Alert Weekend Reader readers may recall our advice about how to respond to the various outrages rolling out with regularity from the Trump administration: In essence, we urged you, be selective about the outrages you choose to focus on; otherwise, you’re likely to suffer from outrage burnout – and there are more than two years (and maybe more) to go. 

Of course, it’s always a busy time at the Reader’s Trump Outrage Desk, but one of the particular items we’ve been carefully watching is the administration’s war against free and fair elections in general and vote by mail in particular. 

So that was the light in which we viewed the Gazette-Times’ story this week from reporter Hans Boyle, about the U.S. Postal Service’s failure to deliver a number of primary election ballots in time to be counted. As Boyle reported, letter carriers received a notification on May 19, Election Day, to switch to package delivery only – in other words, to deliver (and pick up) mail only at addresses where a package was to be delivered. So if your ballot was waiting in your mailbox on May 19, but if a package wasn’t coming your way that day for delivery, your ballot wasn’t picked up.

And if your ballot didn’t get picked up on Election Day, it didn’t get postmarked in time to count in the election. (Officials in Oregon can count ballots they receive up to seven days after the election, but only if they’re postmarked by Election Day.)

In Benton County, the word is the uncounted ballots would not have affected any of the primary races. But this is why election officials – especially in the week before Election Day – urge voters to use the drop-off boxes scattered throughout the county instead of leaving it up to the Postal Service, which has suffered cuts in service.  

And, lest you think we’re being needlessly paranoid about administration attacks on elections, consider this Associated Press story about President Donald Trump ousting members of a bipartisan election commission that resisted his efforts to require would-be voters to document their citizenship before registering. Or the fact that he chose not to sign a useful (bipartisan) housing bill because the Senate is unable to push through his completely unnecessary voter ID bill. (The housing bill became law anyway, despite his petulance.) Or telling states that want certain FEMA grants that they need to “update” their election laws get for the money. Or … we could go on.

But we won’t. 

On another front, so to speak, Trump has famously said that he prefers “the sort of generals that Hitler had” – which is to say, military leaders who are perhaps overly deferential to the whims of civilian leaders. And Trump has seemingly surrounded himself with that type of general in his second administration. What could go wrong with that? That’s a question that gets a nuanced exploration in this story from The Atlantic by Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan. 

Elsewhere, the administration has subpoenaed New York Times journalists who reported about security concerns involving the new Air Force One – you know, the one that the government of Qatar gave to Trump. Some of the subpoenas were delivered to the homes of the journalists. You’ll recall earlier this year that the Department of Justice searched the home of Washington Post reporter (and subsequent Pulitzer winner) Hannah Natanson. 

This won’t be news to journalists who routinely submit freedom of information requests to the federal government, but the public should know: The waiting time for those FOI requests to be fulfilled is longer than ever – months in most cases, and sometimes years. That means that information for stories might arrive too late to be useful. Justin Doud describes what’s at stake for Poynter. 

An interesting legal fight is brewing in West Linn over a law passed in this year’s short legislative session. The law limits the public’s ability to comment on or locally appeal new housing developments that meet “clear and objective” standards for approval. Proponents of the law say it could eliminate unnecessary roadblocks to creating additional (and badly needed) housing. Opponents call the law “blatantly unconstitutional.” Jonathan Bach of The Oregonian/OregonLive sets the stage.

It’s partly cloudy outside today as I write this edition of the Reader, but I don’t want to hear any complaints about the weather. The last word I heard from the daughter in New York City is that her Siberian husky has essentially liquified. 

I searched the web to see if I could find something that was somewhat more fun for this edition of the Reader. Instead, I found this: New research from the Pew-Knight Initiative suggests that the polarization that has marked national news is creeping down to the local level. The result, researchers found, was a drop in the percentage of U.S. adults who say they trust their local news – to 70%, down from 82% in 2016. Worse, the percentage of adults who say local news outlets are very important to the well-being of their communities has dropped to 34%, down 10 percentage points in just the past year. I bet, though, that if you asked that question of someone who lives in an actual “news desert” – one of the increasingly common areas where there is no access to a reliable news source – you might get a different answer. 

Seriously, let’s find some fun stuff this week. Mick Jagger is 82, but The Rolling Stones have just released a new album, “Foreign Tongues,” and he sat down for an entertaining installment of The New York Times’ “The Interview.” 

And can you guess the title of the most popular movie ever on the streaming service Disney+? If you have a child born after 2016, you probably can: It’s the original animated version of “Moana,” which was released that year. If you have a child born after 2016, chances are good you’ve seen the movie with your kids dozens of times – the way it was with my children and “The Little Mermaid.” Science has an explanation for why children gravitate to the same movie (or the same book) over and over, and it’s not all bad news. (The bad news is that the live-action remake of “Moana” that just opened in theaters apparently sucks.)

I’m pleased to report that Lilly St. Angelo, the K-12 reporter for Lookout Eugene-Springfield, the Lane County website where I work, is among the staff members at this year’s High School Journalism Institute, a collaboration between Oregon State University and The Oregonian/OregonLive. Nineteen high school student journalists will spend a week at OSU, learning more about their craft and heading out into the field to report and write stories. This is a terrific program, and OSU and The Oregonian deserve considerable credit for keeping it going. Who says all the news about journalism is bad? Certainly not David Hoffmann.

That’s all for this weekend. We’re headed out to see “The Invite” this weekend, but maybe I’ll grab that old DVD of “The Little Mermaid” just for old times’ sake.. And I will explain to the Reader’s younger readers what a “DVD” is, but not just now.