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(1 of ) A tree explodes into flames as the wind whips up the southern front of a wildfire as it burns near Sisters, Ore., Thursday, Aug. 17, 2017. (Andy Tullis /The Bulletin via AP) (2 of ) A wildfire burns just outside of Sister, Ore., Friday Aug. 18, 2017. (Chris Pietsch/The Register-Guard via AP)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ASSOCIATED PRESS | August 19, 2017, 2:37PM

| Updated 3 hours ago.

SISTERS, Oregon Evacuation orders affecting hundreds of people were issued in California and Oregon as wildfires neared small towns, including one thats a prime location for viewing the eclipse.

About 600 residents were told to leave the tourist town of Sisters, Oregon, and authorities said Saturday another 1,000 people had been told to be ready to leave if necessary.

Sisters is located on the edge of a 70-mile swath of the state where the moon will completely blot out the sun.

No structures had been lost and no injuries have been reported since the fire began last week. The cause is under investigation.

Crews were expecting a tough day Saturday with winds gusting to more than 20 mph.

On Monday, they will have to contend with the solar eclipse that fire officials say will ground all firefighting helicopters and most fixed-wing aircraft for about 35 minutes as the moons shadow passes over the area.

Shopkeepers were hoping the fire would not inhibit business as tourists arrive to watch the eclipse.

If you look up at the sky its not an orange cloud anymore, said Andrew Bourgerie, co-owner of Sisters Bakery. So its simmering down a little bit.

Some campsites and recreational areas were shut down due to the 12-square-mile wildfire in Deschutes National Forest that jumped fire lines Friday.

Officials say the blaze is producing heavy smoke while burning in forests at higher elevations and sagebrush in lower areas.

We have a few days before the eclipse to see if the smoke is in the area, fire spokeswoman Lisa Clark said.

Officials said only aircraft with instruments allowing them to fly at night can fight the fire during the eclipse. Clark said that eliminates the bulk of the firefighting fleet, though large airtankers will be able to fly.

In California, authorities issued an evacuation order for the small town of Wawona as a week-old fire in Yosemite National Park grew and air quality reached a hazardous level.

The U.S. Forest Service said the fire grew to more than 4 square miles overnight due to winds from thunderstorms. Authorities ordered people to leave as air quality was expected to worsen.

Wawona, with a population of 1,000 to 2,000 people at any given time, is less than 2 miles from the fire. The evacuation order included the historic Big Trees Lodge, formerly known as the Wawona Hotel.

The fire has closed campgrounds and trails in the national park since it began a week ago. It was 10 percent contained.

In Montana, 155 National Guard troops arrived to monitor about three dozen security checkpoints in an area south of Missoula that was evacuated due to a fire that flared up after burning since at least July 15.

The fire destroyed two homes and several outbuildings Thursday. It burned an additional 14 square miles Friday and has charred an estimated 44 square miles of wooded, mountainous terrain west of Lolo.

The troops will relieve law enforcement officers so they can return to other duties.

The Missoulian reported that heavy smoke has settled into valleys and officials warned of poor air quality

Idahos two largest wildfires were burning mostly in wilderness areas.

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Wildfire nears Oregon eclipse-viewing spot; hundreds evacuated - Santa Rosa Press Democrat

Mary Clarkin

Kansas House Minority Leader Jim Ward, D-Wichita, jumped into the pool of candidates running for governor by announcing his candidacySaturday morning in Wichita.

Ward joins a Democratic Party lineup that includes former Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer; former Kansas Agriculture Secretary Joshua Svaty, Ellsworth; Olathe physician Arden Andersen; and Wichita high school student Jack Bergeson. The Republican primary has drawn an even larger field.

Speaking prior to the announcement, Ward said the decision by Paul Davis, D-Lawrence, to run for the congressional seat in the 3rd District was one factor in his decision to run for governor. Davis is a previous House minority leader who ran but lost to Republican Gov. Sam Brownback in 2014. Davis had been mentioned as a possible candidate in the 2018 gubernatorial race.

I did my due diligence, Ward said, as he weighed the race. That included surmising the field of candidates and talking to every Democrat in the House. There are 40 Democrats in the 125-seat House.

Ward, 59, will run on a platform advocating fiscal responsibility, tax fairness, strong schools, public safety and investment in roads and infrastructure. He has prior experience as a prosecuting attorney in Sedgwick County, and he opened his private practice in 1990.

He entered the House in 2003 and was elected House minority leader for a two-year term that began in 2017. He will continue in that role next year. He will not be the only member of the Legislature running for state office or Congress next year. Ward thinks that works in his favor.

I think theyre looking for a problem-solver, Ward said of voters. They will gain insight about candidates from their job performance, in his opinion.

Ward wont be able to run for governor and another term in the Kansas Housesimultaneously, so his jump to the governors race creates an opening in the 86th House District in the 2018 election. It also means House Democrats will choose a new leader following the 2018 election.

Rep. Jason Probst, D-Hutchinson, was chosen in June to fill the seat held by the late Rep. Patsy Terrell, D-Hutchinson, andProbst said Ward has been helpful as he learns about the new job. Probst said he knows Ward better than the other Democrats running for governor, but hehasnt felt pressureto endorse a candidate.

Probst said he also hasnt thought much about the topic of endorsing a gubernatorial candidate.He said hes spent most of his time trying to figure out how to do this and what the district needs from him.

University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis said Ward is not going to get a better year than 2018 to run for governor. He gets to run against the Brownback record and against President Trumps record, Loomis said.

I certainly think if youre Jim Ward, you look around and Carl Brewer is certainly not nothing as a candidate at all, but I dont see that theres a lot of energy there, Loomis said. And youve got Josh Svaty who is pro-life and also is not especially well-known, Loomis said.

Ward also has the example of Davis, who ran a competitive campaign against Brownback in 2014.

More Democratic votes are in the four northeast Kansas counties of Johnson, Wyandotte, Douglas and Shawnee than anywhere in the state, Loomis said. If I was any of these candidates, Loomis said, I would work like an absolute dog in those counties.

Loomis did not regard Wards entry into the race as too late. A big question will be which of the candidates can raise serious money to run against the Republican nominee in fall 2018, he said.

Ward made his announcement at a labor union headquarters, and Loomis said which candidate gets labors support also will be important.

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Democrat Ward launches bid for governor - The Hutchinson News

By Jason Hancock and Bryan Lowry The Kansas City Star (TNS)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal was adamant Friday that she isnt resigning over a Facebook post calling for President Donald Trumps assassination.

Chappelle-Nadal, a University City Democrat, has faced calls by Missouris top Democrats and Republicans demanding she resign from the legislature over a comment she posted on her personal Facebook Thursday: I hope Trump is assassinated.

Among those calling for her resignation were the chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party and U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Chappelle-Nadal deleted the comment and said posting it was a mistake. She said she posted the comment out of frustration with Trumps statements about recent events in Charlottesville, Va., where an alleged white supremacist drove his car into a crowd near the citys downtown mall, killing a 32-year-old woman.

But in a series of tweets following the calls from her fellow Democrats to resign, she struck a defiant tone.

I am not resigning, she said. When (people of color) are respected by this (White House) & they are willing to do real work, Ill sit down with them. People are traumatized!

She then retweeted statements of support along with racist comments she began receiving after news broke about her Facebook post. One person sent her a message on Twitter that was just the N-word over and over again from a Twitter account called KillMaria69.

She also tweeted a link to I Stand With Maria website.

Out of anger and frustration, I said something that could have been reframed, she said on the website. And I refuse to shy away from the hypocrisy and chaos our country is enduring under Trump.

But the calls for her resignation grew louder Friday. Joining the chorus late Thursday was House Minority Leader Gail McCann Beatty, a Kansas City Democrat and the highest-ranking black lawmaker in Missouri.

Suggestions of violence have no place in our political discourse, and an elected official who expresses hope for someones murder has forfeited the right to hold office, McCann Beatty said. Given state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadals repugnant social media post suggesting the president should be assassinated, she must resign.

Both Senate President Ron Richard, a Joplin Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe, a Jefferson City Republican, echoed the call for resignation.

In a time when we should be calling for peace, promoting violence of any kind is unacceptable, and Im asking her to resign from her position, Kehoe said.

Talking with reporters Friday, McCaskill said leaders of the Democratic Party have spoken in one voice against Chappelle-Nadals comments.

Theres nothing we can do to force her to resign, but we can continue to reject that kind of advocation of violence, McCaskill said. Thats the problem we have now.

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Democrat won't resign over assassination post - Asheboro Courier Tribune

The male victim involved in a shooting Thursday afternoon has died.

The victim has been identified as 28 year-old Leon Hinckley of Windsor.

According to Pettis County Sheriff Kevin Bond, around 12:50 p.m. deputies responded to the Sunset Village Trailer Park on West Main Street, located just west of the Sedalia city limits near the Galaxy Movie Theater. He said one man was taken by the Pettis County Ambulance District to Bothwell Regional Health Center with multiple gunshot wounds.

Bond said deputies had interviewed witnesses in the area and that a black male driver and a white male passenger were seen leaving the scene in a black four-door passenger car with a sunroof.

A news release states that during the investigation a black 2012 Chevrolet Impala, believed to have been involved in the crime and reported stolen from Sedalia, was recovered by the Lafayette County Sheriffs Office in Lexington.

We believe theyve (the suspects) left our area and the Lafayette County Sheriffs Office is assisting us in investigating, Bond told the Democrat. The vehicle, it was reported as being stolen here in Sedalia, so the Sedalia Police Department is working that portion of it. The vehicle is on its way back from Lafayette County so we can search it, process it, collect evidence.

Bond said an autopsy for the victim is scheduled for Friday morning at the Boone County Medical Examiners Office.

Anyone with information on this case is asked to call the Pettis County Sheriffs Office at 660-827-0052 or Pettis County Crime Stoppers at 660-827-8477.

http://www.sedaliademocrat.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/web1_crime-scene-police-lights-10.jpg

Pettis County deputies still searching for suspects

Nicole Cooke can be reached at 660-530-0138 or on Twitter @NicoleRCooke.

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UPDATE: Shooting victim identified - Sedalia Democrat

Al Sharpton just may be right about the need to remove offensive statues from the American public way.

I'd been somewhat torn on the idea of erasing history by tearing down statues, even Civil War Confederate statues, since destroying public imagery and iconography isn't the kind of thing Americans do.

Actually, it's the kind of thing that ISIS does.

But Sharpton, the noted race hustler, helped me see things in a different way.

Usually, I don't listen to him. But he was interviewed on the Charlie Rose program and talked compellingly about the need to remove statues of white men of the South who fought in the Civil War for a South that wanted to keep slavery.

He said, rightly, that such statues are offensive to many African-Americans.

But he also said that such images should be removed, perhaps taken to private museums.

Sharpton also added that public funding of other offensive reminders of America's racist past, including the Jefferson Memorial, should stop.

"When you look at the fact that public monuments are supported by public funds, you are asking me to subsidize the insult of my family," Sharpton said. "And I would repeat that the public should not be paying to uphold somebody who had that kind of background. We're talking about, here, an open display of bigotry announced, and over and over again."

Thomas Jefferson, founding father, is the author of the Declaration of Independence, widely considered to be the most eloquent appeal for human liberty that has ever been written.

But Jefferson was also a slave owner who raped his slaves. That's history.

As an African-American, Sharpton believes that using federal tax dollars to subsidize the Jefferson Memorial is wrong. And even though the flames of Cultural Revolution are burning hot, you can understand this.

History is important, but history can also be quite offensive.

But there's one thing wrong with Sharpton. It's not that he goes too far. It's that he doesn't go far enough.

Because if he and others of the Cultural Revolution were being intellectually honest, they'd demand that along with racist statues, something else would be toppled.

And this, too, represents much of America's racist history:

The Democratic Party.

Jonathan Lemire and Darlene Superville

The Democratic Party historically is the party of slavery. The Democratic Party is the party of Jim Crow laws. The Democratic Party fought civil rights for a century.

And so by rights or at least by the standards established by the Cultural Revolutionaries of today's American left we should ban the Democratic Party.

Not only get rid of it in the present, but strike its very name from the history books, and topple all Democratic statues of leaders who benefited, prospered and became wealthy by cleaving to the party. And shame Democrats until they confess the truth of it.

The Democratic Party's military arm in the South was the KKK. The Democratic Party opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, making the former slaves citizens of the United States and giving them the vote.

If the new Cultural Revolution was serious, wouldn't it also demand that the Democratic Party be put in a museum somewhere, away from decent people, along with those Confederate statues?

We could put Democrats in exhibits, behind glass, watching white political bosses chomp cigars and pass out goodies for votes, as minorities were relegated, as they are today, to failing schools and lost educational opportunity and neighborhoods that have become killing fields for the young and old.

And in great museums, the Democrats could be studied, safely, without endangering the sensibilities of the children.

We might even peer down on an animatronic Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, once a leader of the KKK. And with him, prominent animatronic Democrats who, just a few short years ago, said wonderful, moving things about Byrd after his funeral.

That's how it is with history. You can't say the Democratic Party wasn't the slavery party. It's historical fact.

Just as it is also historical fact that the Republican Party was the party of abolitionists.

I mentioned this to a Democrat who was all for the removal of Confederate statues in the South, and I told him I wasn't all that opposed, either.

He thought I was being sarcastic. But when I reminded him that his party was the slavery party, the KKK party, the anti-civil rights party from the 1860s to the 1960s, and should be put into a museum, he made a sour face.

"You're really taking this satire too far," he said. "The Democratic Party isn't a statue. It's an institution."

If the Cultural Revolutionaries want to topple statues, they can be my guest. They're so inflamed lately and if you don't believe it, just read the papers that if you dare disagree with them, you run the risk of being denounced by their high priests as a bigot or as someone without moral character.

My guess is that most Americans are afraid of social punishment. So, the offensive statues will go, and then perhaps offensive iconography, offensive images, offensive books.

One book comes to mind. Let me quote a passage from it.

"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

George Orwell. "1984."

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin at http://wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

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While we're toppling offensive symbols, what about the Democratic Party? - Chicago Tribune