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Good Morning Portland! Yesterday was one of those all-day rains. AND TODAY WILL BE AS WELL. It might taper off in the early evening, so consider packing a millennium topā€”which is what we call those tank tops covered in sequinsā€”for later.Ā 

IN LOCAL NEWS:
ā€¢ Kudos to Willamette Week for drawing a throughline between the abrupt March 30 closure of a recently opened downtown Behavioral Health Resource Center and a steep, next-day rise in fentanyl overdoses at a nearby corner. While these are definitely correlative instancesā€”it could also be said that WW profiling the "pop-up fentanyl market" on March 22 could have acted as a kind of advertising, or the critical piece WW wrote about the center on March 1 may have applied establishment pressureā€”what we know for certain is the unexpected closure left a lot of the people that had started using the center in a lurch.

ā€¢ This week, Portland City Council approved spending up to $80,000 on drones for the Portland Police Bureau to use at the scenes of crashes and major crimes. Fun fact from Courtney Vaughn's coverage: THE BUREAU ALREADY HAS A DRONE, purchased in 2019-20, that has never been used. Though critics suspect the new drones might be used for infringement of civil rights, only Walter's kid known how to fly the damn things.

ā€¢ Portland art collective Making Earth Cool advocates for the environment with art and fun. For the next two months, they're the artists in residence at Parallax Art Center, where they're planning community projects for Youth Climate Strike and Earth Day.

ā€¢ When you quiz me / you quiz yourself.

ā€¢ There are some holidays that exist for a reason. Often, someone died and we're trying to remember to be more careful with human life, going forward. So, I find the goddamn food and drinkĀ patronizing, and I think you should as well. Drink beer when you want. Eat pancakes when you want. Smoke. weed. every. damn. day.

ā€¢ It's Bandcamp Friday, and while the company's organizing workforce (and Deerhoof, dude how badly have you fucked up when Deerhoof is Tweeting about you) have accused Bandcamp of union busting in recent weeks, the consensus seems to be it's still a great idea to support artists by buying their music today. For instance local supergroup Eyelids released a limited edition of its Accidental Falls demos to raise money for Transgender Law Center. You can only grip it for the next two months. Download that shit.

IN NATIONAL / INTERNATIONAL NEWS:
ā€¢ You don't generally see fire in Associated Press reporting, so when they called the Thursday expulsion of Tennessee state Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson from the Legislature "an extraordinary act of political retaliation" that's saying something. The two Democrat lawmakers were calling for more gun control, in the aftermath of a deadly school shooting at the Covenant School where six people were killed, including three children.

ā€¢ A banger investigation drop from ProPublica, revealed yesterday that US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted vacations and gifts from conservative donors for over 20 years. This morning Thomas defended his actions, saying that he didn't believe he was required to disclose the trips because they came from his close personal friends.

ā€¢ Earlier in the week a Free Press article claimed a Missouri gender clinic pressured a teen and her parent to give the teen puberty blockers, which failed to relive a trans teenager's distress. The trans teenager in question hopped on Twitter to debunk the ridiculous story Emily Yoffe knew was inaccurate but chose to publish anyway.

ā€¢ Attitude for Friday is as follows.

@nauticalnymph Dont tempt me with a good time. #CapCut #collapse #endoftheworld Ā #plutosreturn #downfallofsociety Ā #protest #protests #fyp #riot ā™¬ original sound - NymphsLure

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