Yesterday morning, Donald Trump commuted the prison sentences of Dwight Hammond and his son Steven Hammond, the Oregon ranchers who set fire to public lands in Harney County (twice!) and inspired the Bundy boys to stage a 41-day armed occupation on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
Trump decided to pardon the Hammonds, who were both sentenced to a mandatory minimum of five years in prison in 2016, because they are “devoted family men” and are respected by their neighbors. Oh, and their family ranch business is failing with them gone (because they committed multiple felonies, but that’s besides the point).
What a bold statement on sentencing reform and family values that doesn’t seem to apply to anyone but white conservative men! (Cut to the thousands of immigrant families that have been torn apart and detained on the border, or the wildly disproportionate number of Black men serving 20 percent longer sentences for the same crimes committed by white men.)
But why stop with the Hammonds? Hell, there are so many misunderstood Oregonians that Trump should really consider pardoning next. Here are a few of our suggestions:
Paul Linnman, the man who blew up a whale on the Oregon Coast in 1970.
That guy who peed in the Mt. Tabor reservoir.
Jess and Luke, that atrocious couple living in Burnside 26.
My neighbor Ethan, who left this note on my car after he backed his Subaru into it.
This bulldozer that destroyed Club 21.
The Kooks Burrito gals.
The kid who set off fireworks in the Columbia Gorge last summer.
Ma Anand Sheela and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who the Hammonds probably hated. Look, we know they aren’t technically Oregonians, but not for lack of trying. They count.
Larry O’Dea, Portland’s former police chief who shot his friend while on a camping trip and forgot to tell anyone about it.
Joey Gibson, that guy from Vancouver that keeps bringing his alt-right buds Patriot Prayer to Portland to wreak unnecessary havoc. (Okay. Gibson, who is running for US Senate in Washington, is very much not an Oregonian—but he sure does love to spend time here!)
Shelly Shannon, the anti-abortion extremist who set fire to a number of Oregon medical clinics in the 1990s and attempted to murder a doctor who performed abortions.
Neil Goldschmidt, the former Oregon governor who repeatedly molested and raped an underage girl over the course of three years while he was mayor of Portland.
Francis Paul Weaver, Ward Weaver III, and Ward Weaver Jr., representing three generations of convicted rapists and murderers.
The Portland State University campus police officers who fatally shot Jason Washington last month.
Jeremy Christian, the white supremacist who harassed a pair of Muslim women on the MAX and then killed two men who tried to defend them.
The Portland police officers who fatally shot Quanice Hayes, John Elifritz, Aaron Campbell, Keaton Otis, James Chasse, and a number of others who are unarmed/have a mental illness/are not white. Oh, wait—none of them have ever faced criminal charges for the shootings in the first place.
Did we miss any?
You sure did dump one giant false equivalency in the middle of that one, Alex. The “Kooks Gals” only did what every other food cart in this town did: took inspiration from someone’s cuisine, tried to market it. For their trouble, they got death threats, amazingly petty press, and finally going out of business.
This particular paper had an article on the subject so fucking tone deaf, it quietly shitcanned the author and now a very, very belated “update” sits in its place, apologizing for lying about the motives of the owners, and causing them that much grief.
So the equivalent to all those other assholes you list would be “the idiots who actually sent death threats to those women.” Fix it, please.
And of course, Paul Linnman didn’t blow up anything. Rather, he was standing there reporting on the whole whale demolishment, and was one of the people who had blubber rain down upon him.
Seriously, you should delete that ‘Kooks’ thing. That truly shows you to be a shithead. Even Steve Humpy admitted the Merc had the wrong take on that one.
Jess and Luke, too: they were actors, weren’t they? So not them, but what they represent. Damn. You spend a lot of time being wrong, for a person with a public forum and a job writing things that other people will read.
Again: unless you actually think that tortilla recipes are any particular person’s intellectual property, TAKE DOWN THAT KOOKS THING, dammit. Or don’t ever let me see you at Robo Taco.
Amazing that you have to link to another site’s discussion of your Kooks burrito scandal-making because you deleted all traces of it on your own site and threw the author under the bus.