks on our industry, but Project 2025’s ban on pornography is the most extreme proposal I have ever seen, and voters have to take that threat seriously,” Holly Randall, a pornographic film actor, said in the group’s announcement. “We cannot simply rely on precedent that consuming pornography is legal and has been legal for a long time.”
The bros may like Trump’s anarchic spirit and care little for actual policy. But this hits them where they live. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if this has an impact.
"The level of un-American activity that you just saw is stunning. That is un-American. They know they're lying. Donald Trump knows that's a lie." @joenbc on Trump and allies blaming Democrats for assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. https://t.co/81Qbqx0lEhpic.twitter.com/HnMNeCBFIE
Joe Scarborough, former hardcore right winger, dealing with what the GOP has become:
“The level of un-American activity that you just saw is stunning. That is un-American. They know they’re lying. Donald Trump knows that’s a lie. He will tell you that the Secret Service, he thought, did the best job they could do. The fact that JD Vance and Trump’s family would out and out say what they said takes the threat of violence, takes the threat beyond where it was even leading up to January the 6th. This is an increasingly desperate person, an increasingly desperate family, who is preparing for civil war. They just are.”
He’s not wrong. The desperation is just dripping from the Trump clan.
The number of migrants crossing into the U.S. illegally at the southern border reached the lowest point of President Biden’s administration in September, three months into his crackdown on asylum claims, according to internal Department of Homeland Security statistics obtained by CBS News.
In September, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 54,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the border with Mexico, the government figures show. It’s a smaller figure than the previous Biden-era low in July, when Border Patrol processed roughly 56,000 migrants who crossed the border without authorization.
Border Patrol’s tally of migrant apprehensions in September is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and the travel restrictions countries enacted in response to it led to a sharp decrease in migration to the U.S. southern border.
It would be nice if there were screaming headlines about this but there are a lot of screaming headlines about everything right now. But considering that Trump’s main line of attack is that hordes of migrants are coming to slit your throats in your kitchen (he actually says that) it seems pretty salient.
I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17 year old over the weekend who’s taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She’s following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and out of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn’t really considered it before.
We were talking about the VP debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Trump’s brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn’t of interest until Trump came along. That’s a lot of people who don’t know that it isn’t supposed to be this way.
Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It’ also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he’s gone?
It’s hard to imagine that it will be exactly the same. Trump is sui generis. But what has the next generation of GOP leaders learned from him that can be put to use for their own ambition? I imagine there are many things but I think there is one very clear lesson.: they can lie with impunity. And some of the new leaders like Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have obviously discovered that if they lie with a congenial look on their face, there is no limit to how much they can get away with.
Politicians have always lied to some degree, of course. In the past we used to call it spin because they would not dare to just lie outright and essentially tell the voters that they shouldn’t believe their own eyes or depend on their own memories. But what we are seeing today is a major shift in what is acceptable in politics. And it goes way beyond Trump.
Vance does not have a naturally pleasant personality but he discovered in that debate that if he didn’t crudely disparage “childless cat ladies” or accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets, he could lie flagrantly about the past and his plans for the future as long as he kept a smile on his face. Consider that he congenially but blatantly lied about having said that he favored a national abortion ban, that Donald Trump had saved Obamacare, that carbon emissions aren’t the main cause of climate change (suggesting that climate change is “weird science”),that Chinese imports raised the cost of consumer goods etc.
That’s not spin. It’s an assault on reality. Those lies and more went unchecked and I would guess that millions of people watching believed him because he said them with such a pleasant tone.
Out on the stump Vance plays to the MAGA crowd, but he’s just as dishonest. One of his favorite lines is “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Whichever persona he assumes, attack dog or affable colleague, the lies are the one consistent feature of his speeches.
Another up-and-comer, Mike Johnson, ever the reasonable sounding fellow, has become adept at MAGA lying. Just this weekend he went on Fox News and said that the federal response to Hurricane Helene is a failure.
The Biden-Harris Administration’s response to Hurricane Helene has been a complete failure.
The massive hurricane was expected well in advance, but they were still not adequately prepared. Now they are playing catch up while the American people suffer.
That’s a lie and he knows it. You can ask any of the Republican Governors and local officials in the affected area and they will say that the feds have been on the ground since before the hurricane hit and have been excellently coordinating the massive response. In the past one would have expected this sort of thing from the likes of Florida gadfly Rep. Matt Gaetz but not the Speaker of the House. This kind of blatant falsehood is now completely normal among Republicans. They are spreading these lies on social media and television and are backed up by Trump’s eager endorser Elon Musk and a massive disinformation campaign.
How about Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fl., was once a respectable conservative and considered a strong candidate for president. Today he sounds like a Russian trollbot on X:
Another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today
16 of the last 17 reports have been significantly revised downwards after media helps them with their fake headlines
But all the fake numbers in the world aren’t going to fool people dealing with the Biden-Harris…
The last two reports have been revised up but that beside the point. The BLS is a non-partisan agency. He knows this. He is lying.
Republicans do this reflexively now, without any fear of repurcussions from their voters some of whom actually respect them for doing it while those poor souls who actually believe what they’re saying give them money and take their lives into their hands. There is no price to be paid for dishonesty and evidently they believe they have something to gain.
This didn’t start with Donald Trump although he’s the first one to turn a profit at it. This really started back in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich and the primer written by Republican strategist Frank Luntz called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” for Gingrich’s political action committee GOPAC. A few years later we were lied into the Iraq war by the Bush administration.
New York Times Magazine published an article in 2004 by reporter Ron Suskind who interviewed a senior administration aide, presumed to be Bush’s Brain Karl Rove:
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
I’m not sure Rove thought it would devolve into the orgy of lying about everything, distorting even their own concept of reality, but that’s where we are now. (Thanks a lot Karl.)Perhaps it was inevitable that a celebrity demagogue and pathological liar would take the mantle of “history’s actor” and turn it into political world wide wrestling but the consequences of this little experiment are dire.
We owe it to my young 17 year old friend to do everything we can to turn this country back into the reality based community. No society can function swimming in deceit and corruption for very long. And right now we are drowning in it.
It’s been an article of conservative faith for as long as I can recall that government ought to be run more like a business. On that topic….
A long time ago, in a high school far, far away, a decade before the breakup of Ma Bell, I read a book about corporate rip-offs.
It included a tale of a private school bus service in Greensboro or High Point, NC that (IIRC) had a run of burned-out clutches in its fleet of brand new buses. Despite his repeated complaints, the owner kept getting the runaround from the maker’s regional manager who claimed that no other customers had experienced similar problems. This was a lie. The owner had contacted other fleet owners by long distance and letter (remember when this was) and had a file of receipts. Yet the regional manager insisted the breakdowns must have been caused by the service’s drivers.
The money quote went something like this: “He was lying to me. I knew he was lying to me. He knew I knew he was lying to me. But he lied anyway, not because he had anything to gain from the lies, but because it was company policy.”
As you may have noticed from the political faction that wants our government run more like a business, lying is now company policy. During the vice-presidential debate last week you watched J.D. Vance tell transparent lies and, when called on them by the moderator, double and triple down on them. He was lying, We knew he was lying. He knew we knew, etc.
When Gov. Tim Walz challenged Vance to acknowledge that Joe Biden won in 2020, Vance dodged and accused Kamala Harris of suppressing the free speech of Covid deniers.
Let’s be clear, though. On the free speech battles that matter most — in our beleaguered public libraries or in our high school classrooms — Republicans like Vance are on the side of government repression. It’s only on the right to tell Americans that public health experts are lying about wearing masks or the efficacy of vaccines that they discover their inner James Madison — even after studies showed that unvaccinated people in heavily GOP counties had higher death rates.
God Bless America. They will defend to your death their right to spread disinformation.
“Republican commentators and officials with a stake in the recovery effort have decided to play both sides against the middle: calling out lies to facilitate the recovery, but suggesting all parties are to blame,” Brian Beutler writes. This lie-fest over Hurricane Helene response is a dry run for Insurrection 2.0:
Now imagine it’s Election Day. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are posting and reposting lies and rumors about election workers destroying ballots or stuffing ballot boxes, illegal immigrants voting by the hundreds, while turning away red-hatted Republicans.
By then it will be too late for mainstream media to make any particular pattern of behavior a major issue for undecided voters. Republican state officials will continue to have it both ways, condemning lies in an intentionally ineffective way. The die will be cast. And then, if Trump slips behind in the vote count, the stage will be set for insurrection 2.0.
Trump’s allies, corporate ones among them, know they are spreading lies, and do so dutifully.
Helene lies serve two mutually reinforcing political purposes: saddling Biden and Harris with the same reputation for incompetence that Trump earned in his single term (sapping the Harris campaign of enthusiasm) and fueling right-wing hatred of Democrats and the government (fueling GOP turnout). To the extent that it actually interferes with command structure and emergency-management logistics, all the better. If they can make the relief effort chaotic, they can lay blame at the feet of the people who are legitimately in charge.
Lies about fraudulent voting lay groundwork for rejecting election results, quite possibly also for retributive violence in Democratic strongholds.
“Democrats should try to prime the public to expect what’s coming,” Beutler warns, “so they aren’t caught flat-footed as they were by lies about Helene.”
There is anecdotal evidence that when MAGA lies are as blatant as they are about Helene recovery that there is a growing backlash among Republican voters here who are living among the truth. Let’s hope that’s real. But real or not, MAGA Republicans won’t change. Lying is company policy.
Where’s Lockjaw when you really need him?
In the Black Forest, lives an ogre named Lockjaw. Lockjaw doesn’t like children Who tell lies. Late at night he stalks the houses of the fibbers and the Falsifiers, and before they can cry out from their beds, he nails their jaws Open with a rusty nail, using his head for a hammer. You may escape him for a While and think you fooled him, but he’ll get you in the end. He’ll get ya! He’ll get ya!!
Thousands of people, government agencies, military, and private volunteers, responded to Hurricane Helene’s devastation in western North Carolina. Don’t let the People of the Lie tell you otherwise.
The official death count here is mounting. Our county sheriff reports over 70 so far. Search and rescue teams expect to find more victims among the tangles of branches and debris left behind by the flooding.
Neighbors helping neighbors
Not only is the military here, but an army of volunteers.
Drew Reisinger, Buncombe County Register of Deeds, turned his office into a relief center for coordinating welfare checks on thousands of people unaccounted for (mostly because of lack of cell service, thankfully). Many of those processing incoming reports worked remotely.
Everyone has heard that Asheville’s drinking water system will be down for weeks, so they’re sending in cases of bottled water. And cases. And cases. And cases.
Thank you. What they’re missing is you can’t flush your toilet (or bathe) with bottled water. (The city’s waste treatment plant never went offline.) So for the elderly and less mobile, another immediate need is water for flushing. These volunteers responded.
Family Assistance Center Oct. 6 – Final Summary
2,685 volunteers — managed by a team of hundreds of volunteers — through the Family Assistance Center at the Buncombe Co. Register of Deeds deployed to check and re-check 15,982 high priority households with 10,000+ care packages distributed and 4,413 toilets flushed. 13,049 of our neighbors confirmed safe and sound by volunteers, and via email and text, as of Sunday, October 6, 2024.
It’s been a bittersweet week since Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina. Homes and lives were lost. People and pets displaced. There was no water, no electricity, and no communication for hundreds of thousands of people. Despite the sudden, tragic devastation, the good people of Buncombe Co. stepped up to help one another. In just eight days, thousands of volunteers, tasked with checking on tens of thousands of our neighbors, made their way to the far reaches of the county to deliver food and water, render emergency aid, flush toilets, and relay the good news — their loved ones were safe and sound.
The Family Assistance Center will close on Sunday, October 6th. As we rebuild, our community will have many needs in the coming weeks. You can find more local volunteer opportunities at bit.ly/4eRc5kZ
Volunteers, from near and far, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Join our Facebook group: FlushingAwesome
To report a missing person, please contact the Buncombe Co. Sheriff’s Department at (828) 250-6650.
Today’s Good News
A father and daughter volunteer team found an individual in extreme distress. He was in the middle of a stroke. They immediately took him to a hospital. Just a few hours later, doctors reported, he would’ve died. Today he was able to visit his children who had to climb trees to avoid the flooding.
Former Asheville resident and current Pittsburgh resident, Adam Casto — employing advanced AI tools — processed 6,477 unique emails and voicemails, automatically extrapolating the data into spreadsheets.
Asheville native and Missouri resident, Emily Woodall, and the Remote Data Team of 70+ active volunteers from across the country — and Finland — processed 2,000+ emails and 730 voicemails — one by one — and called, texted, and emailed 630 grateful loved ones.
Emily writes, “The most surreal moment of this experience was Saturday, Sept. 28th as I was watching emails come into the buncombesearch gmail account. People were reporting dire situations. With everyone in Asheville and WNC literally in the dark, I realized in that moment I was the only one reading these messages, and besides sending them our form, all I could do in that moment was to bear witness to this unimaginable situation. To be able to grow our remote efforts from that very lonely experience to a team of more than 70+ volunteers, to see the deep love for WNC pour in from across the country, has been one of the best experiences of my life and probably the best thing I’ve ever done.”
FYI: After nine and a half days, my power came back on Suday night about five p.m. Made coffee with bottled water. We’re still tapping springs and creeks for flushing water.
4,413 toilets flushed. 13,049 of our neighbors confirmed safe and sound by volunteers, and via email and text, as of Sunday, October 6, 2024.