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Good Morning, Portland! The weather today will be clearish cloudyish with a high of 70! Tomorrow will be rain, which we also like! Maybe you already got your rain booties out and covered them in waxy substances. If not, here’s your 24-hour notice that tomorrow’s forecast has an 86 percent chance precipitation. Or just get your COVID booster and sit under an electric blanket watching movies because it’s only gonna rain for one day, and then we’re back to this pristine fall weather. Now, let’s hit the significantly less pristine news!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• On Wednesday, Mayor Keith Wilson used his tie-breaking vote for just the second time EVER to approve the transfer of a contract Zenith Energy has with the city to an international investment firm called I Squared Capital (oh, that sounds so legit!). The deal between the two private fossil fuel companies largely hinged on the city approving the transfer during Wednesday’s vote, and after a series of procedural moves, the mayor and six of the Council’s more moderate representatives made it happen—without of the additional enforcement measures the public demanded. For the Mercury, Jeremiah Hayden has more.
• Sure Jeremiah, but what was the real news? It was that local drag icon Nicole Onoscopi performed “Jolene” at Wednesday’s meeting in honor of an upcoming September 25 Dolly Parton Day! Okay, mayoral tiebreaker news is super important, but we can have both.
• If you recall last week’s tweet discourse, Portland’s police chief is now the subject of at least three state complaints after the Police Bureau released a statement on his behalf blasting District 4 City Councilor Mitch Green for old social media posts. The complaints allege the chief used his position to advocate for Green to be unseated in the upcoming November election. Green faced heavy backlash for his old posts, including from a District 4 colleague who also took to Twitter to respond to the racial justice reckoning of 2020. News editor Courtney Vaughn breaks down who mad and how mad?
• Two city councilors have proposed a tweak to the city’s tax on mega-corporations that could bring in an estimated $72 million annually, while zeroing out the same tax for some 18,000 small businesses. The business license tax would increase the amount large corporations pay, based on the CEO-to-worker income ratio reported to the SEC. Jeremiah Hayden dives into surtax in this fascinating report.
• You’ve got four more days to eat wings with the Mercury’s Wing Week! Don’t sleep on these delicious, salty little morsels.
IN NATIONAL NEWS:
• We are complex people who can hold many ideas in our minds at one time, so while it’s always a little annoying how we journalists really cover the shit out of anything happening to us (don’t poke the literate bear, I guess), President Donald Trump’s recent White House bans on reporters from several news outlets—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—is an unconstitutional, dictatorial act of censorship that pathetically attempts to obfuscate information owed the public and punish those trying to communicate it impartially. We used to call this “dangerous” before we realized the president was just going to do it all the time, so it’s not like he’s even setting a precedent anymore. The new status quo is security personal wondering if news reporters can come in instead of worrying who will be mad if they don’t get through the line on time for the briefing. But what did a judge say about it? On Wednesday night, a federal judge blocked Trump’s news ban and ordered that the targeted outlets be reinstated Thursday morning. However, reporters from all three outlets said they were still being blocked hours later.
• This week in “it is now common for masked armed unidentified people to brutalize everyday people on suburban streets because of how this administration is doing justice,” five immigration enforcement agents in separate vehicles pulled up on a random man on the side of the road in a Chicago suburb and injured him as they attempted to handcuff him (translation: wailed on him). Witnesses who happened on the scene described the man’s swollen eye socket and bloodstains in the shape of handprints on the man’s shirt. When the agents eventually identified the man as a US citizen they removed the handcuffs and left him by the road. An ambulance brought the man to a nearby hospital. Police are investigating. Politicians are condemning. On the same day, in Texas, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and wounded a man agents were trying to apprehend (translation: kidnap). Police are investigating. Politicians are condemning.
• Today in “Trump administration fucking with the numbers,” did you know that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently raised its benchmark for levels of the COVID virus in wastewater? That means an area that would have been considered to have a high amount of the virus present will now be called moderate, etc. Scientists began working to track polio (the amount present in a population’s water can correlate to how many people are sick in that area) outbreaks in municipal wastewater during the ’40s, but the US government actually committed to creating a nationwide system in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Anyway, if you’ve been putting it off, this could be a good weekend to get a booster.
• Okay, now for a quick jazz break before you hit Thursday.
