Salt City Sinner

George Will's stunt double apparently has no problem with aliens of a certain sort...

Colorful fraudster and "Junk Bond King" Michael Milken crapped out a column on capital markets in today's Wall Street Journal - because, you know, nobody really has more credibility when it comes to finance than a guy who was convicted of six securities and reporting felonies. Whatever rigorous screening process is in place at the WSJ's opinion page did a fantastic job filtering that one out. It's a strange thing about right wing pundits - how many of them are actual , convicted-and-did-time , literal criminals. I suppose you could say the Republican approach to law and order is much the same as their approach to energy regulations or environmental policy: nobody understands the system like a real "insider."

The good folks at Sadly, No! have slowly, and with great dedication, mastered the art of the snarky takedown, and have turned this weaponized form of humor upon the various wingnut bloggers currently swarming around Pajamas Media, PowerLine, Red State, etc. etc. Today, in a particularly inspired post regarding Ed Morrisey , Gavin M. posted what is, in my opinion, the best piece about wingnuttery yet penned this year: The kind of polemical reasoning that Ed is displaying — which isn’t an especially Ed thing, but occurs throughout the WingNet, wherever its cultees confront current events — seemed for a long time to be a way of ordering the world through a kind of ritual storytelling. We saw it like this: The writer begins by eyeing some emerging news or gossip item and decides what meaning it ought to have, in the manner of a sculptor inspecting a block of marble for the forms possible within it. He then applies the chisel, removing context and uncongenial detail and adding decorative ...

My parents and grandparents have been out of town for the last few days to celebrate my cousin's wedding. I duly agreed to house (and dog) sit for my relatives while they were gone, and part of that agreement included picking up my grandparents from the airport tonight, a few nights ahead of my parents, who will be in Florida for a few days in addition to the original wedding schedule. I showed up at the "greet the arrivals" portion of Salt Lake International tonight and more or less minded my own, waiting for my moms' folks to arrive. Not long after I established a post in the "see the arrivals" section of the lower half of the terminal, a TSA "cop" in full uniform sidled up next to me and proceeded to ask me a few "friendly" questions. I am not in any way saying that this is standard TSA procedure. I just look at this as a profoundly creepy snapshot of how TSA cops operate in Utah, based on my (admittedly) anecodtal experience, and the ...

This is interesting: the Sunlight Foundation has set up a word analysis of elected representatives (which words are used most relative to the text of all speeches). Here's how Utah shapes up :

A casual exchange on Facebook today yielded the following fascinating information nugget from my pal Jonny Dover (big old hat tip, Jonny D): I had what is called ' source amnesia ' which is a very common psychological phenomenon where you remember a thing but you don't remember that it came from a disreputable/fictional source; this is why it is dangerous for Fox News to exist, because in time people will forget that they learned something from a disingenuous, morally bankrupt source, and ascribe to that fact more authority than it deserves... Source amnesia also explains why urban legends spread and why people are so convinced of their factuality: you hear a tall tale from a friend and then forget that it was from your pal you heard it and assume it came from a proper source such as the news. Thus convinced of its accuracy, you go on to spread it to other people. While I've seen this a few times on the left (mainly on the issues of gun control and the accuracy of the ...

Media Matters has the goods (via CNN):

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are coming to the Urban Lounge tonight with Faun Fables. Doors are at nine, and it will cost you about $17. Get your sweet young asses to the show:

The Salt Lake Tribune reports today that Utah bankruptcies are up 56% over last year: Bankruptcy filings in Utah soared during the first three months of 2009 -- a sign the weakening economy is exacting a bitter toll on the finances of thousands of the state's residents. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Utah reported Wednesday it received 3,066 bankruptcy petitions during the first quarter of 2009, a sharp 56 percent increase from the same three-month period a year earlier. Add to that our recent five-year-high in unemployment (which was on its way down five years ago, rather than up as it is now), and things are not looking as rosy as I had hoped they would. I know that no state is "recession-proof" (just as no industry is truly recession-proof, merely recession-resistant), but it's still sobering news.

Michelle Malkin, one of the leading voices behind the so-called Tax Day Tea Party movement, has posted a map that displays where said tea parties are taking place. When I looked at it, I felt like I had seen something similar before, and at first couldn't identify where that might have been. Once the realization struck me, I thought "Well...that's AWFUL damn odd." In a previous entry , I posted a map indicating the unemployment rate by county in America right now. Compare the regions of intense unemployment to regions where "tea parties" are taking place: Do I have a clue what this means? No. And by no means is it a 1:1 fit. Maybe it has to do with population density or some other "X factor" I don't know about. But it does seem that the areas of the US hardest hit by this economic crisis are the same areas where pissed-off wingnuts are protesting the administration's efforts to fix things - to put it simply, conservatives in the areas with...

There is a lengthy response at Sadly, No! today regarding Red State fixture and well-paid blogger Erick Erickson's lamentation that the Online Right have been abandoned by their sponsors, while the insidious Online Left (funded by that oft-cited but never defined Soros machine) spends most of its collective free time diving around in a UN bunker full of golden Euros, ala Scrooge McDuck: It's often bemoaned on our side that the left is much further ahead online than the right. This is true. The left has larger blogs than the right, though I still think the right has many more sites than the left. Well, as Sadly, No! and a few other blogs have pointed out , bloggers like Erickson have actually been the recipients of an unusual amount of largesse at the hands of various right wing foundations, much in the same way that wingnut books usually rocket to the top of the NY Times bestseller list with the help of bulk purchases: Mr. Erickson is paid to do RedState by the company that b...

From my sister's Twitter feed : In person Jim Matheson is quite disarming until he smiles, at which point he transforms into Gary Callahan from Transmetropolitan. Folks, you be the judge:

For my entire adult life, I have been a fan of the work of Pat Bagley , editorial cartoonist for the Salt Lake Tribune, and persistent irritant to the status quo in Utah. Last week, Bagley was awarded the Herblock Prize , which is kind of like the Pulitzer for political cartooning. It's been a long time coming, and is well deserved. To celebrate Bagley's achievement (and his continuing service at the Trib, even in these troubled times for papers), here are a few of my favorite Bagley cartoons:

This is some extraordinarily moving footage, and I'll explain why I think so. First off, the charisma that the Obamas exude is something that has been dealt with on the right in a fairly graceless manner. I can't recall a single person on the left - and excuse me if I'm wrong on this - tarring Laura Bush, or, in fact, portraying her as anything other than what she was, which was a tireless advocate for literacy and education. Everybody loves a librarian, right? Michelle, on the other hand, has been subject to every smear in the book, and even a few written in the margins, as the ever inventive Burt Prelutsky proved : Take Michelle Obama...please. Every time I turn around, there she is on a magazine cover. Now, normally, like the Mafia, I lay off the spouses, but inasmuch as this particular spouse attended the same racist church as her hubby for 20 years, I'll make an exception in her case. After all, in spite of the fact that affirmative action got her an Ivy League de...

In a previous post I referred to my pet theory about the GOP's slow implosion over the past three years as 'the eggshell theory' - meaning (and in no way do I think this is a particularly original insight, but it was an "AHA!" moment for me) that the Republican Party's coherence has entirely evaporated, and all that is left of the Party is "branding;" that they have been rendered all image and no substance. The more I reflect on the parade of radioactive circus clowns that the GOP lined up during the 2008 campaign, from Palin to Plumber, the more I realize that this should have been obvious to me much sooner. Further evidence continues to pile up. One of the faces of the 'future of the Republican Party' is Meghan McCain, a so-called moderate who has traded in her father's name for semi-celebrity status and an inexplicable job writing for the Daily Beast - a gig that has now produced a truly extraordinary little column. The headline is, ...

Ryan Avent posts a well-crafted critique of the libertarian CATO think tank's reality problems regarding global climate change: That is to say, confronted by a problem demanding solutions inimical to libertarian beliefs, libertarians were faced with the choice of reneging on their beliefs or turning their back on science. Tellingly, they chose the latter. One might think that’s a rather drastic decision, given the role scientific endeavors have played in delivering the material prosperity so dear to the hearts of the libertarian world, and one would be right. A belief system that cannot grapple with the fundamental reality of a situation is, quite simply, not a belief system worth having. If I were a part of a movement that demanded I not get out of the way of oncoming cars, and that challenged the conclusion of the fields of physics and biology that an impact between the car and my person would leave my person badly damaged, I would begin to suspect that this movement was maybe ...