Thursday was insane, Portland. A rundown:
Portland police shot two people in separate incidents. The first came Thursday morning, as cops were searching for a suspect in an armed robbery near NE Hancock and 82nd. Details are sketchy, but while officers were searching they came upon a man and killed him. A police spokesman says officers found a handgun on the scene.
Then Thursday evening, police say they responded to a call of a potentially suicidal man near Powell City Park in Southeast Portland. According to the police account, the man had a handgun, got out of his vehicle, and was shot after an altercation. The man is in critical condition. Neither shooting victim has been identified.
Then, as you've surely heard, a federal appeals court in San Francisco shot down Donald Trump's immigration ban, finding there was no reason to cancel the temporary restraining order a Seattle judge had granted. This resulted in Trump Twitter outrage and a lot of excellent lampooning of that outrage.
SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017
"SEE YOU IN COURT"
"Ok cool, that is where we work, so it is very convenient for us"
— Chase Mitchell (@ChaseMit) February 10, 2017
The Oregon Zoo also announced that it had euthanized Packy, the Most Famous Elephant in Oregon and, at the time of his 1962 birth, the first elephant to have been born in the Western Hemisphere in more than four decades. Packy had contracted a strain of tuberculosis that resisted treatment, the zoo said. Saddest tidbit I read about this came from Patch, which noted that zookeepers, upon deciding to kill the elephant, went and bought him a cake at Fred Meyer.
What else? Well the city, facing a challenge to a new law that mandates landlords pay relocation costs to some renters, has decided it wants to fight that fight in the federal courts, not at the state level. I'm not sure about the reasoning, but in moving the case the city's ensured that a judge it frequently has disagreed with will decide the fate of the law.
And local health care provider Moda, which lost its shirt by participating in Obamacare, just won a $214 million judgment from the federal government. Guess it's not going to be The Rose Garden again anytime soon.
Now on to Presidential-Administration-Breaks-the-Law Corner:
It looks very much like Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn had a conversation with a Russian official before Trump took office, and that he assured that official that Trump would be easier on Russia than the Obama administration had been. If so, it's potentially a breach of something called the Logan Act, which prohibits citizens from interfering with diplomacy.
And then Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway started advertising Ivanka Trump's clothing line in interviews, which is almost certainly a breach of governmental ethics guide lines. That spurred two congressman, including Trump booster Rep. Jason Chaffetz, to write a letter urging Conway's statements be investigated.
One reason why Chaffetz might have wanted to sign on to that letter? Things aren't going great on the home front, where he was recently taken to task by raucous constituents at a town hall appearance. (On that tip, if you haven't read the Indivisible Guide yet, you might find it interesting.)
And here's another report that paints Trump as a lonely, sad cable news junkie when he's out of the public eye at night.
It should really stop raining.
