Your Weekend Reader for June 21-22

by | Jun 21, 2025 | Political Commentary, Weekend Reader | 1 comment

You call this summer? Well, I suppose we can wait until Monday.

You’ve heard the phrase “There’s no crying in baseball,” right? (It’s from the movie “A League of Their Own.”) Well, it used to be that there was no crying in the halls of the Oregon Legislature, but that’s not the case anymore, as this story from The Oregonian/OregonLive suggests.

And here’s part of the reason why there’s crying in Salem: You might recall that previous editions of the Reader have suggested keeping an eye on House Bill 2025, the big measure to raise a pot of money to fund transportation projects. (The bill calls for a boost in the state gas tax and a variety of additional tax and fee increases.) With a week to go before the Legislature is scheduled to end its session, the bill appears to be in big trouble. A 12-member joint legislative committee voted 7-5 to move the bill out of committee and to the House floor — but Senate President Rob Wagner had to remove Sen. Mark Meek, a Democrat who opposes the bill, and take his place himself on the panel to give the bill the seventh vote it needed to get out of the committee. Since the bill requires two-thirds majorities in each chamber to pass, it takes only one Democratic opponent to scuttle it. And Wagner may have assured that it has at least one Democratic opponent. Expect to see some frenzied bargaining — and, probably some tears — in Salem over the next week.

You may recall that when Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were demolishing the United States Agency for International Development, they both said that cuts to U.S. aid hadn’t killed anyone. Well, here’s Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times — fresh off his commencement speech last week at Oregon State University — reporting that they were wrong. To his credit, Kristof includes in his column links to organizations doing what they can to lessen the toll of human suffering in Africa,

More than 1,000 Google users each month are searching for the proper pronunciation of “Oregon,” according to this new story in The Oregonian/OregonLive. (People who need guidance on this point include Donald Fagen, who’s been butchering the state name in the Steely Dan song “Don’t Take Me Alive” for nearly a half-century.

The leadership woes at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival continue, The Oregonian/OregonLive reports, as the organization names a new interim executive director, Javier Dubon. Dubon steps into the void left by the previous executive director, Gabriella Calicchio, who abruptly resigned after less than seven months in the role.

Vanya Rohwer of the Cornell University of Vertebrates has a guest essay in The New York Times about bird nests: Birds increasingly are using plastic litter and other human trash to build their nests. And while it’s true, as Rohwer points out, that this demonstrates how ingenious birds can be while building their intricate nests, I also found this profoundly depressing.

Is it a good idea to name the new Portland WNBA team the “Fire?” Granted, that was the name of Portland’s WNBA team from two decades ago, but it might not be such a great idea now, writes Bill Oram, The Oregonian sports columnist. Of course, other athletic teams are named after troubling things: Hurricanes. Predators. Heat. Fever — although the latter name is meant to pay tribute to Indiana’s longtime obsession with basketball and not the medical condition. Still, let me make a modest suggestion: Let’s hold off with the Portland Fire until we see what this year’s fire season looks like. All the early signs — including a small but scary fire that triggered evacuations Thursday in Mapleton — suggest that we’re in for a scorcher.

Here’s a piece from David Litt in The Atlantic in which he argues that if Democrats really want to reverse their political fortunes, they need to have more fun. And, after all, what do Democrats have to lose? It’s not like they seem to be doing anything else.

Big changes are coming to recycling in Oregon beginning July 1. As far as I can tell, the Gazette-Times hasn’t yet weighed in on the topic with how recycling will change in Benton County, but my employer — the news site Lookout Eugene-Springfield — has produced this explainer. Our story is focused on Lane County, but many of the changes in the story will be taking place statewide as well.

If the increasingly complicated rules governing recycling have you in a tizzy (I do like that phrase “in a tizzy”), you’ll enjoy this very funny essay by Tori Multon. The piece first appeared in McSweeney’s in 2023, but it just recently came to my attention.

Speaking of humor: During my time at the Gazette-Times, I frequently ran humor columns by Alexandra Petri, who was working for The Washington Post at the time. Not everybody liked her work — but then, not everybody liked “Pearls Before Swine,” and those people always had access to “Peanuts.” (Again, I still think that Charles M. Schulz himself would be angry about the fact that “Peanuts” reruns are taking away space from up-and-coming cartoonists, but I digress.) Back to Petri: She’s working now for The Atlantic, and this new piece — it’s about the dress codes for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — is funny, but with a real bite.

That’s it for this weekend. Let’s meet back here next weekend — and, by that time, you’ll want to remember the sunscreen.

1 Comment

  1. Really like Don’t take me Alive but I always wince a little when he crosses his old man back in Orygone

Want your art event listed?

Read more published work

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Recent Blog Posts

Your Weekend Reader for July 12-13

Your Weekend Reader for July 12-13

It’s a hot weekend, so stay hydrated. Country Fair exposure. A target on the Andrews forest. Transgender trends. A short war against plastic. Endangered local journalists. Christians unite against the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” And abandoning space. It’s all in the new edition of the Weekend Reader.

read more
Your Weekend Reader for July 5-6

Your Weekend Reader for July 5-6

At least one good thing about that “big and beautiful” bill. Trump settles with Paramount, but you could call him about it. Mental acuity checks for Congress? Sources annotate the Post. Housing prices. And customer-service hell. It’s all in the holiday edition of Your Weekend Reader.

read more
Your Weekend Reader for June 28-29

Your Weekend Reader for June 28-29

The Legislature wraps up, maybe. The big and the beautiful and Congress. Your Supreme Court in action. Wildfire smoke in your lungs. Naming heat waves. The Pac-12 Conference. Summer movie projects. Oregon newspapers. And spectacular images from space. It’s a busy week for Your Weekend Reader.

read more
Your Weekend Reader for June 14-15

Your Weekend Reader for June 14-15

A newsy weekend, with protests and parades — and flags. How a shattered media landscape leads to a distortion of reality. Our reluctance to pay for local news. And with summer right around the corner, shouldn’t we be able to define yacht rock? Even by Weekend Reader standards, this edition is a weird one.

read more

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Comments on this website are the sole responsiblity of their writers and the writers will take full responsiblity, liability and blame for any libel or litigation that results from something written in or as a direct result of something written in a comment.

We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason whatsoever.

More Blog Posts

Your Weekend Reader for July 5-6

At least one good thing about that “big and beautiful” bill. Trump settles with Paramount, but you could call him about it. Mental acuity checks for Congress? Sources annotate the Post. Housing prices. And customer-service hell. It’s all in the holiday edition of Your Weekend Reader.

read more