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GOOD MORNING, PORTLAND!👋
Get ready for a partly sunny (and still hazy) weekend, with temps hovering around the 86 degree mark today and dipping into the upper 70s on Saturday and Sunday. I would make a reference to the “hazy, lazy, crazy days of summer,” but if you’re like me, you’ve only experienced two of those things. Now let’s read up on some hazy, crazy, and never lazy NEWS!
IN LOCAL NEWS:
• Lots of people—probably including yourself—are not happy about the federal government spending your tax dollars to finance Israel’s continuing genocide of the Palestinian people. And yesterday a large group of Portlanders and elected officials gathered to hold a press conference outside of City Hall to urge Oregon’s congressional lawmakers to stop providing financial (tens of billions of dollars so far) and military support to Israel in their ongoing siege on the people in Gaza. Speakers at the press conference urged the state lawmakers to co-sponsor the Block the Bombs Act, which if enacted, would prohibit sending deadly defense weapons and services to Israel. Think stopping a genocide might be a good idea? 🙋Then find out more in this article by our Taylor Griggs.
Local lawmakers joined Palestinian Oregonians and other advocates at a rally outside Portland City Hall today. The group urged US legislators to support an effort to curtail military spending in Israel amid its ongoing siege on Gaza. So far, two Oregon US congresswomen have signed onto the bill.
— Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury.com) September 4, 2025 at 5:39 PM
• Yesterday on Capitol Hill, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden really laid into the brain worm-addled Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., chastising his insane attempts to gut and reshape the CDC, limiting vaccine access to millions, and endangering the lives of Americans. “Instead of finding ways to help American families pay less for health care,” Wyden snapped, “Robert Kennedy is singularly focused on his anti-vaccine mission, fueled by a messiah complex, the consequences be damned.” Even some of Kennedy’s Republican comrades were blasting him in an unusually fiery session in which Wyden correctly noted that “I don’t think Robert Kennedy should be within a million miles of this job.” (I’d say closer to ten million… but why nitpick?)
• Meanwhile on Wednesday, anti-ICE and pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Q&A session with Mayor Keith Wilson at a weekly Bike Happy Hour event, which eventually ended in the mayor getting up and walking away. While the mayor’s intent was to speak about transportation safety, members of the crowd reportedly peppered Wilson with questions about what he was going to do about the city’s ICE facility, and demanding that Portland must end its sister city relationship with Ashkelon—a city in Israel just north of the embattled Gaza Strip.
West Coast states are teaming up to issue their own vaccine guidelines in the face of rapid changes at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. The federal turmoil has some people wondering what this means for their seasonal shots.
— OPB (@opb.org) September 5, 2025 at 7:30 AM
• In labor news, Portland’s popular Powell’s Books have reportedly laid off 18 workers in the last two months. According to a company spokesperson, the layoffs primarily affected “management and business services positions across several departments,” and cited lagging sales that have not returned to the level of pre-pandemic profits.
Swedish pop girlie Zara Larsson brings her Midnight Sun tour to Portland, former Odd Future member Earl Sweatshirt will promote his newest album on his 3L World Tour, and Aussie comedy queen Celeste Barber is adding more US tour dates. All this and more in this week’s TICKET ALERT! 🚨
— Portland Mercury (@portlandmercury.com) September 4, 2025 at 12:30 PM
IN NATIONAL/WORLD NEWS:
• BAD NEWS FOR THE CHEETO-IN-CHIEF: According to the latest abysmal jobs report, hiring across the country continues to crater under Trump-onomics. Thanks to King Fool’s stunningly idiotic tariff plans, American employers have been reluctant to hire new workers, citing the country’s current (and verrrry shaky) economic situation. As a comparison, in July companies made 77,000 hires (not great)—but then in August, only 22,000 people were hired, while unemployment continued rising to 4.3 percent. Following the prior disappointing jobs report, an infuriated Trump fired his director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, for not giving him the numbers he would prefer. Wonder who will get shit-canned this time?
Early job numbers ahead of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Friday jobs report are painting a grim picture of the American economy, one that some are labeling as an indicator that a “Trumpcession” is well underway.
— Raw Story (@rawstory.com) September 5, 2025 at 7:30 AM
• Roughly 450 immigrants were kidnapped by ICE agents at a Hyundai plant in Georgia yesterday, marking what is most likely the biggest mass arrest in the agency’s history. The kidnappings brought operations at the company to a complete standstill—which cannot be making Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp very happy, since he has been proudly touting the Hyundai factory as “the largest economic development site in the state’s history.” (Sorry, GOP! You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.)
Stephen Miller has emerged as a key enforcer of President Trump’s D.C. takeover.
Miller’s team provides a daily report on the arrests made the night before, including a breakdown of how many of those arrested are undocumented immigrants.
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) September 5, 2025 at 7:00 AM
• In an all-too-clear example of “bumbling white guys failing upward”: Despite the fact that billionaire crybaby Elon Musk and his pimple-faced DOGE cronies have decimated many necessary government agencies without achieving any considerable savings, while also causing his company Tesla to experience its biggest ever losses, the company is setting him up to be awarded a whopping $1 trillion if he does his job achieves certain benchmarks. The good news is that in order to get that $1 trillion, under his watch the failing company would have to reach a market valuation of $2 trillion while also delivering 20 million vehicles—though in 2024 it only sold two million total. (Will this be the most excruciatingly slow firing we’ve ever seen in our lives? LET’S WATCH. 🍿)
• In a headline that practically says everything: “Trump seeks to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.”
• And finally… as you may have noticed, it’s SPIDER SEASON here in Portland. (And is it just me, or are these spiders getting more salty?)
@epitomeofclassy.4
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Wm. Steven Humphrey
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