Landfall: Hurricane Laura smashed into the Gulf Coast overnight as a Category 4 storm with winds up to 150 mph and a potential storm surge of up to 20 feet. The eye of the storm was just on the Texas-Louisiana line.

  The National Weather Center said the storm surge is “unsurvivable” and could go 40 miles inland. The low lying city of Lake Charles, with 80,000 residents, is particularly vulnerable.

  Thousands of people are without power already.

  Gov. John Bel Edwards said during a briefing, “Understand, our state has not seen a storm surge like this in many, many decades. We haven’t seen wind speeds like we’re going to experience in a very, very long time.”

Unconventional: Vice President Mike Pence proved last night during the Republican Convention speak-a-thon that great delivery can mask lack of substance.

  He thanked the President, his wife, kids, his mother, and God for making him Vice President. Like Trump, a man who never served in the military, Pence cloaked himself in the heroism of others. “Tonight,” he said, “we have among us four recipients of the Medal of Honor, six recipients of the Purple Heart, a Gold Star Mother of a gallant naval seaman, and wounded warriors from Soldier Strong, a group that serves our injured veterans every day.”

  He praised President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus without mentioning that the US has had the most cases and most deaths of any country in the world.

  This morning, 179,743 Americans are dead of the virus.

  Possibly most importantly, Pence repeated the lie at the core of the Trump campaign, that the Democratic opposition is a force for totalitarianism; “The radical left believes that the federal government must be involved in every aspect of our lives to correct those American wrongs. They believe the federal government needs to dictate how Americans live, how we should work, how we should raise our children and in the process deprive our people of freedom, prosperity and security.” 

Inflation: The New York State attorney general’s office is investigating whether the President and his company, the Trump Organization, improperly inflated the value of his real estate holdings, making false representations to banks and tax authorities.

  In particular, The NY Times reports, Trump and his company put widely different values on the Seven Springs estate north of New York City. The property was bought for $7.5 million in 1995. In 2014, the Trump Organization said in an application for a bank loan that Seven Springs was worth $291 million. Four years later Trump’s ethics disclosure form listed the value as no more than $50 million.

The Kenosha Crisis: A 17-year-old Illinois teenager described as being a member of an armed militia group has been charged with the murder of two protesters and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tuesday night. Authorities say Kyle Rittenhouse will be prosecuted as an adult.

  Video shows Rittenhouse shooting one man in the stomach. 

  It’s part of the fallout from the police shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake. 

  While protests continued in the streets, the Milwaukee Bucks also protested by refusing to come out of the locker room for their NBA playoff game against the Orlando Magic. Two more NBA playoff games also scheduled for Wednesday night were quickly postponed, and players in other leagues followed suit, prompting numerous professional basketball, baseball and soccer games to be called off because athletes would not participate.

The Bulletin Board: The Navy suspects that a sailor set the fire that wrecked the amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard last month. — A Sudan native who was sworn to US citizenship live at the White House during the Republican convention says she didn’t know her ceremony would be part of the political event. — Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, an Army officer dismissed from the White House earlier this year, has filed a whistle-blower complaint claiming he was fired in retaliation for both his role in the impeachment of President Trump. His twin brother is former Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in the Trump impeachment inquiry and retired from the Army this summer amid what his lawyers claim was a campaign of White House intimidation and retaliation. 

The Obit Page: Gail Sheehy, the author and journalist who wrote the bestselling 1970s book “Passages” about the changes and crises of adult life, has died at age 82. The book was on the NY Timesbestseller list for three years.

  Her writing focused on human fate as the result of character. She ended up writing 17 books, many of them with a spinoff of the “Passages” theme.

  Back in the 1960s Sheehy had been a reporter for the morning Democrat & Chronicle newspaper in Rochester, NY. She was later known among the staff as someone who had “gotten out,” as if she had been able to slip the guards and breach the fence.

Red Faced: The Washington Post reports that the owner of the Washington Redskins ordered up a special video of the team’s cheerleader beach shooting, consisting of nipple slips and brief moments when the women were partially naked.  The DVD was labelled, “For Executive Meeting,” the Postreports.

  This comes at a bad time for owner Dan Snyder. Previous reports have described sexual harassment in the front office and the team is trying to hang on to its increasingly targeted name.

 Eyeballing: Donald Trump Jr. has denied that he was high on cocaine when he delivered his speech for the Republican National Convention Monday Night. Junior looked sweaty and glassy-eyed. As his own father might remark, “lots of people were saying” that he looked stoned. Junior said, “I guess there must have been something with the lighting.”