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Good Morning, Portland! About the weather. It's gonna rain pretty steadily for the foreseeable future. Not all the time—just probably every day for a few weeks, so put an extra pair of socks in your bag right now. 

IN LOCAL NEWS:
• ICYMI: Newly elected Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek signed three executive orders on Tuesday. 

• ICYMI: A four-day strike held by Living Room Theaters staff ended yesterday. Though the staff is not unionized, they banded together to hold an unpaid work stoppage to protest when they say they were told not to discuss a coworker's termination at work or outside of work. 

J Crew recently announced it plans to leave Pioneer Place Mall. The sweater store for people with very shiny teeth, declined to give a reason for its departure. 

• Pilsner Alert: PNW brewers Chuckanut Brewery recently released a new pils, simply called Italian Style Pilsner. New School Beer writes that the Italian Style "is a sub-style of pils that Chuckanut has brewed before after first experiencing the the original example Italiano BirrificioTipopils at the 2014 Pils & Love Fest in Italy." Mentions of "huge notes of spicy and herbal hops" and "a clean bitterness" sound pretty nice, even at 7 am.

• Grizzled voice: And then the hunters found themselves the hunted 😎. Just kidding, there are always rewards for these situations and infrequent justice for wolves.

• In this week's Savage Love, Dan tried out ChatGPT—an artificial intelligence chatbot that can generate essays, novels, screenplays—to see if it could also write an advice column. Can you tell the difference between Dan Savage and a horny robit?

IN NATIONAL NEWS:
• First off, we're having more airplane problems.

• As part of last week's McCarthy House Speaker vote debacle, a small number of ultraconservative Republican representatives got to create a powerful new committee: the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Read how much clusterfuck we can expect from this dingy full of drama in this morning's New York Times.

• A report released Wednesday, by the National Taxpayer Advocate, revealed (although anyone paying attention to this already knew) the IRS has been significantly weakened by budget cuts and is having difficulty enforcing the tax code and / or helping taxpayers. While many people dislike the IRS, a weakened IRS is very beneficial to white collar crime. Republican lawmakers would like to cut IRS funding even further, but the Joker-esque, "watch the world burn" legislative moves will more than likely be blocked by the President and the Senate.

• Because propaganda is so good at what it does, we're also hearing cycles of a poorly-reported, incorrect story about the IRS amping up to audit a disporportionate number of middle class or small business-owning Americans. It's not true.

• Oh, that's nice! Buffalo Bills say that Damar Hamlim has been discharged from the hospital.

Look at this cool berry map: