Holy doody! Ballots are here! Ballots are here! And new polling data released by Oregon Public Radio offers some mixed news about the many consequential state ballot measures eating up tons of money and attention this fall. Legal marijuana is up, up, up, up after a previous poll had it not so up—but it’s still in doubt. Driver cards, an issue backed by immigrant rights activists, are way, way, way down. And GMO labeling is basically a tossup.
Three downtown parks were closed, for a few hours, while cops investigated how and why a man was stabbed to death in the shadow of Portland City Hall.
A Christian television network—one of the channels you angrily flip past several times when you have a cheap cable package like mine—is looking to anesthetize Oregon prisoners with a pabulum diet of “clean” and faith-based movies and shows.
So… Iraq! Turns out we did find chemical weapons there. Lots of them, even! It’s just that they were all obtained before the Gulf War and designed by the United States and in shoddy condition. So we never actually said we found them—and didn’t treat soldiers who were injured by them—because we might have been embarrassed by them.
Some of those weapon caches (which are still dangerous, even if incapable of causing “mass destruction”) now sit in land held by the Islamic State. That’s partly because the Islamic State keeps grabbing more and more land, despite our airstrikes—which are perfectly legal no matter what Congress says, according to the White House. The militant army is now a dozen or so miles from Baghdad.
Ebola hysteria is spreading faster than the virus itself. News that a second nurse at a Texas hospital now has been stricken was made somehow worse by the detail that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allowed her to board a commercial flight despite having treated the country’s Ebola case and despite having a fever. Of course, if that hospital in Dallas hadn’t made a series of errors—like not treating Thomas Duncan right away, not enforcing rigorous standards for scrubs and gear—there might not be any threatened metastasis. Hospital officials now say they’re sorry.
Video footage of a beaten protester in Hong Kong, which Dirk mentioned in GMN yesterday, has very much revived flagging protests over China’s plan to pre-select candidates ahead of the territory’s next elections—creating awful scenes in which cops have been flooding protesters’ faces with pepper spray. Hong Kong’s current leader has decided all the anger is reason enough to try again at talking with protest leaders.
Airbnb’s been embraced, with some rules, in West Coast Shangri-Las like Portland and San Francisco. New York is another matter. The attorney general there just delivered a withering report chronicling rampant illegality and inequity—as in, commercial operators cashing in, not genial residents—in what’s been billed as a virtuous sharing economy.
John Grisham, author of the luridly titled granddad’s-nightstand-in-1993 book The Firm, has a soft spot for drunk old men who get horny and somehow, as if by accident, start looking at child pornography.
It sounds like it might be terrible to find a dead mouse at the bottom of your cup of McDonald’s coffee. But I bet you’d actually feel pretty lucky. Because you’d get to be on the news, and people would feel bad for you, and you’d probably get some free food.
GO AWAY WE HAVE NO FOOD.