Salt City Sinner

  Where was the belief that evil can wear a humdrum face codified? And does horror fiction provide an additional insight - an invitation to probe beneath the mundane and to acknowledge that the mundane has its own special horror?

Alright!  I'll tell you, I'm NOT a republican.  I have been a registered Democrat since I became a registered voter.  Through my desire to try and find change for my family, and community I changed my registration and am now "Unaffiliated".  I was too ill to attend the Democratic Caucus on Tuesday evening.  Thursday evening approached much faster than I had anticipated, and attending the meeting was something I found myself truly dreading.  We, (my nine year old daughter and myself) arrived at Kearns High School approximately 30 minutes before the meeting was to begin and entered a packed parking lot, eventually making our way back out of the parking lot to find a space on the side of the road.  Having signed up the night before I knew which district I was located in and found my place in the many lines formed for the different districts.  After "signing in" we eventually found our way up the stairs, around the corner, and tucked aw...

Wonkette is one of my very favorite blogs. It is funny, but manages to sneak in some legitimate points with the WOKKA WOKKAs. "Wonkette operatives" from the Occupy Chicago gatherings collected and sent this leaflet to Ken Layne : The Banking Class is finally terrified of the harmless, jobless students and workers milling around day after day forever beneath those glass towers soon to be repossessed by either China or Justice...And were any actual 1-percenters involved in this dumb fear stunt? We are thinking, "Ha ha, of course not, because this has all the marks of Asshole $100K Salaryman on it." You need to have an annual income of $2,196,124 to be in the Top 1% of U.S. earners, according to the latest federal statistics from the Social Security Administration. The people making $2 million plus are not running off copies in the office insulting the protesters, because the people making over $2 million a year are keeping as low a profile as possible righ...

(h/t Pat Bagley )

When newscasters mention Utah's economy, they usually insert a sort of “man on the street” “ain't things tough” tone, but emphasize one rosy fact – our unemployment figures. It is true that Utah's current unemployment rate of 7.5% is a hair lower than the national average of 9.1% (seasonally adjusted). Utah: the beehive state! Home of industry, land of rugged, independent workers who aren't afraid to help their fellow men when in need. An example for the nation, right? Well, according to a very well-researched report by Lee Davidson at the Salt Lake Tribune, things are not so rosy. Astonishingly titled “ Utah median income drops below 1997 level ,” it reads (in part): Back in 1997, Bill Clinton began his second term as president. The first Harry Potter novel appeared. Gasoline cost $1.30 a gallon. The median household income in Utah was $57,938 in 2010 dollars. Now, 14 years later, Utah’s median income has dropped below that level. In 2010, it was $56,787, o...

The Washington Post has an excellent piece up on job-creation data: specifically, on what it does and does not say: Some of the country’s best-known multi­national corporations closely guard a number they don’t want anyone to know: the breakdown between their jobs here and abroad. So secretive are these companies that they hand the figure over to government statisticians on the condition that officials will release only an aggregate number. The latest data show that multinationals cut 2.9 million jobs in the United States and added 2.4 million overseas between 2000 and 2009. This becomes of particular concern when it comes to economic policy: “It’s an important piece of information that the American people should have,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Should you listen to the kind of advice these companies have about how to grow the economy when their record and their model indicates they’ve cut jobs? . . ....

"Corporations are people, my friend." - Mitt Romney You can see the speech where he said it here (quoted statement is at 1:25). He follows up the response (some outraged yells that are hard to distinguish) by saying "Everything that corporations earn ultimately goes to people." Mitt's statement is nothing really extraordinary - it's an example of the ideology of trickle down economics *, popularized by Ronald Reagan and virtually every conservative politician since Ronald Reagan (never mind that these theories have been largely disproven ). We should keep in mind that recent judicial action and economic data both support Mitt's statement on its face in a way - yes, the Supreme Court has essentially held that corporations are people, and, yes, corporate profits DO go to actual flesh-and-blood people. The problem is that they go to the people at the very, very top of the ladder , while real wages for workers have stagnated since the 1970s. The ...

The Salt Lake Tribune reports today that Utah bankruptcies are up 56% over last year: Bankruptcy filings in Utah soared during the first three months of 2009 -- a sign the weakening economy is exacting a bitter toll on the finances of thousands of the state's residents. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Utah reported Wednesday it received 3,066 bankruptcy petitions during the first quarter of 2009, a sharp 56 percent increase from the same three-month period a year earlier. Add to that our recent five-year-high in unemployment (which was on its way down five years ago, rather than up as it is now), and things are not looking as rosy as I had hoped they would. I know that no state is "recession-proof" (just as no industry is truly recession-proof, merely recession-resistant), but it's still sobering news.

They're calling that patch that starts in Texas and goes north (including where I live!) the "Zone of Sanity." And, since I'm gainfully employed and recently bought a condo at a very reasonable 30-year fixed rate, I'm not going to disagree. One of the nice things about living in Utah is a feeling - perhaps deserved, perhaps not - that no matter how bad things get in the economy overall, what we experience here will always be much milder.