Good Morning, News! Portland’s First Police Shooting of 2015, Ted Cruz’s Butter Cow, and the Mysterious Case of the Missing Dan Saltzman

“The details are sketchy,” Dirk VanderHart wrote last night on Blogtown, “but we know this much: A Portland police officer killed a man tonight, after the suspect apparently attacked with a knife…. The incident marks Portland’s first deadly police shooting of 2015, and the first since Officer Robert Brown shot Nicholas Davis, a homeless man, on the Springwater Corridor Trail last June.”

“The Oregon House of Representatives apparently either overlooked a Thursday letter from Google, or ignored it,” reports the Oregonian‘s Mike Rogoway—thus inviting the fury and rage of Google’s capricious, all-knowing corporate meta-gods. In theory, this might complicate the process of getting Google Fiber in Portland—but hey, who cares about theories? In theory, it’s also a billion times smarter for Portland to build a municipal network and not have to start sweatily shouting “HOW HIGH DEAR GODS HOW FUCKING HIGH” whenever Google mumbles “Jump,” but you don’t see us doing that, do you? Bah! Theories!

Writing the sentence “Where in Portland is Dan Saltzman?” certainly gives us an excuse to begin our day with Rockapella, but no, really: Where in Portland is Dan Saltzman? According to Andrew Theen at the Oregonian, the commissioner isn’t in City Council meetings, and instead “is increasingly missing in action—taking long weekends and, on some workdays, leaving the building earlier than his colleagues.” But at least Saltzman has the the world’s most angering excuse: “He acknowledged that he’s been gone a lot since buying [a] $799,000 home overlooking the ocean near Tillamook.”

Typing that last sentence made me start making molotov cocktails at my desk while chanting “CLASS RAGE CLASS RAGE CLASS RAGE,” but then I remembered that this morning at Liberty University (of course at Liberty University), Ted Cruz became the first Republican to announce a 2016 presidential campaign! Everybody else is already doing a great job of making fun of Cruz, so I’ll spare you that, and instead simply leave this here. Stare at it for as long as you can.

Wow, a cow made of butter. My girls would love it. In fact, the first sentence Caroline ever said was “I like butter” pic.twitter.com/TzBZJmVFKT
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) August 9, 2014

“With the release of The Divergent Series: Insurgent over the weekend, women have delivered the three biggest live-action openings of the year,” Brooks Barnes writes for the New York Times. This, of course, is even more evidence that Hollywood’s decades-long over-reliance on jackass teenage boys is being radically upended. But don’t worry, jackass teenage boys! Hollywood is sloooow to adapt, so you can still expect “nearly 30 superhero movies on the way by the end of 2015.”

Speaking of superheroes, the world’s real-life Tony Stark, Elon Musk, just put SpaceX images in the public domain.

Today the Supreme Court “takes up a free speech case on whether Texas was wrong in rejecting a specialty vehicle license plate displaying the Confederate flag.” This is a very serious issue (for racists), and I believe we should ponder it while watching this nine-minute-long video of the General Lee doing sweet jumps. Press play and join me, won’t you? I have already watched it three times.