SUSPICIOUS PACKAGES! Containing mysterious substances! Showing up at government offices all over the state! Giving the Grant County sheriff arm rashes! Oregon State Police are looking into this. No one quite knows what the hell to think right now.
Portland’s $35 Arts Tax is collecting millions less than anticipated, from fewer people than predicted, and is more expensive to administer than you were promised. BUT. It’s also paying for arts teachers in schools, which was the central goal. A new audit breaks it all down.
How filthy are those Benson Bubblers you ignore everyday? Not that filthy, according to lab tests KGW commissioned. They’re cleaner than a Lloyd Center drinking fountain, anyway.
Oh boy. You’ve read the menacing, backwards insanity one of GOP presidential frontrunner(!) Donald Trump’s attorneys and spokespeople unleashed on The Daily Beast, right? Too much of it to paraphrase. Too much to unpack about each horrific sentence even if I tried. Just read it all, and contemplate how this will somehow just make Trump more popular.
The guy who murdered two women at a Louisiana movie theater used to be a reliable go-to for southern talk shows looking for someone to spout off about how women shouldn’t have rights.
In no way should that guy have been allowed to purchase a gun. But he was allowed to purchase a gun because of the many holes in the background check system this country most relies on to keep weapons away from potentially dangerous people.
Oh and by the way? Multnomah Countians are carrying concealed weapons way more these days!
Mormon Church said it might leave the Boy Scouts over decision to end ban on gay leaders http://t.co/tzOH11B8Cx pic.twitter.com/9ExDT0I8yV
— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 28, 2015
The Boy Scouts of America will now allow openly gay adults serve as troop leaders in the organization. Unless, you know, individual bigoted churches don’t think that’s cool. One such bigoted organization: the Mormon Church, which has threatened to sever all ties with the Boy Scouts over this.
You may have heard that we can expect an earthquake at some point in Oregon. You probably did not hear that we have a state agency dedicated to tracking geologic risks like earthquakes. But even this agency—the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries—doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be doing. So maybe we’re going to get rid of it?
ISIS has federal agents shook, and the FBI’s resorting to increasingly knee-jerk tactics, according to the New York Times. “The F.B.I. has arrested and charged at least 25 people in the past three months with having ties to the Islamic State or other terrorist groups, compared with 20 people arrested over the previous year.”
Hillary Clinton has a climate change agenda! It’s bolder than Obama’s (which is convenient since she has no power to do anything with it)! And it might be partly aimed at raking in millions from moneyed climate change activists! Still, a far better position to stake than most of the folks on the other side.
Good, odd news: Congress is talking seriously about common sense sentencing reform, somehow?
Brazilian taxi drivers are purposefully clogging the streets in protest of Uber. It is entirely plausible that this could happen in Portland.
Here we go again, y’all.
GOOD MORNING, DIRK! GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE!
“Drummond Kahn, director of the Audit Services Division, said it’s unclear how much the Revenue Bureau spends to collect the tax because the bureau doesn’t track it. Bureau Director Thomas Lannom wrote in his formal response that closely tracking the costs would have “limited practical use.”
But City Auditor Mary Hull Caballero disagreed. “Voters deserve a better accounting of how arts tax funds are spent and tax collection is managed,” she said in a statement.”
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015…
Give it up for your Portland City Government! The 6 pm show is completely different from the 8 pm show!
GOOD MORNING, DIRK AND DRUNK AND D’EVERYONE.
Absolutely related to that Louisianan asshole (and any mass shooting I might have missed this week), some sociologists have a fascinating theory about why the last few decades have been so shooty. Give it a read.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/…