Reader's digest


You take a peek at the news in Portland these days, and it's nonstop homeless homeless homeless drugs drugs drugs crime crime crime. Occasionally you get a brief diversion with a gang shooting, police misconduct, weather, or corruption story, but then it's back to homeless-drugs-crime, which is pretty much all the same story, when you think about it.

Rather than write a half dozen posts about the latest aspects of it, maybe a roundup will suffice for today:

  • The trustafarians who don't like the new Portland city councilman, Rene Gonzalez, were back screaming at him and disrupting the City Council meeting the other morning. All because Gonzo stopped his bureaus from handing out free tents to street dwellers. You long for the day when we may once again have a functioning police force, a sane district attorney, and judges with some spine. The tantrum-throwing children deserve some "lived experience" in the county jaill for a couple of nights. I hope Gonzalez is tough enough to ignore them for four years. Talking sanity in Portlandia is a thankless job.
  • Portland's clown mayor, Dud Wheeler, announced that they're going to put his sanctioned homeless camp down near where the railroad tracks cross Powell Boulevard. Conveniently located near the MAX Green Line! Dud and Dandy Dan Ryan have been blathering about this project for more than two years now, and so far they've managed to pick a site. Whoopdee doo. If they go any slower, the street campers will be dying of old age.
  • Several people have been interacting with Portland squatters on Twitter lately. One guy, Kevin Dahlgren, posted a revealing interview yesterday with a stereotypical bum, a young white guy who lives on the street because he doesn't want to endure "the misery of being a wage slave." He's been out there for years. He's in Portland because they don't put up with his kind on the East Coast. So far no one has knocked any sense into him.
  • A number of "homeless" folks were living under an on-ramp to the Steel Bridge until their hidey-hole (pictured) caught fire the other day. One of them wound up in the hospital. You hope there is no threat to the structural integrity of the ramp or bridge, but at last report they were still checking that.
  • The Mexican drug cartels have set up shop in Seaside, Oregon. Leave it to out-of-state media to notice it first. If it matters to Oregonians, it's in the Louisville Courier Journal.
  • Does Sean Kemp's arrest (catch and release, Tacoma style) count as a drug story?

There ya go, all rolled into one post. Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Comments

  1. You’re right about the news in Portland. It’s all homeless/crime all the time because that’s about all there is to talk about in this city these days. Years ago there was a story in the news about a young girl being pulled into a tent off Powell and being sexually assaulted. At that point, I thought surely this type of story will wake up the city and bring an end to tents on our streets. How wrong I was. That sort of outrage is not going to spur the city into action. Now we learn that campers have done serious damage to a transportation hub in the city. What would it take to make the city do something about ending camping, the burning down of Forest Park? That probably wouldn’t change anything either.

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  2. I was really surprised that they located the homeless encampment on the east side. I thought Dunthorpe for sure.

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    1. Proof positive, the West Hills Mafia is alive and well.

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  3. Couldn’t find anything in your link about Seaside and CJNG, but did find an article in USA Today (by the Louisville paper), here:

    https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2023/03/09/el-menchos-mexican-cartel-cjng-supplied-drugs-to-portland-oregon/11418543002/

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    1. You do have to dig around in the Louisville's paper extensive coverage to get to the Seaside story. I've improved my link to their version.

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  4. Hurray for Gonzalez! You know, you quit feeding the birds and they eventually fly away!

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  5. A friend of mine who lives up in Tacoma had a bunch of homeless people move into his greenhouse. He had to file a legal request for an eviction and he showed me pictures that looked like these but amongst the garbage was a book on 'Home Decorating'.

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  6. Small correction. That’s actually the MAX Orange Line running by 13th and Powell. Used to ride it every weekday. After opening in 2015, it got worse and worse every year even before the pandemic. The morning commute often included whole rear train sections taken over by strung out bums. Happy I don’t have to ride it in anymore now that I’m working from home.

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