I hope everyone made it through the hurricane. Let’s hope that’s it for this hurricane season.

Yesterday, after Donald Trump denied he had sent covid test machines to Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin confirmed that he had. But the Kremlin denied that Trump and Putin have been talking on the phone since. What to make of this? Maybe Putin thought Trump needed a reminded that I own you. Also, Woodward cited an intelligence analyst as the source of the covid machine story, so it must be assumed the intelligence agencies knew about this. Whether the intelligence agencies know about the phone calls isn’t clear.  See also Marcy Wheeler.

I found a news story from April 2020 in which Trump brags about these  particular test machines, by Abbott Labs.

A coronavirus test made by Abbott Laboratories and introduced with considerable fanfare by President Donald Trump in a Rose Garden news conference this week is giving state and local health officials very little added capacity to perform speedy tests needed to control the COVID-19 pandemic.

“That’s a whole new ballgame,” Trump said. “I want to thank Abbott Labs for the incredible work they’ve done. They’ve been working around-the-clock.”

Yet a document circulated among officials at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency this week shows that state and local public health labs were set to receive a total of only 5,500 coronavirus tests from the giant manufacturer of medical devices, diagnostics and drugs, according to emails obtained by Kaiser Health News.

Elsewhere — I’ve been working really hard at ignoring the polls. But the polling issue gets in my face sometimes anyway. One issue that keeps coming up is that in both 2016 and 2020, Trump voters were undercounted. I keep seeing headlines saying that Dems are terrified Trumpers are being undercounted again. Now I see in a Newsweek story that pollsters are now “correcting” for the undercount in various ways. Maybe they’re over-correcting? A recent article by Nate Cohn in the New York Times goes into more detail about different ways polls are being “weighted,” arriving at different results. See also Josh Marshall’s miscellaneous thoughts on polling. It’s entirely possible the race isn’t quite as close as the polls are saying.

Getting back to hurricanes — Trump, Vance, and other right-wing tools have been flagrantly and shamelessly lying their butts off about the FEMA response to Helene and Milton.  (For some reason, I keep wanting to call yesterday’s storm “Winslow.” Maybe there will be a Hurricane Winslow some day.) Vance wrote an op ed for the Wall Street Journal about the Biden-Harris mismanagement of Helene, which of course I can’t read. Meanwhile, politicians of the affected areas, including Republicans, have been heaping praise on FEMA and the rest of the feds. The people whose lives have been impacted will, sooner or later, figure out who’s telling the truth. Although I understand there are people who refuse to ask FEMA for help because they’ve been told FEMA will confiscate their houses.

At Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley writes Trump Is Doing His Best to Make the Hurricane Into a Bad Issue for Him. Mathis-Lilley reminds us of times that Trump tried to politicize or otherwise unnecessarily inject himself into situations and got burned in the process. The Bible Stunt and the Bleach Suggestion, for example. He may well be overplaying his hand now. I guess we’ll see, won’t we, North Carolina?