Salt City Sinner

posted on 7/30/2019 by the Salt City Sinner If you live in Salt Lake City, you’ve already received your ballot to vote by mail in the August 13 primary election for mayor (if you haven’t, you can vote in person – if you need to register to vote , you can do that too). It’s a crowded field, full of highly qualified, intelligent, and likeable people from diverse backgrounds, and it’s not exactly a hot take to say that almost any one of them would make an outstanding mayor. If you’d like to hear what the candidates have to say on a variety of issues, the Salt Lake Tribune has one fairly exhaustive guide and the Deseret News has another . The Let’s Go Eat Show, a podcast from Radio from Hell’s Bill Allred, has a fantastic series of longer-form conversations with many of the candidates as well (here are part one , part two, and part three ). Whomever we choose to head city government, she or he is going to have a lot on their plate: air quality and the inland port, home...

Photo by Briana Scroggins, Utah Investigative Journalism Project,  posted on 7/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps you always hurt the one you love , and conservatives really do love the great outdoors. More likely, this professed love is simply a conveniently outdated one, like the perennial reminder given us that the Republican Party is the “party of Lincoln.” Maybe, right-wing rapport with nature is just an outright lie, and always has been. In any case, this summer brought a fresh example of a folksy, sagebrush-lovin’ maverick who wrought destruction that would make the oil monster from Ferngully jealous. It seems that Bert Smith, one of the founders of Smith and Edwards, sold an old building he owned to Ogden city in the years before his death. After he expired in 2016, the city got their first close look at what they had purchased – what Bert, as it turned out, had been stashing there since the 1960s. The Salt Lake Tribune has the incredible story , whic...

posted on 7/4/2019 by the Salt City Sinner It is, perhaps, a function of middle age to see with unforgiving clarity the folly of one’s youth. As 2019 grinds on and the frost creeps into my beard one thread at a time, I look back now upon myself circa 2003 or 2004, in the thick of the Bush years, and wonder how I could have been so naïve as to assume that those were the darkest days of right-wing ascendancy in America. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in the “I miss Bush” camp that some lefties are. I remember the lawless reign of that dimwitted son of privilege too well to ever find that beady-eyed visage cuddly, or his trick with the cough drops charming. George W. Bush started a needless, lie-based war that we are still suffering through. His legacy will forever be one of brutal, bloody quagmire: of torture, rendition, detention, and atrocity abroad. Many inhumane policies predate our present situation. There’s the US prison system – a network of semi-privatized gulags that...