The air in Seattle blew past unhealthy this morning, then past very unhealthy this afternoon; it’s now at hazardous and still climbing; after hazardous it’s just we can’t count it any more.

But as for Oregon…

Hundreds of firefighters battled two large wildfires Friday that threatened to merge near the most populated part of Oregon, including the suburbs of Portland, and the governor said dozens of people are missing in other parts of the state.

The state’s emergency management director, Andrew Phelps, said officials are “preparing for a mass fatality event” and that thousands of structures have been destroyed.

Gov. Kate Brown said more than 40,000 Oregonians have been evacuated and about 500,000 are in different levels of evacuation zones, either having been told [either] to leave or to prepare to do so. She was dialing back on a statement late Thursday issued by the state Office of Emergency Management that said a half-million people had been ordered to evacuate statewide.

…

The Oregon Convention Center in Portland was among the buildings being transformed into shelters for evacuees. Portland, shrouded in smoke from the fires, on Friday had the worst air quality of the world’s major cities, according to IQAir.

From that air quality story:

Smoke pollution from wildfires raging in California and across the Pacific Northwest worsened in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, on Friday, giving those cities and others in the region some of the world’s worst air quality.

…

The sky turned a hazy, grayish white across the Northwest as winds that had previously pushed much of the smoke offshore shifted, bringing unhealthy levels of near-microscopic dust, soot and ash particles to Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, British Columbia. San Francisco also continued to suffer from smoke pollution; those four cities topped the list of major cities with the worst air quality Friday, according to IQAir.com, which tracks air quality around the world.

…

The smoke was expected to linger through the weekend, another reminder of the vast and severe effects of climate change. In a news conference Friday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee insisted on calling the blazes “climate fires” rather than wildfires.

“This is not an act of God,” Inslee said. “This has happened because we have changed the climate of the state of Washington in dramatic ways.”

It’s apocalyptic around here.

Chris Cillizza is not one of the great journalists, but I like his take on Trump’s efforts to prevent panic over a new lethal contagious disease.

There is, without doubt, a worthy debate to be had as to whether Woodward, who technically works for the Post but in practical terms has been writing books for years now, should have immediately gone to the Post after Trump made his statements about downplaying the virus and demanded space on the website (and in the next day’s paper) to write a big contemporaneous piece about it.

But that conversation pales in comparison to this one: If the President of the United States knew that Covid-19 was worse than people thought — and worse than he was letting on by comparing it to the seasonal flu — why didn’t HE go tell the American public about it?

Wull…because he’s not a reporter. Woodward is the reporter. Trump is just some guy.

Trump said he was downplaying the virus to keep us from panicking. But…

He didn’t just downplay the virus. He openly mocked mask-wearing, one of the only proven tactics we have to mitigate the spread. He pushed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the virus, even though the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization for the drug in mid-June. Heck, he even suggested that people might benefit from shining a bright light inside their bodies or ingesting disinfectant to combat the virus.

That’s MUCH more than just downplaying what he knew about coronavirus. That’s openly rejecting science in favor of personal opinion and political point-scoring.

But back to Woodward. The simple fact is that it is Trump, not Woodward, who is the President of the United States. Which means the burden of informing the public about uncomfortable truths regarding a virus that has killed more than 190,000 Americans this year to date — and putting in place policies to mitigate it — falls on the one who was elected to be the leader of the country. Not the guy who is writing a book about the guy who was elected to be the leader of the country.

And so, this defense — like so many of Trump’s excuses, rationalizations and blaming — crumbles on even the slightest inspection. And proves yet again that Trump simply does not understand the responsibilities that come with being president or the moral burden that running for and winning the job confer.

Well when you put it like that…

Few face masks, no social distancing.

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Thursday he was “pretty puzzled” and “rather disheartened” by President Donald Trump’s crowded campaign rally in Michigan — at which few of the several thousand attendees could be seen wearing face masks and virtually none appeared to be practicing social distancing.

In unusually frank remarks during a CNN town hall event focused on the novel coronavirus, the nation’s top public health official lamented that commonsense mitigation measures had become politicized and claimed that aliens from far-off worlds viewing Americans’ behavior amid the pandemic would conclude that Earth was all but doomed.

Except for the “all but” part. Being aliens, they wouldn’t feel any need to hedge to spare our feelings. Earth is doomed.

Trump’s rally came amid ongoing efforts by his White House to counter fallout from newly published excerpts of Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book. Some recordings of the president’s 18 on-the-record interviews with the veteran reporter released this week show Trump calling the coronavirus “deadly stuff” and acknowledging he was eager to “play … down” the outbreak in February and March — a time when he was publicly dismissive of its threat.

…

Although roughly 190,000 Americans have died from the disease, Trump told reporters that “the United States has done really well,” adding: “I really do believe we’re rounding the corner.”

But of course what Trump “believes” has nothing to do with anything, even if he adds “really do” to it, because his “beliefs” are just whatever pops into his head in the moment. He never pauses to evaluate or question or test them – he wouldn’t know how if you told him to. He is unaware of any difference between a thought in his head and a fact about the world.

Now here’s a smart guy.

Brilliant call.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts will end nearly all of his state’s social-distancing restrictions on Monday even as the number of new coronavirus cases has trended upward over the last few months.

Cases are going up so – shrug – might as well stop trying.

The new rules will still limit the size of large indoor gatherings, such as concerts, meeting halls and theaters, but will drop all other state-imposed mandates in favor of voluntary guidelines, as other conservative states have done.

Because “conservative” now means “ignore all expert health advice and refuse to take sensible steps to damp down a lethal pandemic.” They really want to go with that?

Richard Wolffe

The Inuit are supposed to have dozens of words to describe snow. The Brits have endless ways to talk about rain. Now it’s time for Americans to delineate all the many ways that Donald Trump is dumb.

I’ve been working on that project since July 2016.

(I know there’s a retort that he’s having a lot of success for someone who is dumb. Yes but the dumb is why he’s having the success. Sadly, pathetically, maddeningly, tragically, there are enough Murkans who love to see somebody stupid in the White House to put him there and keep him there despite impeachment.)

If Bob Woodward’s new blockbuster teaches us anything new about the character of the 45th president, it’s that we don’t yet have the words to describe the multiple variants of the vacuum inside his head.

There’s the stupidity of arrogance, the stupidity of ignorance, and his old friend: the stupidity of blatant duplicity. There’s his homicidal stupidity, his traitorous stupidity, his criminally corrupt stupidity and his plain old infantile stupidity.

Let’s start with the top of this taxonomy: the domain of Donald’s dumbness. At his core, the former reality TV star is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart.

So maybe, Wolffe suggests, this stupidity explains his 18 interviews with Woodward. (Trump hinted as much in that “press conference” the other day, when he said he respects Woodward because of hearing his name year after year. Not, he stupidly elaborated, because of his work, just because of Celebrity. Now that is stupid.)

… our very stupid genius vomited up all manner of secrets that collectively prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he represents the greatest single danger to the fate of both the American people and to himself.

How do we classify the stupidity of blabbing the greatest secret of them all: that he knew all along how Covid-19 was deadly and easily transmissible? We now know that in late January, his national security adviser told him the coronavirus was the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. A week later, he told Woodward that the disease was “more deadly even than your strenuous flus”.

But see at that time he didn’t know he was going to lie to us about it for months and months and months. Because he’s stupid.

Then he admitted it all over again at the press conference Wednesday.

“So the fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country. I love our country. And I don’t want people to be frightened,” he told reporters. “We want to show confidence. We want to show strength.”

Nothing says confidence or strength quite like 190,000 dead citizens. And nothing blows up your pushback against Woodward (“another political hit job”) like admitting to your arrogance and duplicity at a press conference.

Mattis and Coats knew how bad it was but couldn’t bring themselves to do anything about it.

Because of their failures to act, we now have an intelligence community that suppresses warnings about Russian election interference and white supremacist terrorists, while hyping conspiracies about antifa. You could say this was an impeachable state of affairs, but Republican senators have developed a new stupidity of cowardice.

Is it cowardice or love? I think it’s more that they love him, because they’re as bad as he is.

He leads with “I don’t say this out of ego but”

Hahahaha no obviously not.

He also implies that he’s getting it in the same sense Obama did, but Obama got the actual prize, awarded by the committee, not a nomination, awarded by one far-right jackass.

But never mind, Trump isn’t bragging about his farcical nomination out of ego.

I’m reading it. It’s tough going – I’ll be reading it in segments and taking breaks. Here’s one item:

Male violence and rape, and police inaction over these crimes, is also a problem for women and children not in prostitution who live near or enter the Holbeck zone. In 2015, ‘Sally – a young woman with learning disabilities, then aged 17 – was approached at a bus stop in Beeston on a weekday afternoon, bundled into a car, and raped in a nearby home. With DNA evidence, the attacker was quickly arrested and prosecuted in court. However, during a gruelling court case which saw Sally forced into a cross-examination, the defence lawyer argued that his client had simply mistaken Sally for a sex worker, and he walked free’.

Source: E. Carlisle, ‘Holbeck sex zone in the spotlight again’, South Leeds Life (31 August 2018), https://southleedslife.com/holbeck-sex-zone-in-the-spotlight-again/

An honest mistake.

Interesting.

The “I heart Rowling” poster didn’t get complaints, but Network Rail took it down anyway, because…………….??????

So then Network Rail got 128 158 complaints about the taking down, and ignored them.

Jessica Krug doing her academic woman of color thing.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

From Pliny:

New level of disgust. We knew he’d done it, but now we learn he bragged about it to Woodward.

President Donald Trump bragged that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of the American journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Why does the pestiferous sack of shit think that’s something to brag of?

Woodward wrote that Trump called him on January 22 shortly after attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. During the conversation, Woodward pressed the president about Khashoggi’s gruesome murder.

…

“The people at the Post are upset about the Khashoggi killing,” Woodward told Trump on January 22, his book says. “That is one of the most gruesome things. You yourself have said.”

“Yeah, but Iran is killing 36 people a day, so —” Trump began, before Woodward redirected the conversation and continued to press Trump about MBS’s role in ordering Khashoggi’s killing.

“I saved his ass,” Trump had said amid the US outcry following Khashoggi’s murder, the book says. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.”

But that’s a bad thing. That’s not a good thing, it’s a bad thing. We don’t want you saving MBS’s ass. We don’t want you getting Congress to leave him alone.

When a reporter pressed Trump on Thursday about what the president meant when he said he’d “saved” the Saudi leader’s “ass,” Trump replied: “You’ll have to figure that out yourself.”

No, sir, you should be required to explain yourself.

During his January 22 conversation with Woodward, the president said: “Well, I understand what you’re saying, and I’ve gotten involved very much. I know everything about the whole situation.”

Oh yes, he knows everything about everything, and understands it all too.

Trump repeatedly used executive power to block or bypass congressional efforts to cut ties with Riyadh after Khashoggi’s murder.

Last year, he vetoed a bipartisan bill to end US support for the Saudis in Yemen. The war in Yemen has led to a devastating humanitarian crisis, and the Saudi-led coalition has killed civilians using US-made bombs.

The president also bypassed Congress to push through an arms sale worth roughly $8 billion to the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates, and he later vetoed several resolutions blocking the sale.

More recently, Trump has moved to circumvent a decades-old arms-control pact in order to sell weaponized drones to the Saudis and to other countries in the region, sparking backlash from Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

Filth.

Via TheDudeDiogenes, Identity Theft by Zaid Jilani:

He starts with an analogy Apple’s CEO made between Emmett Till and Jacob Blake and points out what a terrible analogy it is.

I don’t write this to justify the shooting. If it turns out [Blake] didn’t pose any imminent threat to the officers or to the kids at the time of the shooting, it wasn’t justified. But there is no universe where it is legitimate to compare what is at worst an incompetent arrest and unjustified nonlethal shooting of someone wanted for an alleged violent crime to a brutal racist killing of an innocent child.

And yet such comparisons are now commonplace. Our contemporary political debates induce us to identify ourselves and those we view as sympathetic as first and foremost members of some group that has suffered historical victimhood. Then, after you have established that you or someone else is a member of this group, you can then use this status to plead for sympathy, prestige, or even power.

And if you can’t establish that you are a member maybe you can fake it.

On some level, we all know this rhetorical technique doesn’t quite make sense. The brilliant Aaron McGruder demonstrated as much in his hit animated series, The Boondocks, back in 2005. In the episode “The Trial of R. Kelly,” the infamous rapper goes on trial for his indecent acts with a minor. In order to defend him in court, Kelly hires an uber-woke white lawyer who turns to the Black jurors and intones, “They don’t want R. Kelly to be free because they don’t want you to be free!” The implication is that Kelly was being prosecuted not for his crimes but for his race; defining him only by his race allows his defense attorney to shield him with the status of historical victimhood—even if he himself is not a victim at all, for his race or for any other reason. Eventually, series protagonist Huey Freeman, an adolescent Black nationalist, loses his cool, reminding the court room that every famous Black person who “gets arrested is not Nelson Mandela!”

Which reminded me of the OJ Simpson trial, which was another classic of this genre – in fact it’s probably the classic of all time.

Another example can be found in The Washington Post’s global opinions editor, Karen Attiah. Attiah’s social media presence consistently features claims of victimization or underprivilege. In one tweet where she complains about the “white patriarchy,” Attiah notes that “Black women in particular find themselves pushed out of workplaces due to sexism and racism. They start their own ventures and rely on social media and branding to—*gasp* Self promote. Because we have to. To survive.”

The “we” is doing a fair bit of work here. Attiah holds a prestigious and secure position at one of the nation’s premier newspapers at a time when the industry is contracting and good reporters and editors are being laid off left and right. Yet by invoking her membership in the group “Black women,” she can situate herself in the same status as say, a housekeeper at a motel who lives a precarious existence.

Which, I think, is not entirely bogus, because even successful black people are still subject to racism, just as even successful women are still subject to sexism. It’s not entirely bogus but there are times when it may seem like a reach.

This sense of victimhood even drew her to tweet in June about the “lies and tears of white women” producing the “1921 Tulsa massacre,” the aforementioned murder of Till, and the election of Donald Trump. “White women are lucky that we are calling them Karens,” she warned. “And not calling for revenge.” Although Attiah later deleted the tweet, it’s instructive that she felt comfortable she could walk right up to the line of implying racial violence would be justified—such is the power of this rhetorical tactic.

And that sexism is ok if it’s against women who can be called Karens.

This very last example is illustrative of why I do my best to never play this rhetorical game. Because it’s a game that involves stealing valor.

The term “stolen valor” is used to describe military impostors—typically, people who exaggerated or lied about their military records. In 1998, investigative journalist Glenna Whitley and Vietnam veteran B.G. Burkett published a book by the same name, chronicling the stories of individuals who wore Vietnam War medals and ribbons who had not earned them. The pair used Freedom of Information Act requests to search the records of a host of individuals, finding that they often exaggerated the terms of their military service in their public statements. 

Certainly a good term for what Jessica Krug did.

He’s not called Don Junior for nothing.

While speaking about 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, charged with homicide in the shooting deaths of two people and the wounding of a third during unrest in Kenosha, Donald Trump Jr. said, “We all do stupid things at 17.”

The president’s son made the comment during an interview with “Extra” host Rachel Lindsay, a former contestant on “The Bachelor.”

Well, lots of us do, yes – things like getting drunk, getting pregnant, scratching the car, failing calculus, not cleaning up the kitchen when asked. We don’t all shoot two people to death.

“If I put myself in Kyle Rittenhouse(‘s shoes), maybe I shouldn’t have been there. He’s a young kid. I don’t want 17-year-olds running around the street with AR-15s,” he said. “Maybe I wouldn’t have put myself in that situation. Who knows? But we all do stupid things at 17,” he said.

It’s not as if the “situation” jumped up and yanked Kyle Rittenhouse into shooting two people to death. It’s also not as if anybody asked him to take an assault rifle to Kenosha, or as if he were employed to do so.

He’s daddy’s son all right.

Trump’s caught in his zipper.

“How dare you accuse me of lying! I never lie!!!” “Sir, that’s a lie right there, sir.”

Uh…what?

Less than a week but still too long.

Less than a week after George Washington University announced Jessica Krug would not resume teaching this semester after the professor revealed she had been lying for years about being Black, the school announced she has resigned.

“Dr. Krug has resigned her position, effective immediately. Her classes for this semester will be taught by other faculty members, and students in those courses will receive additional information this week,” the university said in a statement obtained by CNN on Wednesday.

We need a word for this move – this form of fraud in which a person with more social privilege pretends to be a person with less social privilege. Maybe we already have the word, maybe “appropriation” is good enough, but it doesn’t capture the more/less aspect, or at least it doesn’t explicitly name it.

We don’t feel the same kind of repulsion at the idea of someone with less privilege pretending to be someone with more. Why? Because that’s the natural direction of flow, the reasons are obvious, and privilege is a form of injustice. Stealing other people’s disprivilege is gross. It’s a kind of mockery as well as a kind of theft.

It might make an interesting academic discussion, but let’s not invite Jessica Krug to participate.

The Guardian has some more details on Trump’s compassionate and patriotic desire to shield the American people from the truth about COVID-19.

Specifically asked whether he downplayed the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump told reporters, “In order to reduce panic, perhaps that’s so.”

As one does. If the house is on fire, you tell the people in it that it’s not serious, because you don’t want them to panic.

The president insisted his strategy was focused on encouraging Americans to remain calm, as the virus spread across the country.

“You have to show leadership, and leadership is confidence in our country,” Trump said.

Well, see, here’s the thing – the danger is a contagious disease that is lethal to many and permanently debilitating to many more. There are things people can do to try to avoid the contagion, so the first job of a leader showing leadership should be to amplify the messages of health officials on how to do that. It should not be to play down the danger and refuse to do the very things that help us avoid the contagion. That’s where Trump went wrong – not in being cheerful or reassuring or strengthy, but in refusing to wear a mask and refusing to distance and continuing to gather crowds. He also went wrong by constantly telling us it’s no big deal and will disappear any minute now.

Also…

“I’m a cheerleader for this country,” the president said. “I don’t want people to be frightened; I don’t want to create panic.”

Oreally?

That comment would seem to clash with Trump’s repeated warnings about the recent protests against racism and police brutality.

The protests have been mostly peaceful, the president has repeatedly claimed that Democratic-controlled cities are being overrun by “violent anarchists”.

Highly contagious deadly virus, no biggy; people protesting police violence against Black people, AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH be afraid.

A bizarre item this morning.

Penis masks! How creative! But…back to school gifts?

No no, that’s not what they meant, they said.

Whatever. I became curious about who and what “esteem acet UK” even is, so I looked for more. Their Twitter profile says:

We deliver relationships and sex education training, equipping youth workers, teachers and parents to talk to young people about relationships and sex.

United Kingdom acet-uk.com Joined August 2011

What does that mean? Who are they? What is their expertise? So I clicked on the link, and then the About page. You’ll never guess.

acet UK is a Christian charity with a mission to equip and inspire individuals, schools, churches and organisations, in the UK and internationally, to transform culture by promoting healthy self-esteem, positive relationships and good sexual health.

A Christian charity!

I don’t understand how any of this works. Can random groups “equip and inspire” schools just by offering? Is this just another “Catholic League” aka one person and a laptop trying to sound important? It certainly could be – an obscure Twitter account and a website don’t necessarily add up to a real organization really shoving its way into schools to “equip and inspire” them for the greater glory of Jesus and penis masks. But who knows, maybe there are schools that take them seriously and pay them for inspiration?

There was so much stuff yesterday that I never got to the DHS whistleblower. About that:

A senior Department of Homeland Security official alleges that he was told to stop providing intelligence reports on the threat of Russian interference in the 2020 election, in part because it “made the President look bad,” an instruction he believed would jeopardize national security.

Gee, what a wacky belief.

The official, Brian Murphy, who until recently was in charge of intelligence and analysis at DHS, said in a whistleblower complaint that on two occasions he was told to stand down on reporting about the Russian threat and alleged that senior officials told him to modify other intelligence reports, including about white supremacists, to bring them in line with President Trump’s public comments, directions he said he refused.

Brilliant. “Senior officials” told an intel official to manipulate intel reports to fit President Narcissist’s manic tweets. That’s definitely what we want intel officials to be doing. Russia’s fucking with the election in order to stick us with Trump again? We don’t want to hear that, make the reports say that Biden has a scary antifa squad in the basement of a falafel bar in Georgetown.

On July 8, Murphy said in the complaint, acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf told him that an “intelligence notification” regarding Russian disinformation efforts should be “held” because it was unflattering to Trump, who has long derided the Kremlin’s interference as a “hoax” that was concocted by his opponents to delegitimize his victory in 2016.

Mister Wolf? Sir? Intelligence reports aren’t supposed to be “flattering” to Donald Trump. That’s not their purpose. That’s not their purpose at all. Quite the reverse. The state of Donald Trump’s flattery-receptor is of no relevance whatsoever to the need to know how Putin is manipulating this election.

It’s not clear who would have seen the notification, but DHS’s intelligence reports are routinely shared with the FBI, other federal law enforcement agencies, and state and local governments.

People in a position to do something about the information, in short.

Murphy objected to Wolf’s instruction, “stating that it was improper to hold a vetted intelligence product for reasons [of] political embarrassment,” according to a copy of his whistleblower complaint that was obtained by The Washington Post.

“Improper” is a nicely subdued way of putting it.

The president’s political interests were often of greater concern to senior leaders at the department than reporting the facts based on evidence, Murphy alleges. He claims that Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, the department’s second-in-command, on various occasions instructed him to massage the language in intelligence reports “to ensure they matched up with the public comments by Trump on the subject of ANTIFA and ‘anarchist’ groups,” according to the complaint.

We can almost hear it. “Change this so that it makes Trump’s rants about antifa and the Democrats sound true.”

Murphy’s claims that Trump officials tried to downplay the threat from Russia will add to a chorus of complaints on Capitol Hill that administration officials are withholding vital information about election interference from lawmakers and voters. The administration has limited the number of lawmakers who may be briefed on the subject.

Murphy alleges an ongoing effort by senior officials to obfuscate the threat from Russia in particular. He claimed that in May, Wolf told him to stop producing intelligence assessments on Russia and shift the focus on election interference to China and Iran.

As Barr did just the other day.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Murphy’s complaint “outlines grave and disturbing allegations that senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials improperly sought to politicize, manipulate, and censor intelligence in order to benefit President Trump politically. This puts our nation and its security at grave risk.”

And makes it more likely that Putin will succeed in getting Trump re-elected, thus putting us even more at risk.

Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated publicly that Russia, China and Iran were engaged in interference campaigns, an assessment that drew sharp rebukes from Democratic lawmakers, who said the administration was trying to equate the efforts of all three countries, when in fact Russia is the only one actively trying to help Trump by attacking Biden.

Bad.