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Good morning, Portland! Today, we continue our warm streak with sunny skies and a high of 79. Tomorrow could be even hotter, with a high of 80. 🥵
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• It’s election season (Is that why it’s so spicy outside this late in the year?!) Voters will soon be asked to choose a governor, while those in Multnomah County and Portland City Council Districts 3 and 4 will also vote on local leadership for the next four years. That means the mud-slinging and campaign spending are in full swing, but as the Mercury’s Jeremiah Hayden reports, the city, county, and state are being asked to investigate whether a trio of new political action committees (PACs) broke election laws by trying to obscure the source of funding for a slew of recent roadside billboard campaigns. A new complaint alleges the PACs didn’t report their political spending with the state on time, and the PACs’ donor, United for Portland (the political sect of the Portland Metro Chamber) established the PACs as a straight pass-through of money in an attempt to hide the original funding source.
• Last night, hundreds of parents, teachers and students pushed their way into the Portland Public Schools headquarters following a rally outside the building ahead of a Portland School Board meeting to discuss plans for a range of school closures that will impact up to 14 sites. The school district hasn’t finalized school closure plans yet, but it’s one of the most painful and impactful decisions from PPS within the past decade.
• Speaking of campaigns and investigations…Oregon’s Secretary of State won’t investigate complaints alleging Portland’s police chief used his position to advocate for the ouster of a city councilor. The state agency confirmed six people filed complaints after Portland Police Chief Bob Day released a statement condemning old social media posts from City Councilor Mitch Green. In his statement, the chief indicated no confidence in Green’s ability to make decisions about the Police Bureau. The SoS says Day’s remarks don’t count as political advocacy and don’t appear to violate the law. One of the people who filed a complaint is a local attorney who says he takes issue with the state’s decision to overlook important context, like the timing of Day’s statement (just weeks before an election) and the fact that it came shortly after the police union called for the same city councilor to resign. The complainant says the state is choosing to use a very narrow interpretation of the law. Read more about the complaints and the state’s decision in our reporting here.
• Rant incoming: Can someone at the Washington Post do just a modicum of fact checking before republishing actual lies packaged as hard-truth-telling critical dives? The Post published a story from City Journal, a project of Manhattan Institute, which is mostly considered a conservative think tank-style editorial endeavor. The result is what’s actually just tired trope of a narrative about how gross and fucked up our city is because of boogeyman progressive politics, despite our tough-on-crime DA. A few gems, plucked from this shit pile: “A measure that would have restored funding for the Portland Police Bureau failed to make it onto November’s ballot after entrenched progressive interests brought legal challenges against it, a city hall elections insider was caught following petition-gatherers, and signatures were disqualified at disproportionately high rates.” Fact check: This measure failed to qualify for the ballot because it didn’t garner enough legally valid signatures. A legal challenge was mounted by the measure’s own backers, who questioned whether the elections office used the right process to disqualify signatures. A judge later determined the process was legal and sound. The measure faced other legal challenges at the beginning, which led to a slight delay in signature gathering, but didn’t lead to the initiative’s ultimate demise, as the story suggests. The story quotes the initiative’s backers, including the Portland Police Association president, as primary information sources.
The piece leans on dehumanizing catchphrases to drum up some punchy scene about our idyllic city gone awry. “Vagrants slumber on benches in well-to-do Laurelhurst Park,” it reads.
And then there’s the data-challenged narrative about how Measure 110 brought an onslaught of drugs, and not, you know, the fact that fentanyl arrived in the city around the same time and ravaged the community. Opioid users don’t care about what’s legal, and the law never exempted dealers, so it’s hard to imagine decriminalization alone could have yielded the onslaught of what we’re seeing on Portland’s streets, especially considering other major cities are also dealing with similar fentanyl issues and never decriminalized drugs. If Measure 110 was the problem, and it took less than six months for our laws to supposedly create a disaster, wouldn’t our fentanyl crisis have subsided by now, more than two years after the Legislature overturned the law?
Anyway, if you want an example of why helicopter journalism does harm and billionaires buying media companies does even more harm to the overall information landscape, feel free to read this misguided take from someone who doesn’t live here, but got talking points from the police union and thinks they have us all figured out.
IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS:
• Today marks the third anniversary of the deadly October 7, 2023 attacks by the Hamas militant group at the Israel music festival that killed about 1,200 people and kicked off a deadly war in the Middle East. Three years later, Palestinians have faced genocide and most have been driven from their homes in retaliation from Israeli forces. Much of Gaza has been bombed to rubble, leaving makeshift tent encampments with little access to fresh food. On the anniversary of the deadly attacks, Israelis still mourn at the site of the festival, as the international ripple effects of that day are still felt far beyond Gaza.
• Christa Pike, the Tennessee death row inmate who survived a botched execution, is reportedly “awake and communicating,” according to her legal team. Pike miraculously survived two lethal injections of pentobarbital last week. She remains shackled to a hospital bed, but is apparently speaking in full sentences, though her recovery is expected to be long. Her legal team says she has no recollection of the failed injections. Pike, 50, has been incarcerated for more than 30 years for the gruesome murder of her 19-year-old Job Corps colleague, Colleen Slemmer, in a wooded area of Knoxville in 1995. Pike, who was joined by her boyfriend at the time and a friend, allegedly thought Slemmer was interested in her boyfriend. Prosecutors said Pike tortured Slemmer, slicing her stomach with a box cutter before bludgeoning her to death. While the victim’s family still seeks justice, Pike’s case has led to renewed scrutiny of the state’s death penalty. Tennessee’s governor has halted all remaining executions for the rest of the year in the wake of the failed lethal injections.
• Residents in a rural town in Pennsylvania are being offered $10,000 if a data center gets built in their town. Hazle Township, which has only about 4,500 households, is being courted by NorthPoint Development, who wants to build one of 15 data centers in the region, starting with one in the township. The promise of $10,000 to each family is enticing in the area, where the median income hovers around $60,000, Wall Street Journal reports, but even so, hardly anyone seems interested in the payments, citing noise, skepticism of AI, and a slew of other concerns. It mirrors a growing distaste for the massive data centers, which typically draw huge amounts of electricity and require large amounts of water to run cooling systems for the servers.
• At least 215 teens and 85 school staff have been injured in protests across France that have turned violent in some cases. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets for mostly peaceful marches to protest deteriorating high school conditions, but on Tuesday, police fired tear gas at protesters in Paris, where the largest demonstration occurred. Police in France have been accused of using excessive force to disperse the crowds, who are demanding smaller class sizes, better school buildings, and an overall improvement to the education system.
Vibes for today…
