If there’s one thing I couldn't stand in all the Monday morning quarterbacking about Hurricane Irma, it’s those folks who said it was all a lot of “hype.”

What would it take to get their attention, I wonder? You have close to 40 people dead in the U.S. and Caribbean. You have millions without power – which means without air conditioning, fresh food, hot meals, transportation, communications and medical treatments. No school and no work. You have a wide, deep swath of destruction. And you have parts of the Caribbean that are decimated.

Plus, as with any hurricane, the aftermath is sometimes worse than the storm. What made Hurricane Katrina such a killer – apart from government mismanagement – was the flooding that followed. ...

Scooch over, Harvey and join Sandy, Katrina, Andrew and (here insert your personal past hurricane nemesis) on the long couch.

As the Repubs learned yesterday, there’s no political storm quite like Hurricane Donald. (Here we cue a fabulously appropriate folk song that figures in my novel “Water Music” – “The Wind and Rain” – beautifully realized by the band Crooked Still.)

He blew through Washington D.C., cutting a three-month deal to raise the debt ceiling with Dems Nancy Pelosi and “Chuck Chop” Schumer, the Minority Leaders of their respective Congressional Houses, leaving the repudiated Repubs to wonder in the manner of hurricane survivors, “What the hell just happened?” ...

Eye of the storm: Predicting, covering Irma

The wind, the rain and The Donald