Portland Dispatch December 29

A gunshot victim found in a tent in North Portland set the city’s annual homicide record at 86 early this morning, but with an accelerating race to the finish, his hold on the title is in no way assured with just a day to go:

If the man’s death is confirmed to be a homicide, the incident would mark Portland’s 86th homicide of 2021, a record, and the city’s fourth such killing in less than a week.

Two of the homicides came last weekend.

In the first, a man was shot dead Saturday in North Portland’s Eliot neighborhood. Then a man unintentionally shot and killed his cousin after getting into a dispute with others in the parking lot of a Southeast Portland strip club early Sunday, according to police and prosecutors.

Black parents really should give “the Talk” about strip clubs; maybe they’re too busy staffing and patronizing them to make time.

Record traffic accidents have been recorded so far this holiday season due to inclement weather, though I’m finding total traffic fatalities for the year not so easy to find. I suspect the city at least will establish new records there, following a national pattern.

Earnest liberal Oregon farm boy Nicholas Kristof leads the field in fundraising for Oregon’s next gubernatorial election and is attracting other earnest liberals hoping to moderate their fiery progressive allies:

Democratic candidate for Oregon governor Nicholas Kristof has now raised more than $2.5 million, far more than his two more established competitors in the Democratic primary, House Speaker Tina Kotek (D-Portland) and State Treasurer Tobias Read.

Kristof, the former New York Times reporter and columnist who grew up in Yamhill, has reeled in checks from a number of prominent sources, most of them from out of state. One interesting name in his latest haul: Brian W. Ross, a U of O grad turned Wall Street software entrepreneur, who gave Kristof $7,500. (Ross is married to another journalist with Oregon roots: Ann Curry, the longtime NBC reporter and former Today Show host who grew up in Ashland and graduated from the University of Oregon.)

Of perhaps more note to Democratic primary voters: a $100 check from former U.S. Rep. Les AuCoin (D-Ore.), who represented Oregon’s 1st Congressional District for nine terms from 1975 to 1993. AuCoin supported Gov. Kate Brown in 2018. His contribution to Kristof, though modest, is another signal of the voter dissatisfaction that has buoyed Kristof and former state Sen. Betsy Johnson (D-Scappoose), who is running as a nonaffiliated candidate and has raised $2.9 million this year.

Tina Kotek is a BLM-antifa fellow traveler and Read is a former Nike shoe designer who succeeded Ted Wheeler as state treasurer. He also carries the white guy handicap, despite the promising name, Tobias. For the dominant radical progressive faction in Oregon, enjoying favorable media gaslighting a shell-shocked public, a moderate of course simply will not do but–statewide at least–the public is quietly, I suspect, panicking about the radical direction of things, and Kristof is probably about as far to the right a correction as we’ll be allowed to make–for one thing, the media won’t commit to taking him down at all costs, as they would if the state’s pathetic Republican Party managed to nominate a Ron DeSantis.

How the radicals deal with the Kristof challenge will be interesting to see.