Bill Clinton seems to think that he is, inexplicably, a “stand-in for the first black president,” as he so carefully explained this week.

This massive plume of gray-white smoke from the wildfires raging through Southern California's transverse mountain ranges is being pushed over the Pacific Ocean by the notorious Santa Ana winds. A weather satellite operated by NOAA captured this image late Thursday—you can see five of the narrow Channel Islands between Santa Barbara and San Diego County beneath the thick smoke.