This just in: Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek is urging all Oregonians to “stay calm and enjoy a beautiful fall day.”

Well, that sounds like good advice in a Saturday statement from the governor. But is there a broader context here?

Ah, here it is: Kotek made the request in a statement in which she blasted President Donald Trump’s decision Saturday to send federal troops to Portland. In a post on the president’s hilariously misnamed Truth Social, Trump said he made the decision to “protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists. I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and Kotek immediately pushed back, of course, as they should have — and argued that calling the city “war-ravaged” is a bit of stretch, in that the protests there are pretty much limited to a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the southern part of the city. And even those protests have been relatively calm over recent weeks, although some neighbors have filed suit over the noise generated by protesters.

If this sounds familiar, it should: Trump sent troops into Portland in 2020, a deployment that led to new confrontations outside the downtown federal courthouse. Zane Starling of The Oregonian/OregonLive recalls the previous deployment in this story about how Labor Secretary Lori Chevez-DeRemer — not so long ago, a member of Oregon’s congressional delegation — was among the first to congratulate Trump on his decision to invade — oh, I’m sorry — protect Portland.

This was a busy week for Trump, as you probably noticed: After firing batches of federal prosecutors, Trump finally found one willing to bring an indictment against former FBI head James Comey — mere hours before a statute of limitations would have run out. And although you might take comfort in the fact that many legal experts think the case against Comey can charitably be called paper-thin, here’s an Associated Press story reminding us that a conviction may be beyond the point.

And this was, of course, the week in which Trump spoke at the memorial service for assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk. During the service, Kirk’s widow, Erika, movingly said she forgave the killer of her husband. Trump spoke after Erika and wasn’t having any of that forgiveness nonsense: He said he hated his enemies. Vice President JD Vance — the presumed next Republican nominee for president, assuming Trump actually steps down after his second term — later said Trump had been joking about that, but something tells me James Comey isn’t laughing.

One thing we know Trump hates is language that’s critical of him; that orange skin appears to be pretty thin. So how does Trump define the type of “hate speech” that he says he wants to censor? You probably can answer that question yourself, but here’s Peter Baker of The New York Times to support your guess.

Jimmy Kimmel returned from his suspension this week with what I thought was a nicely constructed monologue that mostly succeeded at threading a particularly narrow needle. (Not everyone agreed: Turning Point, the conservative organization that was founded by Kirk, termed it “not good enough.”) The battles over free speech on broadcast networks are just getting warming up, and this piece from The Conversation (republished on the Nieman Lab website) explains why.

Pete Hegseth, the head of the Department of Defense — sorry, Department of War — wants Pentagon reporters to sign a pledge that appears to sharply curtail their ability to, you know, report the news. Among other provisos, the pledge requires that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.” Reporters who decline to sign the pledge — which will be all of the real ones — may be barred from the Pentagon. The goal here, of course, is to limit critical coverage of the armed forces, as Nancy A. Youssef explains in The Atlantic.

Hegseth, of course, was one of the speakers at Charlie Kirk’s memorial — and not at all the only one who talked about the moment we live in as a “spiritual war.” In The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummen examines the growth of a rising Christian charismatic movement that describes its political agenda in terms of a cosmic battle against evil.

Eli Saslow at the Times has a long story this weekend about a fellow in Santa Monica who’s started a program to buy people who are homeless one-way tickets back to their homes. Before you read it, a couple of suggestions: First, remember that even though 90% of the homeless in Santa Monica come from someplace else, that’s not the case in Benton County, where most people who are homeless are from the mid-valley. Second, see as if you can set aside some of your preconceived notions about homelessness as you read — or be alert for that something inside that tells you that those notions might be shifting a bit.

By the way: I’m hearing reports of additional layoffs this week at the Gazette-Times (and, by extension, the Democrat-Herald). I didn’t find anything official about the local layoffs, but Lee Enterprises, the owner of the papers, has laid off workers recently at its papers in Richmond, Tulsa and Buffalo, so it seems likely that these were ordered throughout the company. I still stand by my belief that it’s important to continue to support local news outlets like the G-T, even though Lee keeps making it harder and harder to do so. And I note in passing that the Lookout Eugene-Springfield newsroom where I now work has at least twice the number of journalists who remain at the G-T/D-H.

So, at this point in this week’s Reader, you may be asking this question: “Mike, did you find any fun reads this past week?”

No. I did not.

But I did find this interesting story about closed captions from The Associated Press: A new poll shows that the captions actually are more popular among people under 45 than they are among, um, we older adults. Of course, those whippersnappers are using the captions to multitask while we’re using them to figure out exactly what the actors are saying.

That’s it for this week. Depending on events, I might not post a Weekend Reader next week, but we’ll see; I’ll let you know either way. In the meantime, to quote the president, “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”