Salt City Sinner

posted on 10/30/2013 by the Salt City Sinner  Happy Devil's Night and preemptive Halloween, ye servants of darkness! It is by this point quite apparent, I would think, that I have a low-grade obsession with Joseph Farah's WND (formerly “WorldNetDaily”), which I think is probably the most insane right-wing website on planet Earth – certainly the most insane site that generates such a volume of traffic, anyway. It's impossible to know how many WND readers are there looking for their version of legitimate “news” and how many are, like me, lookie-loos attracted to the most ghastly political freak-show this side of Alex Jones, but the numbers are pretty impressive (1.680 in traffic worldwide, 454 in the US, according to Alexa ). Lest you think this is just a depressing measure of the size of the proverbial fever swamps, it's worth noting WND's email list has been purchased by the Republican National Committee for outreach efforts in the past. This lends Farah...

Game of Drones posted on 10/18/2013 by the Salt City Sinner A few Fridays ago, Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager that the Taliban shot in the head for the crime of attending school, met with President Obama. President Obama, you may recall, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for the singular achievement of not being George W. Bush (or, according to the committee, some flimsy fairy-tale about Russia and START). Malala, who has become a powerful voice for women's education worldwide, just happened to have been passed over for a Peace Prize preceding her meeting with Obama. According to Gawker : While thanking the President for his support of education and assistance to Syrian refugees, Yousafzai pressed the President on the issue of drone strikes, a counterterrorism method he supports.  "I thanked President Obama for the United States' work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees," Yousafzai said in a statement ...

posted on 10/4/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Good news, everyone! And in this case, it IS good news: Utah WIC, which as of the beginning of the budget burlesque in D.C. was in serious danger, is (temporarily) saved! From the same fishwrapper that I recently teed off on about their coverage of this very issue, the Trib : Utah’s Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program received $2.5 million in emergency funding Thursday from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, enabling local health department clinics to reopen and begin issuing food vouchers to new and existing clients. Clinic staff will begin issuing new food vouchers immediately.   In Salt Lake and Summit counties, which kept their clinics open with emergency local funding, vouchers may be distributed as early as Thursday afternoon, he added. "This is welcome news for the 66,000 moms, babies and children we serve, especially those who didn’t have food vouchers for October," [WIC Head Chris] Furner said.  Given...

posted on 10/2/2013 by the Salt City Sinner Usually, when I want low-quality local news, I watch Biff and Becky Chucklehead and the Morning Yuk-Yuk Crew (coloquially known as KUTV's "2News This Morning”). I'll gnaw on the grey and fleshless bones of the Salt Lake Tribune if I feel like reading a newspaper, but I generally get that inclination about as often as I feel like indulging in a bit of falconry or maybe some hurdy-gurdy music. After following local coverage of the impact of the Federal clown orgy's decision to shut down the U.S. Government on WIC, however, I may have to add the Trib to my hate-read list. The barest minimum of background: due to two political parties' inability to cut a deal in Washington, the federal government has temporarily “suspended operations” (read: they will still spy on you and blow things up, but good luck visiting Yellowstone or, if this keeps up long, getting your food stamps). Incidentally, C-SPAN covered the negotia...