It’s a double-whammy for those of us who tend to mourn the end of summer: This is the last full weekend of August. And it’s Labor Day weekend to boot. But I suppose it is a bit of consolation that the Labor Day weather forecast calls for very nice conditions throughout the holiday weekend. (Then it gets hot again, but let’s not worry about that just now.)

The forecast is cloudy up in Salem, though, where Democrats face-planted on the first day of the special session called to find a way to fund Oregon’s transportation needs. Even though Democrats hold supermajorities in both legislative chambers, the House was unable to muster the 40 members necessary for a quorum until 8 p.m. Friday — some nine hours after it was scheduled to convene. The House approved procedural rules for the special session and then adjourned until Sunday. There’s still time for the Legislature to pass sufficient funding to avoid widespread layoffs in the Oregon Department of Transportation, but the special session is not off to a promising start. Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle explains it all for us.

It’s too early to tell if the state’s experiment with drug-treatment “deflection” programs is going to work as expected — but there are promising signs. You’ll recall that when legislators rolled back portions of Measure 110, which (among other things) decriminalized possession of certain drugs, they also allowed counties to set up the deflection programs, which give drug users the option to seek out treatment instead of being shuffled into the criminal justice system. Noelle Crombie of The Oregonian/OregonLive has an update on how the programs are working. Statewide, of 1,308 people who entered deflection, 277 have finished the program thus far — a percentage that is about what was expected. In Benton County, eight people have entered the program, and one has completed it. Lane County, by contrast, has deliberately cast the deflection net wider, allowing 211 people to enter the program; 15 have completed it.

Thanks to President Trump’s brilliant leadership, U.S. gas prices are at a four-year low as we head into the Labor Day weekend. But you probably haven’t noticed this in Oregon, which has the fourth-highest gas prices in the nation. The average price of a gallon of gas in Oregon is $3.976, nearly 80 cents higher than the national average. (Oregon gas prices almost always are above the national average.) Benton County prices are a little less than the state average, at $3.790, AAA reports. As for Trump, his administration fell all over itself taking credit for the low prices at the pump (to be fair, every president would), but experts say the low prices are mostly due to a surplus of supply from the United States, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Aimee Green at The Oregonian/OregonLive offers the details.

Speaking of President Trump, if you’re among those people who already are sick of pumpkin spice, the president’s tariff strategy (although strategy is too strong a word) has good news for you.

Tom Henderson at the Gazette-Times checks in with the South Corvallis Food Bank to see how federal cutbacks and recent legislative decisions are affecting its ability to feed the hungry. The upshot: More people are suffering from hunger, and their number is on the rise. Officials at the food bank tell Henderson that local residents are donating produce and other food items, and that’s great — but if you want to help local food nonprofits, donations of cash are most effective.

Here’s this week’s long read: It’s an analysis from The New York Times about whether the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can survive health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s persistent efforts to destroy the agency. The prognosis is grim, but not completely hopeless — although even the most optimistic observers concede that none of this will help Make America Healthy Again.

If you can resist a story with this headline: “Robot rabbits the latest tool in Florida battle to control invasive Burmese pythons in Everglades,” you are a better person than I am. If you cannot, here’s the link.

I’ll likely make time next week to watch “The Paper,” the 10-episode spinoff of “The Office” that focuses on a struggling newspaper in Ohio, the fictional Toledo Truth Teller. The show drops its entire 10-episode first season Sept. 4 on Peacock. This New York Times preview story suggests that the show gets at least some of the details right — the Truth Teller, for example, is owned by a big corporation that cares little about journalism. (The fictional corporation also has absorbed Dunder Mifflin.) Despite those connections to “The Office,” the Times says that the new series is more reminiscent of “Parks and Recreation” in spirit.

Was there some news this week about an engagement that I somehow missed?

That’s all for this weekend. Enjoy the holiday and when we meet again, it will be (sob!) September. Actually, September is one of my favorite months in the mid-valley, so I’m not all that upset.