Salt City Sinner

In my previous post on this topic, I explained that a Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry had penned a column for the Nation magazine called " Black President, Double Standards: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama " in which she claimed that white progressives who had given Clinton a pass on his centrist tendencies were unwilling to extend the same courtesy to Obama due to racism. I found this pretty preposterous, and pointed out many variables other than race that could account for Obama's dwindling support (Obama has continued our endless, mindless "war on terror" on two fronts and expanded our military commitments to include the NATO action in Libya as well, Obama has failed on most of his major campaign promises to progressives including closing GITMO and the CIA's black sites, Clinton ran as a moderate while Obama ran as a liberal, &c. &c.). Gene Lyons, an old hand when it comes to anything Clinton, also expressed his outrage over Dr. Harris-Perr...

To hear the conventional wisdom these days on the subject, you would think that pervasive liberal bias in the news media is corrosive to our democracy -- excuse me, our republic -- and so ubiquitous as to be self-evident. Despite this common sense fact, I have had a hard time since I first started consuming large quantities of high-potency political journalism finding this so-called liberal bias. I've noticed bizarre ideological blind spots in the media to be sure, but most of these blind spots seemed to line up nicely with a "corporate bias" if any simple description is accurate. On top of that, within my lifetime I've seen Fox News emerge as the most unapologetically biased and fact-light media outlet outside of Berlusconi's Italy. Indeed, virtually every example of media bias I've ever encountered, with the exception of explicitly ideologically outlets like National Review or the Nation has trended in a bland way towards protecting and benefiting the...

I noted in a previous entry that Utah's hit comedy reality show, "Government," had missed a major opportunity for partisan laughter recently. It seems that, given the chance to shaft our state's Democratic minority by eliminating one state congressional seat on Salt Lake City's West Side (for you non-Utahns, the West Side is Salt Lake City's most ethnically and economically diverse community) to create an extra one in Utah County, Utah Republicans blinked. Consider that mistake corrected. From Lisa Roche, writing for KSL : Utah State Democratic Party Chairman Jim Dabakis said Wednesday the party will take the state to court unless Republicans back away from a controversial new congressional  map ... Democrats have data showing that while roughly 40 percent of Utahns vote Democratic, the party holds on average less than 30 percent of elected offices. The lawyers' memo suggests that the court look for "partisan symmetry" between votes cast an...

Quite a hubbub has been sweeping the liberal/progressive media outlets lately regarding a column by Melisa Harris-Perry entitled “ BlackPresident, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama .” Harris-Perry attempts to measure the electoral “roll-off” that can be ascribed to racism in the 2004 Senate race between then-State Senator Barack Obama and perennial wingnut candidate Alan Keyes, the 2008 general election, and the 1994 re-election of President Clinton. Her thesis, which is a bit murky, seems to be that by comparing the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we can conclusively establish that the variable at play is racism on the part of white liberals (which is a political category that fits me pretty well, so I might as well kick someone).  Astonishingly, my first and most major objection to Harris-Perry's column ("wait, Clinton wasn't a liberal") is contained within the column itself, written by the author as though it suppor...

A funny thing happened on my way home from my dad's birthday party yesterday. As I was creeping through downtown, I had my radio tuned to the LDS Church's General Relief Society Meeting (specifically, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf's remarks on “Roses vs. Forget-Me-Nots,” which had a pretty lovely message, whether you're a Mormon or worship no gods at all – although the section about the “most majestic and powerful Creature in the Universe knowing your name” obviously didn't apply). I hit the intersection of State and S. Temple, and traffic immediately slammed to a stop. After a few minutes, it became apparent what was going on – there was a truly remarkable procession underway. I mistook it for a gay pride event, maybe even one thrown to promote solidarity after three recent incidents of downtown anti-gay violence. As traffic got worse and I crept to the front of a line of cars meticulously performing U-turns under the mirror-glassed gaze of State Highway Pa...

$100 toilet seats! Welfare Cadillac queens! $16 muffins! The conventional wisdom is that anything the government acquires, it acquires at four times the cost and double the time of its competitors in the private sector. This has turned out to be provisionally true at best – it turns out that a lack of transparency and oversight can drive private industry to be inefficient! For example, KBR, an alternate-universe Fraternity of Evil Mutants and the company better known in its incarnation as Halliburton, had no problems delivering“sailboat fuel”  in Iraq (think about it) and collecting payment for their trouble. If you want a particularly infuriating example of private/public collusion and corruption, this 2006 article by Matt Taibbi should fit the bill. It also turns out that while private industry can be horrifying inefficient, government occasioally – brace yourself – acts in a fiscally reasonable manner. A cottage industry of right-wing think tanks has sprung u...

Another week has passed, and we are 1/52 nd closer to the Rapture, Praise the Lord. These miscellaneous stories caught my attention this week – think of them as a taster's sampler of news media from various sources, and please, enjoy responsibly. UtahQueer Community Responds To Recent Attacks Seth Bracken, Q Salt Lake A recent string of attacks on gay men in Utah has lead to an increased awareness of violence prevention and a large community response, encompassing queer-rights groups and their allies.   In the first incident, a 20-year-old Salt Lake City resident was attacked and hospitalized on Aug. 27 as he left a downtown club....That same evening, up the street from the first attack, a group of men broke into a gay man’s apartment and attacked his boyfriend while shouting gay slurs as the beating continued out into the street, said Tom Taylor, owner of Club Sound. After members of the queer and straight communities in the area heard about the attack on [Da...

Larry Flynt, Prince of Perverts,  is at it again :     SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Pornographic magazine publisher Larry Flynt offered $1 million on Thursday to anyone with proof of "an illicit sexual liaison" involving leading Republican presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry. The offer by the politically left-leaning Flynt targeting Perry was similar to past efforts by the Hustler magazine founder to embarrass public figures he dislikes... "I've been doing this for 35 years," Flynt said in a telephone interview with Reuters. "We've found running these ads were very successful in finding sources to come forward." This is the same strategy Flynt used (as the article notes) in the past, especially regarding prominent Republicans who targeted President Clinton over his illicit sexual affairs. The strategy is pretty basic and essentially repulsive: dump ten chum buckets into the water, cast as wide a net as possible, an...

Things Man Hath In Common With The Lofty Squid #39b In A Continuing Series "No foreplay, no tender caresses, no fond farewells until the next union, just a desperate drive to reproduce followed by a glancing quickie and an early death. "And that's when things go well." (Thank you, Raw Story , for today's edifying entry.)

They said it couldn't happen here. Ladies and gentlemen, Conway Twitty... В русском. (h/t  Yumeko Jenkins , who like Sookie Stackhouse is (SPOILER ALERT) probably part Faery 'cause she's just so damn great)

Harper's magazine's October 2011 cover story, " Pennies From Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the G.O.P. " (by Chris Lehmann*) is certainly a bombshell for anyone living in Utah, anyone of the LDS persusasion, and/or anyone who has a passing interesting in either post-1970s Evangelical politics or political Mormonism. It has some excellent research and some decent points, and also, in my opinion, has some significant, crippling flaws that demonstrate a lack of understanding on the author's part of Mormonism's history (aside from its most recent few decades) and modern Evangelical (especially megachurch-Evangelical) self-help theology. That said, it is exhaustively researched enough to include gems like this one regarding chemical magnate Jon Huntsman Sr., which I think presents the best case thus far for the existence of actual, physical evil: Even as he worked in the Nixon White House as personal aide to the president, the elder Huntsman was also sel...

As I stated in my previous post regarding Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and the HPV vaccine in Texas: I'm currently agnostic on the vaccines/CDC question (full disclosure: my mom is convinced of the link between the initial commercial flu shot and autism). Well I'd be a bad son and a dishonest scoundrel if I did not represent my mom's response to the above, which is as follows (and seems, to me, perfectly reasonable): Correction: your mother believes that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative found in MANY vaccines and only recently removed from children's vaccines, is a dangerous thing to be injecting into your body. Mercury, for chrissakes. If you can go without it, why wouldn't you? The government has never admitted any danger to childhood immunizations or any link to autism, but DID take mercury out of childhood injections. My brain being impaired anyway, I choose not to have any mercury either. It is the FREQUENCY (every 3 months in some...

There is nothing to add to this, except a very brief introduction. The exchange at the September 12th "Tea Party" Republican primary debate in question, in case there is any question of “exaggeration” or “misrepresentation,” is here: Susan from 29 's post ***is here*** , and I recommend you read it in its entirety there. What follows is an almost full excerpt intended to encourage anyone who finds it moving, thought-provoking, or worthwhile to read the whole thing. Feel free to leave comments for Susan as well, to let you know your thoughts are with her. I cannot remember the last time that a post made me feel as intensely emotional as Susan from 29's. That Was My Brother's Death You Were Cheering, You Assholes   To all of those tea-jadist assholes at last night’s GOP debate: I don’t generally like to use profanity, but I fear that English is above your comprehension level, so in terms you might better understand, may God damn your worthl...