Free Republic

The battle against homelessness in the Portland, Oregon, area reportedly came with a high cost in 2023, with most of the money going to temporary shelter, services, and housing placement. ECOnorthwest’s analysis found in the counties of Multnomah, Washington, and Clackamas, “local governments and nonprofits” shelled out $531 million for homeless interventions, Fox News reported on Thursday. “The huge increase was driven in part by nearly $90 million in federal pandemic relief funds, as well as a regional homeless tax approved by voters in 2020, the report shows,” the outlet said.

A woman with a 'very dangerous' brain tumor broke down in tears as she revealed she cannot get surgery to remove it despite doctors saying she needs the procedure ASAP — because the hospital is full of COVID patients. Amanda Harris, from Portland Oregon, found out she had a brain tumor in October 2021, and was told by her neurologist that she needed to get it surgically removed as soon as possible or it could cause 'irreparable harm' to her brain. Her doctors are not sure if the tumor is cancerous or not, but because it is 'pressed up against...

The local teachers’ union encourages students to resist “Zionist bullies.” Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants. I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by...

Democrat's talk a lot about insurrection. Unless it is carried out by Progressives... Four years after the 2020 siege and insurrection of the Federal Court House in Portland, Oregon, I take a closer look at what happened. What's the truth? How did media cover it? Why do Democrat politicians ignore it, or worse, support it? Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi degraded the whole incident to mere "graffiti" by peaceful protestors. Meanwhile, President Trump was trying to send in Federal law enforcement to deal with the violent mobs. Who was right? What was the real cost of it all? What really happened in...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — A Portland burn nurse returned home on Saturday after a 17-day mission treating patients in Southern Gaza. Monica Johnston said she first heard of the opportunity to provide medical help to civilians in Gaza last year through the organization Palestinian-American Medical Association. "I hear the word ‘help,’ and my ears perk up," she told KATU on Monday, adding that her experience in the burn unit of Legacy Emanuel Medical Center led to "an absolute need to be there." Johnston arrived in Gaza on May 1, planning to stay 13 days. She worked in the European General...

Portland, Oregon, is considered one of the wokest cities in the nation, yet even residents there have apparently had enough of watching silently as their metropolis descends into chaos and ruin. On Tuesday, they got rid of their disastrous district attorney Mike Schmidt and handed the job to his tough-on-crime challenger Nathan Vasquez.Never thought I’d see such sanity from Portland folks:BREAKING: Portland voters fire Soros DA Mike Schmidt by a landslide 15% margin.He infamously declined to prosecute the BLM and Antifa riots & allowed crime to flourish in Multanomah County.Soros DA Chesa Boudin (San Fran): OutSoros DA Kim Gardner (St....

Voters in Oregon were on the brink Wednesday of ousting progressive Portland DA Mike Schmidt and replacing him with one of his deputies who was once a Republican and has vowed to crack down on rampant crime and drug abuse. As of Wednesday morning, with about 63% of the vote counted, Schmidt was trailing Nathan Vasquez by 11.9 percentage points — a difference of more than 117,000 votes, according to the latest tally. “I am committed to fulfilling those campaign promises. I’m committed to ending the open-air drug use, to ending the open-air drug dealing that we have suffered from...

Mike Schmidt, the leftist prosecutor in Portland, Ore., is asking voters to give him the opportunity to serve four more years as head of the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office. In an interview with local media last October, he graded himself an “A” for his performance. But if the past four years of record homicides, decriminalized antifa rioting and surging street overdoses represent Schmidt as his best, Portland may not survive another four years with him at the helm. Schmidt’s re-election is being challenged by his subordinate, Nathan Vasquez, a senior deputy district attorney and moderate candidate who promises to...

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was rebuked as an "elite" during a recent Oxford Union debate, where she argued that populism in the United States is a threat to democracy. Pelosi — a self-described "devout" Catholic — said during the April 25 debate that certain Americans, whom she considered to be "poor souls who are looking for some answers," refuse to accept the answers Democrats give them on particular topics due to their beliefs about "guns, gays, [and] God." Challenging Pelosi's position in the debate about populism, Winston Marshall, a musician who was once a part of Mumford and...

Paint splattered on floors. Spray-painted messages and screeds covering walls. Furniture moved and overturned. Security cameras disabled. Fire extinguishers missing and entrances blocked by stacks of chairs. “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” a facilities manager at Portland State University said Thursday as he examined the destruction left behind after a three-day occupation by pro-Palestinian protesters in Millar Library.

ORTLAND, Ore. (KPTV) - The Portland Police Bureau has released the names of 30 people arrested Thursday as officers worked to clear out protesters who were occupying a library on the Portland State University’s campus. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators began occupying the Millar Library on the PSU campus Monday evening. Police moved in Thursday morning in an effort to clear protesters from the library and the park area out front. By 10:15 a.m. Thursday, police cleared out the library but protesters remained outside throughout much of the day. FOX 12 witnessed police leave the area outside the PSU library just after 5...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KPTV) - Over a dozen patrol cars were damaged or destroyed in a suspect arson attack at the Portland Police Bureau’s training facility early Thursday morning. Just before 2 a.m., Portland Fire & Rescue and Portland police officers responded to a fire at the training facility in the 14900 block of Northeast Airport Way. When crews arrived to the scene, police say they found at least 15 vehicles in a fenced training area were burning. Firefighters were able to quickly extinguish the flames. No injuries were reported. I understand people in our community are hurting, but in no...

A lawsuit claims four students took turns forcibly penetrating a third-grade girl in a restroom stall, blocked her escape, and received one-day suspensions, OregonLive reported. The lawsuit claims employees of both Portland Public Schools and a Multnomah County-sponsored after-school program operated by nonprofit Latino Network failed to protect the girl — who was 9 at the time — from being sexually assaulted, the outlet noted. The girl's family filed the lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court last month; it seeks up to $9 million in damages on grounds including negligence, lack of oversight, and failure to protect a vulnerable person...

The 75 largest cities in America were collectively $288 billion in debt at the end of fiscal year 2022... 53 major cities that do not have enough money to pay their bills. Yet all of them claimed their budgets were balanced, as is required by law. That means lawmakers understated each city’s debt by not including future costs like employee pensions and healthcare ... New York City has a taxpayer burden of $61,800, the largest by far despite being the most populous. The city has only six cents saved up for every dollar it will need to spend on retiree...

Private property isn't so private anymore. When normal Americans weren't looking, squatters became cult heroes. The left has been cultivating squatters' rights for years. Woke cities are giving them legal backup by consolidating COVID-19-era no-eviction rules into free housing for months or years. People seeking their piece of the American Dream are now the stars of the left's dystopian horror show. The property takeovers are all over the country in the nation's woke cities. The stories are legion. "The homeowner wouldn't talk with us on camera for fear of retaliation from those living on the property. When he asked them...

Recently, the city of Portland, Oregon, exhibited a moment of sanity when city officials decided to reverse a law they had enacted in 2020 that basically decriminalized all drugs. The results of that law were extremely predictable (everyone did, in fact, predict it). Crime escalated, drug use became rampant, overdoses soared, and the city descended even further into chaos than it already had. But if you were fooled into thinking that Portland may have regained a modicum of common sense, you can rest easy: it has not. Yesterday, independent journalist Andy Ngô broke the news that a Portland area woman...

A Democratic Congressional Candidate is 'reclaiming her sexuality' after a clip of her working at a Manhattan BDSM dungeon was leaked. Courtney Casgraux, 41, is a self-described 'international businesswoman' who is running for a seat in the United States House of Representatives for Oregon's first district. The single mother of a teenage son was exposed in a video leaked on Reddit for working as a dominatrix in Manhattan during hers 20s and 30s. Casgraux would charge clients $500 for playing the dominant role in BDSM activities. The California native returned to the BDSM industry when she began working at Donatella's...

A Fremont Vietnamese restaurant has closed its doors due to a neighbor’s complaints about the restaurant’s smell. Pho Gabo, which operates three locations in the Portland area, has closed its Fremont and Northeast 73rd location indefinitely due to “the city’s and the neighborhood’s complaints about the smell of the food that we grill and the foods that we serve customers,” according to a sign posted to the restaurant’s door. Willamette Week reports that the restaurant has been hit with complaints since September 2022, five years after the restaurant opened. A presumed neighbor has been filing complaints with the city about...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — Some of the city-sanctioned homeless camps are getting an upgrade. The city of Portland has purchased 100 new tiny home pods for the unsheltered at the Multnomah Safe Rest Village. Each one came with a $16,510 price tag. While the cost is a steep one, Savannah Eadens, a public information officer for the Temporary Alternative Shelter Sites, said the units come with everything a resident will need inside. This includes a bed, bedding, and a heater. The pods at Multnomah Village were paid for by federal American Rescue Plan (ARPA) money and Metro’s Supportive Housing funds.

A transgender killer smirked at her victim's relatives and refused to apologize because her gender identity made her 'vulnerable', as she was sentenced to 22 years behind bars. Moses Jacob Lopez, 30, brutally stabbed cab driver Reese McDowell Lawhon to death in his car in April 2023 with bladed brass knuckles after suffering a mental health episode while on a night out partying in Portland. Lawhon had picked her up after a 911 operator suggested she call a cab home. Lopez senselessly stabbed him in the chest without provocation. At her sentencing on Wednesday, Lopez callously justified the murder by...