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GOOD MORNING, PORTLAND!👋

Alert! Alert! Valentine's Day is THIS FRIDAY, so you have two tasks: Send your shmoopie-woopie a FREE Mercury VALENTINE for all the world to see, and read our very romantic, entertaining, and horny LOVE/SEX Issue, currently on these streets in more than 500 spots citywide. It's got everything: your reader valentines, self-care tips, horny books, how to find love (on a bike), an interview with a sex worker, the hilariously (un)scientific SEX SURVEY poll results, and lots more! And now? Prepare to fall in love (and/or get very horny for) today's NEWS.

IN LOCAL NEWS:

• ICYMI, last week our new City Council raked Michael Jordan, Portland’s interim city administrator, over the coals due to a lack of communication with the council and turning a blind eye to the city's open-armed invitation to Zenith to continue their dangerous oil transportation practices, and whose very existence threatens every person in Portland. (More on that here.) That said, the council still overwhelmingly agreed to allow Jordan to stay on the job until the end of 2025—but it is NOT an auspicious start to his relationship with council. Our Courtney Vaughn has the juicy deets.

Gender Reveal presents Gender Ordeal: Gender on Wheels is a variety show featuring the star power of show-host Tuck Woodstock, cartoonist Mattie Lubchansky, and author Calvin Kasulke. As titles go, this one really seems to convey the vibe: multi-part, goofy, about gender.

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— Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 2:34 PM

• Get ready for the shock of your life: Two Oregon Republican representatives—one of whom owns part of a trucking business—have introduced legislation that threatens to defang Oregon’s ACT regulations, which aims to increase the number of zero-emission trucks on the road. Trucking business leaders, like GOP Rep. Shelly Boshart Davis (whose family owns Boshart Trucking, Inc), would rather torpedo the progressive, environment-saving regulations to... well... save themselves money at the expense of everyone else on the planet. Our Taylor Griggs has more.

• Hospital docs may have struck a tentative deal with Providence healthcare system, but while a tentative agreement was reached last week with the Oregon Nurses Association, their members at seven locations voted to reject the deal on Friday, and so the long-running, five-week strike continues. Nurses say the hospital system refuses to pay them market value or provide the staffing they need—Providence negotiators deny the assertions.

Subfreezing temperatures overnight will create a high chance of frostbite or hypothermia for those who are not adequately dressed or sheltered against the cold.

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— The Oregonian (@oregonian.com) February 10, 2025 at 7:50 AM

• Take care if you're driving or biking this morning—the National Weather Service has issued an advisory about freezing fog in the Willamette Valley, that can make roads slick. Also be on the lookout for the (currently small) possibility of snow in the Portland area this Thursday as freezing rain moves in, and do what you can to protect your houseless neighbors.

In this week's hilarious trivia quiz, we ask "WHAT SHOULD WE STICK IN THAT HOLE?" Find out more about this mysterious (and deep) hole, as well as local elephants, ancient fashion, and more in POP QUIZ PDX! See how well YOU score!

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— Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 9:54 AM

IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS:

• Let's start with a short list of the most EMBARRASSING Trump face-plant losses from his firehose of failure over the past three weeks, shall we?

1) Besides backpedaling on the majority of his tariff threats, many of Trump's impotent executive actions have already been blocked by the courts, including his ban on birthright citizenship (blocked three times), his freeze on federal grants and loans, the transfer of transgender prisoners, revealing the names of FBI agents who worked on the January 6 domestic terrorist case, sending three Venezuelan deportees to Guantanamo Bay, and the dismantling of USAID. Other actions that will most likely be stopped in their tracks by judges include Trump's ban on asylum seekers, expanding fast track deportations, removing protections for civil servants, a ban on transgender troops and gender-transition care for minors, and the overall legality of DOGE. (And trust me, we're just getting started. Looks like Trump's "firehose" is slowing to a drip-dick trickle.)

2) Speaking of DOGE and the vice president of failure, a federal judge has blocked Elon Musk's boy-toy filled DOGE organization from access to Treasury Department information, and ordered them to delete everything they've illegally taken thus far. Hardy-har-har! (How are Musk's sniveling teens going to afford their acne cream now?)

3) A Massachusetts judge has slammed the brakes on the idiotic deadline that Musk put on federal workers to leave their jobs and take a buy-out—leaving employees who jumped for the offer too soon in danger of just getting laid off with NO money. And that is what happens when you play a fool's game.

4) Trump's tariffs are already hurting a significant section of his base, American farmers, but that's not stopping him from threatening a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum imports—the ultimate price of which will be passed on directly to the industry itself. As a reminder, in 2002, under the Bush Administration's steel tariffs,  America "lost nearly 200,000 jobs in the steel-consuming sector."

REMINDER: Because of their inability to read and process accurate information, be sure to remind Trump's followers of their elected leader's many, continuous and embarrassing failures at every opportunity, yes? YES!  

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— Raw Story (@rawstory.com) February 9, 2025 at 7:47 PM

• It should also be noted that Trump and his cronies are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their daily "flood the zone" strategy of releasing three insane proclamations per day (in order to disguise what they're really doing... providing tax breaks for their rich oligarch buddies). Here are some the most recent desperate nothing-burgers of rage baiting: Trump says he will fire the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and install himself as board president. 🤣 Trump says he will revoke Joe Biden's security clearance. 😆 Here's an oldie-but-goodie: Trump wants to ban paper straws (whew! the desperation is really showing). 😅 And Trump also wants to ban pennies, because... FUCKING PENNIES, AMIRITE?? 😝 Remember: You can only be distracted by bullshit if you allow it.

• IN SPORTING NEWS: Rapper Kendrick Lamar was the clear winner of yesterday's Super Bowl, defeating Drake 535 billion to negative three. Besides stomping on his chief rival's grave—with an assist from SZA and Drake's former love, the crip-walking Serena Williams (OUCH)—Lamar's halftime show was a joyous celebration of Blackness which was jam-packed with symbolic nods to America and the NFL's continuing love affair with racism. Samuel L. Jackson appeared as Uncle "Tom" Sam to chide Lamar for not performing to white people's expectations, as Lamar's red, white, and blue backup dancers formed the American flag (that was occasionally and pointedly split in half). But nothing was more devastating than Lamar looking dead into the camera, acknowledging the ever-present threat of lawsuits, and unblinkingly saying "Say, DRAKE... I hear ya like 'em young," as roughly 65,000 fans simultaneously screamed, "A-Minorrrrrrrrr." RIP, Drake: 1986-2025. 

@nfl Replying to @NFL THEY NOT LIKE US (part 2) #KendrickLamar #AppleMusicHalftime #superbowl @Apple Music @Roc Nation ♬ original sound - NFL

Oh, and apparently a little football game was played as well, with the Philadelphia Eagles easily beating the MAGA-loving Kansas City Native American Appropriators, 40-22.

It was a night of pearl-clutching for many prominent conservatives Sunday night.

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— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast.bsky.social) February 9, 2025 at 7:12 PM

• RIP to one of my fave artists, Mort Künstler, who achieved much of his fame due to his realistic paintings of Civil War and other patriotic scenes, BUT! It's his cover work for a slew of men's magazines from the '50s and '60s which made me fall in love. He died at the age of 97, and leaves behind such eye-popping work as this 2010 Portland Mercury cover:

• And finally... Portland will never become a "world class" city, until we have one of THESE:

@ac2ality

Este cafe🫠

♬ sonido original - ac2ality