Mayor Charlie Hales has been an easy go-to of late for world leaders looking to add a little oomph to their climate proclamations. And to his credit, the mayor’s a realist about those unexpected invites—acknowledging he’s riding the city’s green rep to DC, the Vatican, and maybe Paris next.

The conventional wisdom is that it’s incredibly satisfying to be a SWAT officer who recovers a stolen coin-operated carousel in a burglary raid, as a team of Clackamas County deputies did Friday (along with a “bewildering cache” of other items). My bet, though, is that it’s profoundly conflicting in ways none of us could have expected.

Uh oh: The ole’ 5 pm announcement that a city council member is resigning for “family reasons” trick, eh, Gresham? Someone fetch me my popcorn!


It strains credulity, but in this day and age EPA scientists thought they could just break into something called the Gold King Mine and not spring a nefarious booby trap… Wound up poisoning a whole river.

How cute, LA. A whole 27,500 people showing up to cheer on Bernie Sanders? Couldn’t muster the extra 500 to play in the big leagues? You’ll get there someday.

Speaking of The Bern, here’s an interesting take on how he stacks up to 2004 Vermont-based insurgent Democrat Howard Dean, felled by an ill-timed screech (spoiler: not great, electability-wise) (spoiler2: plenty of people disagree with that logic).


Drought fun: A train trestle in Sherwood caught fire yesterday and has now collapsed.

Sure, police arrested dozens of protestors in Ferguson, but most people are breathing easy this morning after no one was shot at demonstrations last night, with only minor confrontations.

This nation’s drone shenanigans are quickly getting out of control, the WaPo reports. Case in point: “Another unnerving scenario emerged last month when a Connecticut man posted an Internet video of a drone he had armed with a handgun, firing shots by remote control as it hovered in the air.”

Whoops. Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry’s campaign cash is running dry, so he’s had to stop paying his staff.

So maybe those vanished 16th century Roanoke colonists—cryptic scrawlings at their abandoned homes notwithstanding— just moved a bit inland?

Summer continues apace.

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Thing I just learned about.

I'm a news reporter for the Mercury. I've spent a lot of the last decade in journalism — covering tragedy and chicanery in the hills of southwest Missouri, politics in Washington, D.C., and other matters...

4 replies on “Good Morning, News: Pilfered Carousels, Gold Mine Booby Traps, and Too Many Drone Shenanigans to Count”

  1. All this Ferguson crap over a common street thug that got what he had coming. His parents did a wonderful job raising him. Most likely, if he hadn’t been shot when he was, it was just a matter of time until he either hurt or killed someone, or got shot himself.

  2. ^ Racist Grandpa:

    I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood with several middle-class white kids who did a lot of the same shit that Michael Brown did. All of them turned out, more or less, to be productive adults with families who discontinued their bad behavior. Michael Brown never got a chance to grow up and change. He was a kid, you are calling him a thug because he was a black kid.

    You’re a fucking asshole.

  4. By the way, I’m not racist. I would have said the same thing no matter what color his skin was. I just calls them the way I see them.

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