On Wednesday, I was asked by a friend to do a favor that involved sitting in her house for a few hours. So I did. It was very hot outside, and she had robust a/c. When I arrived, the sky was clear and the sun, punishing. When I left around 6:30, the sky was overcast, not with clouds, but with smoke.

And now it’s Thursday morning, and Michigan has the worst air on the planet. Not the Midwest, not the entire country, the whole damn world. A quirk of the wind has swept wildfire smoke from Canada and Minnesota into our state, and the map footprint is eerie; of course there’s bleeding into other states, but the worst of it seems to stop at the state borders. Good news, Toledo! All the air-quality scales are pegged in the Hazardous zone. As bad as it is in Detroit, it seems to be even worse in the U.P. Here’s the Mackinac Bridge:

Another view:

We have our own a/c on, with the fan running constantly. Morning swim was cancelled. The lakefront park is closed. But never fear! John James, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination for governor, the emptiest suit that ever did empty, the man whose whole campaign is, to steal a phrase from Jon Stewart, “a noun, a verb and a helicopter*,” had this to say:

As Governor, I’ll put Michigan first, demand answers, and push Canada to take real action.

As the quip goes, tell me you know nothing about wildfires without telling me you know nothing without wildfires.

* James was a helicopter pilot during the Gulf War, or “Desert Storm,” as he patriotically calls it, every time. He brings it up…a lot.

In other news at this hour, while I was sitting at my buddy’s house yesterday, I did some rabbit-hole moseying, and came upon the latest from the Indiana Policy Review, which exists as a sinecure for the former opinion-page editor of my alma mater in Fort Wayne. He’s been there since roughly 1990, so that’s a pretty good sinecure. The fact the organization barely exists at all speaks more to the pity the wealthy founding families have for their pet mouthpiece, but never mind that.

This week’s column by him (the lower-case “tcl” at the end stands for T. Craig Ladwig) is remarkable for its naked bigotry and elevation of Indiana’s lieutenant governor, right-wing Christian scold Micah Beckwith, to something resembling relevancy. (It’s a quirk of Hoosier politics that the governor and lieutenant governor don’t necessarily run as a team, as they’re independently nominated by the party faithful. The gubernatorial candidate can make their wishes known, but the delegates don’t necessarily have to do their bidding. So in this case you get a more or less normal Republican serving with a lunatic wingnut like Beckwith.) Lately, Beckwith, a pastor of sorts, has been on about the Muslim Menace, and tcl is right there with him:

The need to confront the Muslim scourge in our cities is dividing the Republican Party — or so you would expect. In Indiana, however, only Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith is speaking out while other GOP leaders sit silent for fear that Julia Carson’s grandson, Andre, will call them bigots.

Indeed, the governor upbraided Beckwith for not choosing his words more carefully, for not thinking before he speaks.

OK, if the governor wants a careful word choice, how about “seditious”? That’s when you demand that your religion exempts you from a society’s norms, mores, laws and core beliefs to the degree that you would overturn them to be replaced with your own.

Freedom of religion? Do you think the Founders had in mind someone like Genghis Khan, a devout follower of Tengrism, the shamanic religion that worships “the Eternal Blue Sky.” His armies killed as many as 40 million people, estimated to be 11 percent of the world’s population at the time.

It is terrifying to realize that the leading minds of our GOP are willing to abide an openly hostile, globally controlled Islam as a benign curiosity.

To use a not-that-great internet witticism twice in one blog, tell me you know nothing about American Muslims without, etc.

And no, I don’t know what Genghis Khan is doing in there. But I chuckled when, later in the column, he mentions “the unassimilable Muslim population.” I’d like to escort this elderly hayseed on a tour of Dearborn, Michigan. He’ll see some assimilated Muslims, oh yes he will. They make delicious hummus.

OK, gotta clean the house today. Company’s coming for the weekend.