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TRUMP AIDES “SCRAMBLED TO PROTECT” PORTER—Following the resignation of White House staff secretary Rob Porter—after two ex-wives detailed “years of consistent abuse“—CNN reports that for months, senior aides to President Donald Trump “knew about Porter’s abuse allegations and scrambled to protect him.”
In a fun twist, Porter is currently dating White House communications director Hope Hicks—who, turns out, is under increased scrutiny as “Robert Mueller is zeroing in on her as part of his Russia investigation.” The Trump White House, everybody!
A BUDGET EVERYONE HATES—Congressional leaders will spend the day trying to “muscle through a sweeping two-year bipartisan budget deal that would add more than a half-trillion dollars in federal spending,” writes the Washington Post.
“Both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats were balking in the hours after the deal was unveiled Wednesday,” the Post adds, “the former angry about the spending jolt, the latter fuming about the lack of protections for young immigrants at risk for deportation.” Hooray! Everyone loses!
STREETS OF RAGE—Over 3,000 comments about a draft of Portland’s Residential Infill Project make it extra clear that Portlanders “are deeply divided over draft city proposals intended to encourage the construction of less expensive housing in single-family neighborhoods,” reports the Portland Tribune, noting that “city residents, businesses, and advocacy groups have multiple opinions on virtually every proposal.” Huh. YOU DON’T SAY.
For absolutely no reason at all, this might be a fun time to read up on housing advocates’ recent use of California’s 1982 Housing Accountability Act—AKA the “anti-NIMBY law.”
FREE HUGS—Yesterday, news broke that self-proclaimed “huggy” Oregon state Sen. Jeff Kruse was found “to have groped or inappropriately touched more than 10 women at the Capitol,” despite having been warned in 2017 “to cease breaching boundaries with women at work.”
Despite multiple Oregon lawmakers’ calls for his resignation, Kruse has yet to quit—though he has been generous enough to agree to “stay off Capitol grounds until a formal hearing is convened on the matter in two weeks.” In, uh, less comforting news, Kruse has yet to announce where he’ll be hanging out instead.
OIL AND TROUBLE—”California thinks it may have found a way around” the Trump administration’s catastrophic plans to open up the U.S. coastline for oil drilling, NPR reports! The potential plan has roots in a California ballot measure that passed in the ’80s, when John Laird, then the mayor of Santa Cruz, had a realization.
“When oil companies drill offshore, they still need to build infrastructure onshore, things like pipelines and helicopter pads,” NPR writes. “And it’s cities who control the zoning and building permits that allow that, not the federal government.”
ACLU V. FEDS: DAWN OF JUSTICE—The ACLU of Oregon is suing the federal government “in an attempt to find answers to the mysterious presence of immigration enforcement agents around Oregon’s courthouses,” reports the Oregonian.
Back in October, the Mercury examined the increasingly aggressive tactics of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—including public defender John Schlosser’s claims that a plainclothes ICE agent “stalked him and his clients in the Multnomah County courthouse and surrounding streets.”
YOUR FOOD IS TRASH—”Sugar kills more people than terrorism and car accidents combined. It’s the poison of our time,” says Senator Guido Girardi, vice president of the Chilean senate and a key figure in that country’s ambitious, hard-won decision to wage what the New York Times calls a “sweeping war on obesity” that “could be a model for how to turn the tide on a global obesity epidemic.” “People have a right to know what these food companies are putting in this trash, and with this legislation, I think Chile has made a huge contribution to humanity,” says Girardi.
That’s all I got, dear Mercury readers. Leave me be.
