By now more people than I would have thought have seen OPB’s coverage of how Mine Furor’s troops in Portland are seemingly at random nabbing people off the street in unmarked cars and then denying they’d detained them. Tim Dickinson for Rolling Stone provides a good backgrounder on what’s been happening overall here in Portland, including the feckless, pointless, and spineless lack of leadership from Ted Wheeler; while Charles P. Pierce echoes the warning Portlanders have been offering that Portland is just Trump’s trial run for these tactics.
Bonus read: Noelle Crombie for The Oregonian provides wide leeway and benefits of the doubt to the fed who shot Donavan La Bella in the head, in an article that credulously quotes experts assuming that the feds first had issued an order to disperse which mostly only makes me wonder: does The Oregonian not have any reporters on the ground for these protests so they would know the answer to that rather than just giving the feds cover through the mouth of someone’s outside assumption?
Bonus opinion: I don’t remember who I saw say this on Twitter, and obviously it doesn’t apply to the feds, but mostly that Rolling Stone article reminded me of a policing change the City Council could make right now: the only Portland Police official who should be able to declare a gathering a “riot” should be the police commissioner. We should force Ted Wheeler into taking that responsibility upon himself.