Daily digest: Cascadia braces for federal cuts + Yakama Nation works for fish friendly dam + an Oregon modernist painter

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Cascadia braces for federal cuts

Oregon and Washington are just starting to understand the impacts of massive spending cuts coming the the budget passed by the US Congress last week. OPB looks at what 250,000 people – many of them children – losing Medicaid coverage in Washington state could mean for small, rural hospitals struggling to stay afloat.

“I don’t think it’s immediate, but I think it is certainly possible in the next three to five years that we will see the loss of small hospitals in our state,” said the CEO of a small hospital in Ilwaco.

Meanwhile, deep cuts the the federal food assistance program, SNAP, will hit more than 700,000 folks who use the program in Oregon, Oregon Capital Chronicle reports, noting that the cuts are putting pressure on the state legislature to pass free school lunches and breakfasts next session. John Burbank, writing for The Urbanist, notes that Washington state legislators are panicking because of the cuts, and he offers suggestions for increasing revenue to provide health care and food assistance to low income families.

Cascadia needs to work on resilience now, and consider the benefits of peaceful separation – our tax dollars squandered on ICE and a bloated military could better be spent here at home taking care of each other.

Woman detained by ICE before wedding

A woman from Mexico who has been a longtime resident of Kent, Washington was arrested by ICE just days before her planned wedding to another woman, KUOW reports. She's accused of having a fake green card, and had a drunk driving conviction many years ago – hardly the sort of "criminal" Trump once boasted he would deport. In related news, the Seattle Times reports that Washington is joining 17 other states in suing to halt the Trump administration's "suspicionless" raids by masked ICE agents.

Sorting truth from fiction in Idaho shooting

RANGE Media has a great article that looks into the facts surrounding the recent north Idaho shooting in which 20-year-old Wess Roley killed two firefighters responding to wildfire, listing what details can be confirmed through factual reporting and which details are untrue rumors spread through right-wing social media.

Yakama Nation works toward a better dam

Cascade PBS has a feature on how the Yakama Nation is working with federal officials to add improvements to the 107-year-old Wapato Dam on the Yakima River that would better protect the survival of fish species, including sturgeon. In related news, OPB looks at a $23 million program to improve habitat for steelhead and salmon at former gravel mines the East Fork Lewis River watershed.

Exhibition of Oregon's foremost modernist painter

Oregon Arts Watch has a great feature on Clayton Sumner Price, one of Oregon's most acclaimed modernist painters, who worked in the first half of the twentieth century and whose art is the subject of a retrospective exhibit at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem.

He then quotes Heaney, the Portland painter who was friends with Price and described the artist sometimes achieving a sort of Dionysian ecstasy when he worked. “He went at it like he was killing snakes,” Heaney said. “He would throw his whole self into it.”