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I'm a news reporter for the Mercury. I've spent a lot of the last decade in journalism — covering tragedy and chicanery in the hills of southwest Missouri, politics in Washington, D.C., and other matters elsewhere.
I've been in Portland three years, love it and want to help make it better. Let's keep it amicable!
Even more agencies are bailing from Portland’s problematic, expensive police records system.
Joey Gibson speaking at a pro-Trump rally he organized in Vancouver in April. Doug Brown Earlier this week, the group Rose City Antifa began an online campaign to claim Joey Gibson’s job. It apparently worked. Gibson is best known as the Vancouver-based alt-right vlogger who organizes events like the June 4 “free speech rally” in […]
Henglein and Steets via Getty Images As a coalition of Portland cultural and climate change groups plots a new business tax to pay for renewable energy projects, the city’s number crunchers are urging caution. In a report issued earlier this month, the city’s Revenue Division says a single company could wind up paying more than […]
It’s almost July (dear god), which means the Oregon Legislature is in full shit-show mode. After lawmakers were unable to pass serious tax reforms, they instead passed a new health care “provider tax” aimed at shoring up the state’s growing Medicaid bills. Republican Julie Parrish plans to refer that to the November 2018 ballot. Democrats […]
MULTNOMAH COUNTY gets a lot of use out of its shackles. As a matter of course, prisoners who have hearings in the county courthouse have their hands cuffed, their legs in irons, and their arm movement constrained by a third chain around their waist. They are marched through the courthouse’s public hallways like this, and—unless […]
But will righting the ship lead to huge delays?
Will the city pick the pricey water treatment plant, or the really pricey one? Both, probably.
Commissioner Dan Satlzman City of Portland Commissioner Dan Saltzman’s office is about to lose one of its most-senior members. Earlier today, the Portland Housing Bureau announced it’s hired Shannon Callahan—a Saltzman aide for roughly a decade, who’d served as a liaison to the PHB during Saltzman’s stint as housing director from 2013 to early this […]
Yertle doesn’t have the votes. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) It’s as bad as you figured. According to the new CBO report that dropped yesterday, the Senate’s version of Obamacare repeal would leave 22 million people without health insurance by 2026—and nearly 15 million next year, compared to current law. Senate Republicans had been planning […]
Antifa demonstrators opposing a right-wing “free speech” rally on June 4. Some of these folks were later caught up in a police kettle. Aaron Lee Portland Police detained a group a group of marching antifa protesters on June 4 as a means of deescalating “the threat of violence” between the group and a nearby right-wing […]
Kurt McRobert When Portland City Council adopted its budget for next fiscal year on June 8, the final funerary knell tolled for the Portland Police Bureau’s Mounted Patrol Unit. After years of putting the city’s horse cops up on the chopping block in budget proposals—often comfortable in the notion that actually slashing it would be […]
Secret no longer: Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell yesterday finally unveiled the health care bill he’d been tinkering with in secret for weeks—and surprise! It’s not so different from the House’s terrible bill after all. The bill doesn’t have enough support to pass the Senate in its current form, and it’s unclear what tweaks will […]
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