Slog AM: High-T Navy May Name Aircraft Carrier After Noted Coward, Wildfires Cost Washington $207 Million in Two Months, and After Husband Dies in Alaska, Mexican Widow Not Allowed into US 

Local coffee roaster and cafe operator Starbucks is laying off 224 of its employees, including 120 people who didn’t want to relocate to Nashville and live the honky-tonk life. The affected workers live in Seattle and beyond. The company said the layoffs are the “final piece” of its global restructuring plan, reports KING 5.

The price of climate denial grows: According to the Washington State Standard, fighting the 20 wildfires crisping Washington this July and August cost $207 million, an amount more than two-thirds of what the Department of Natural Resources spent fighting wildfires during the state’s last fiscal year. The expenses are split between the feds, the state, and local governments.

Instead of naming an aircraft carrier under construction after Doris Miller, a Black cook mess attendant who carried wounded sailors to safety at Pearl Harbor before shooting down four to six Japanese bombers with an anti-aircraft gun he’d never been trained to use, the Navy is considering honoring a far braver man, Mr. Donald J. Trump, a draft dodger who said avoiding STDs in the 1990s was “his personal Vietnam.”  The Navy announced it would name the carrier after Miller during Trump’s first term. Now it is looking to name a different ship after Miller—who died when a Japanese submarine torpedoed his ship during the Battle of Makin, the deadliest carrier sinking in US Naval history—and it is recommending him for the Medal of Honor, an award that Trump and Congress must approve. 

Despite his nomination by a Michigan Congressman and New York Senator and a campaign from the Black press, Doris Miller was not given the Medal of Honor while he was alive because of—well, to put this in terms conservatives understand—a sort of reverse reverse racism. 

Between 1941–1945, no Black enlisted man was given the honor. Only one Black World War II veteran, Vernon J. Baker, an infantryman who took out German machine guns, observation posts, and a dugout during an assault on Castle Aghinolfi in Italy that killed 19 of the 25 men in his platoon, was awarded the Medal of Honor while he was still alive, in 1996. He was 77 years old.

More reverse reverse racism: The Mexican wife of a Jefferson County man who fell from the mast of an Alaskan fishing boat and died cannot enter the US for his funeral. Adriana Gonzalez had the wild idea of mourning the man she loved most by attending an open-casket funeral in Alaska, cremating him, and bringing his ashes to their shared home in Ensenada. Shipping to Mexico could result in his body’s decomposition. “I just want to say goodbye in person. To see his face, to take his hand and tell him everything is OK,” Gonzalez told the Seattle Times. The two had applied for tourist visas to visit family in Washington, so she converted her appointment into an interview for an emergency visa. She was handed a blue sheet of paper with denial codes and zero explanation.

The Department of Homeland Security couldn’t prove its claim that 16,000 non-citizens had registered to vote in Nevada because it was total bullshit. A month after this pronouncement, the agency said it’d found 185 “potential” noncitizens in the state’s voter rolls, according to emails and recordings of meetings obtained by The New York Times. This list the feds sent Nevada did not include names or identifying information, making it impossible to verify. Federal officials are still considering wasting more time by reviewing 14,000 more names.

All aboard the Grift Express: After editors spiked his column about the co-owner of the Storm allegedly swearing at some anti-trans, pro-Sophie Cunningham protesters after the Storm-Fever game at Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle Times sports columnist Matt Calkins resigned. He had this to say: “But in thinking about this decision, I kept going back to an Albus Dumbledore line: ‘We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.’” He wasted no time making his entrance on the profitable “canceled” media circuit.

Come away to the fair: NO HATE in WA State, the group organizing against state ballot measures for round two of the Parents’ Bill of Rights and for an anti-trans sports ban, is holding a carnival to raise money for their campaign at Cal Anderson Park on Sunday, August 29th. Brian Heywood dunk tank when?

Weather: The worst of both worlds, cloudy with a high near 81. A merciful rain may come this weekend and bring with it cooler temperatures.

As a balm in this villainous, plastic world, please admire the emotional arc of this Elliot Smith performance on Breakfast Time, a largely forgotten live FX morning show hosted by Tom Bergeron. Recorded in 1995, I’ve watched it more times than I can remember. What begins with Bergeron and a puppet named Bob goofily interviewing this shy, shy man is by the first verse, as one commenter put it, “ego-death” for Bergeron and everyone else in earshot. Reads the top comment: “even the puppet stopped fucking around.”

The post Slog AM: High-T Navy May Name Aircraft Carrier After Noted Coward, Wildfires Cost Washington $207 Million in Two Months, and After Husband Dies in Alaska, Mexican Widow Not Allowed into US  appeared first on The Stranger.