Salt City Sinner

Posted on 6/16/2012 by the Salt City Sinner I love my city. I love its weird blemishes and odd spots most of all. Any rube can stroll downtown and look at the Wells Fargo building or some such and be impressed. I'm more interested in the more esoteric elements of my city. For example, at the Granary District Street Fair yesterday, one could feel free to ogle the ladies of Salt Lake's rollerderby Amazons: The derby ladies were pumping out punk rock via a PA and skating this way and that. The fact that female roller-derby has taken off so much in SLC fills me with both joy and dread. Why the dread, you ask? Well, have you ever watched a roller-derby match? The festival took place in the so-called 'Granary District' of Salt Lake, at the intersection of 700 South and 400 West. There's obviously some kind of urban renovation going on there, since that area is mostly renowned for its beautiful urban decay. What you see there on the right i...

Representative Ted Deutch, D-FL, member of the House Judiciary Committee, might have a good heart deep down, but I sincerely doubt it. One of the websites I keep in my RSS feed is ThinkProgress. It's a blog with a reliably "new Left" / progressive slant. I try to read news from a variety of ideological perspectives, and it's good to keep a pair of left-Democrat lenses handy. I consider this a valuable exercise for many reasons, but the primary purpose is to make sure that my bull$h!t detector has fresh batteries and still works on "my side" as well as on those with whom I disagree. Today I was pinged with the headline " Rep. Deutch Introduces OCCUPIED Constitutional Amendment To Ban Corporate Money In Politics ." Well there's something you don't see every day, I thought. Let's crack that sucker open. In one of the greatest signs yet that the 99 Percenters are having an impact... Okay, I have to say that right off the b...

After Mitt Romney's last foray into the land of mysteriously dis/appearing corporations and their attendant luxurious cash baths, I thought we had seen the last of this type of thing. Nope! From Talking Points Memo : The Campaign Legal Center and Democracy 21 have filed complaints with the FEC and DOJ calling for an investigation into the activities of two companies that appear to have been used to funnel funds to a Super PAC created by former Romney campaign staffers. The complaints come on the heels of a another the two groups filed against the first phantom company, W Spann LLC, was discovered to have masked the true identity of a $1 million mystery donor to Restore Our Future [Romney's super PAC]... The two watchdogs groups are now asking the FEC and DOJ to formally investigate the activities of the F8 LLC and Eli Publishing L.C. for possible violations of the ban on making contributions in the name of another and for failing to organize and register as a poli...