Category 4: Hurricane Florence is bearing down on the Southeast coast, threatening to be an historically damaging event. Under evacuation orders, residents and tourists are choking the roads heading west. Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina called the storm “big” and “vicious” and warned people not to try to ride it out. Some always do.

At 5 this morning it was a Category 4. The forecast has the storm making landfall above the border between North and South Carolina.

Forecasters warn of record-setting storm surges and catastrophic inland flooding. Power could be out for days. Emergency warnings have also been issued in Maryland and Washington, DC.

President Trump said “we are ready as anybody has ever been” for the hurricane. He also called the underpowered federal response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year an “incredible unsung success.”

This morning he tweeted, “We got A Pluses for our recent hurricane work in Texas and Florida (and did an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan). We are ready for the big one that is coming!”

We expect he’ll praise himself for this one, too.

17 Plus 1: Memorials for the 9/11 attacks were held in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and all over the country yesterday. Family members read out loud the names of the dead at the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan. Many of the readers spoke personally about husbands, parents, and siblings who died. It was both stirring and painful.

President Trump went to Shanksville, Pa. to remember the passengers of United Flight 93, who unsuccessfully fought to take the airplane back from hijackers. He said, “They boarded the planes as strangers and they entered eternity linked together as true heroes.”

Trump also spent some time during the day on Twitter complaining about the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Russia investigation.

Politically Corrected: NBC  cancelled an appearance by comedian Norm McDonald on The Tonight Showafter he defended entertainers swept out of their professions for racism and sexual misconduct. In particular he was talking about his friends Louis CK and Roseanne Barr, who he said have suffered greatly. He described Roseanna as broken and crying. McDonald said, “There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day. Of course, people will go, ‘What about the victims?’ But you know what? The victims didn’t have to go through that.”

NBC, which fired its star news anchor Matt Lauer, didn’t agree.

But You Don’t Need It: Apple is expected to reveal three new iPhones on today, including its biggest and most expensive model yet. The biggie has a 6.5-inch OLED screen, up from 5.8 inches on the existing iPhone X. OLED has no backlight so black is a true black. Evidently people want bigger screens so they can watch movies on their phones.

The Obit Page: Henry Bawnik, a Polish survivor of several Nazi extermination camps who came close to dying once again when refugees were bombed by British planes, has died at age 92.

Bawnikwas 15 when he was taken in Lodz, Poland, and circulated through four camps, including Auschwitz. In April, 1945, he was among 10,000 prisoners being loaded onto three barely-seaworthy passenger ships in the Bay of Lübeck on the Baltic coast when they were mistakenly attacked by a squadron of British Typhoons. The pilots had been told they were hitting top SS officers.

“We were just counting the hours before we were going to be dead,”Bawnik said in a 2016, interview. “I couldn’t swim.” About 7,000 of the prisoners died.

Bawnik ended up in the water and survived. When he was rescued he asked, “What camp are we going to now?” He said he was told, “No more camp for you The British are in town.” He became a  construction worker in the US and later the owner of dry-cleaning businesses. He lived outside Buffalo.

Incisive Communication: The Pentagon has signed a $10 million contract with a California company to make mouth microphones that would be attached to the user’s back teeth.

The device called the Molar Mic is both a microphone and a speaker that transmits sound through the jawbone to the ear. We’d like to know whether they’ve tested it with a plug of chaw in the soldier’s mouth.

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