Salt City Sinner

posted 3/21/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Photo: AP Paul Mero has a freedom problem. And not a freedom problem in the sense that an alcoholic has a drinking problem. Modern conservatives have made out like bandits by exploiting metaphors and ideas that are deeply embedded in American culture -- concepts like freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and individualism. During the Bush years, these linguistic tics took on a grim, ironic quality. Increasingly, they were deployed alongside other, older conservative idioms regarding patriotism, faith, and family as a smokescreen to cover concepts somewhat at odds with freedom: indefinite detention, warrantless wiretapping, and torture (proud new American traditions that continue under President Obama to this day). I've   written before  about how an ideology -- any ideology -- is like a room in which conceptual furniture must be arranged. That's not my metaphor (although I wish I had thought of it first); I cribbed it...

posted 3/10/2013 by the Salt City Sinner (Spoiler alert: no, they have not jumped the shark. A fetid little conspiracy clearing-house like WND does not jump the shark. The stupider and crazier they get, the more childish delight and wonderment they elicit in their target audience.) It has been an interesting couple of months for those dedicated souls still hugging the right-most lane of American politics. Despite repeated and full-throated (and often pompously public) prayers to the Magic Nazarene to dash the machinations of Kenyan Marxist Usurper-in-Chief Barry Soetero Hussein, Mitt Romney got a final   swift kick to the nuggets  that left them smarting, and dangling somewhere in the neighborhood of his earlobes. You can name any number of variables that came into play in the great GOP wipeout of 2012, but one factor -- a subfactor of the "demographics" explanation -- was certainly the well-publicized Republican treatment of women and women's issues. The neand...

posted 3/9/2013 by Crazypoliticos In their latest effort to make the world a more terrible place the Utah House of Representatives stands poised to pass HB-372, which passed out of the Utah House Health and Human Services Committee on March 6, 2013. This proposed legislation seeks to tax e-cigarettes at 86% of the manufacturer's price and make purchasing e-cigarettes online or through the mail a criminal offense. Hello Utah! Really? Let me explain. I'm a former smoker who hates cigarettes. I hate the odor. I have asthma and occasionally have a severe reaction to cigarette smoke. I detest cigarette buttes left everywhere. Smokers are not supposed to smoke in prohibited places such as bus and Trax stops. Smokers are not supposed to throw their butts everywhere. They do. They do and anyone who lives in an urban apartment building or takes public transportation knows this. They smoke inside their apartments. They drive and smoke with you in the car. Smoking is a terrible addicti...

posted 3/8/2013 by the Salt City Sinner The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in domin...

posted 3/8/2013 by ViewFinder "I am a Birth-mother to two children whom I placed for adoption just over 15 years ago.  Wednesday, 3/6/13 I spent several hours on the lower level in room 25 in the "House" at the Utah State Capitol.  I was participating in the presentation of House Bill 148 to the House Health and Human Services Committee.  The schedule posted gave a start time of 4:10 PM.  However multiple committee members arrived after 4:10, one not even until after the first bill was about to be voted on.   Local Residents standing through 1 1/2 hours of   SB0166S02 I had taken my seat at 3:30 not moving through 2 1/2 hours of discussion- mostly a VERY long presentation on the taxation of nicotine cartridges.  I sat through two other bills and watched in amazement as those making the decisions came in late, excused themselves, laughed with each other during public speaking and sometimes presentation by bill sponsors.  It was ra...