Stay up to date on Portland news and politics. Looking for fun? Here are the best Things to Do in Portland today.
Happy Election Day! Procrastinators: you still have until 8 pm to turn in your ballot; here are our endorsements. If 2016 left you too vulnerable to watch election results alone, check out our list of election watch parties.
The Final Countdown: Kate Brown and Knute Buehler <a href=”https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/11/oregon_governors_race_in_final.html
https://www.cookpolitical.com/analysis/governors/oregon-governor”>traversed the state yesterday for one final day of campaigning in the closest governor’s race Oregon has seen in decades. The Cook Political Report is officially calling this race a toss-up, so what happens tonight is anyone’s guess.
Out-Foxed: Trump loves a rally, and last night he brought his friends with him. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Jeanine Pirro all joined him onstage last night to rev up the crowd in Missouri before the midterms. “All those people in the back are fake news,” Hannity told the MAGA mob. Cool.
Speaking of Racists and Fox News: CNN, NBC, Facebook, and even Fox News refused to air a Trump campaign ad for being too obviously racist. The 30-second ad “featured courtroom video of a Mexican citizen convicted in the 2014 killings of two police officers, juxtaposed with scenes of a US-bound caravan of Central American migrants and refugees.”
Last in the Nation: If Louisiana votes yes on its Proposition 2 today, Oregon will be the only state left in the country where you could be convicted of a felony without a unanimous jury.
Methinks He Doth Protest Too Much: The Portland City Council will consider Mayor Ted Wheeler’s proposed new protest ordinance at a Thursday meeting. The ordinance would give the Police Commissioner “the authority to restrict where groups who have clashed in the past may gather and demonstrate.”
The ordinance has faced harsh criticism from many, including the ACLU of Oregon, for being unconstitutional. That has kept Wheeler busy defending it on Twitter:
With all due respect, @MatPDX, by that logic you would want us to wait for people to get hurt first and then prosecute? When we have seen time and time again two groups purposefully getting together in downtown Portland to hurt each other? https://t.co/KG5NlXmnDC
— Mayor Ted Wheeler (@tedwheeler) November 5, 2018
First Grifter: Chinese regulators granted Ivanka Trump approval for 16 trademark applications. The trademarks will give her a presence in a wide range of Chinese markets, including “senior homes and lightning diffusing machines; for batteries, wedding gowns and sausage casings” – and also voting machines.
HARVARD WANTS TO BELIEVE: Researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics think that aliens might have tried to visit Earth last year in a cigar-shaped spacecraft. They have nicknamed the object “Oumuamua,” which translates to “a messenger that reaches out from the distant past” in Hawaiian.
Our new alien overlords might soon render democracy obsolete—but until that happens, get out there and vote!
Me voting in 2018 and also me voting in 2018 pic.twitter.com/5ejXMulGRx
— R. Eric Thomas (@oureric) November 6, 2018
While the ACLU generally does good work, Mat dos Santos has been a pretty horrible leader for the Oregon chapter. The law is never as black-and-white as he claims, and a lot of the positions he pushes are counter-productive, yet somehow he plunges ahead with utter certainty.