Salt City Sinner

posted 11/7/2012 by the Salt City Sinner I cracked open Twitter today to get a sampling (for my delectation) of the various unhinged wingnut responses to last night's election results, and came upon this gem from God Kin & Country ("Christian Man 1st, Husband and Father 2nd, Patriot Last"): (What he's "Just Saying..." has been a popular trope in right wing and white supremacist media circles leading up to the election - namely, that savage, dusky minorities would burn America's cities to the ground in an uncontrollable rage in the event of a Romney victory. Yes, "Just Saying...") Leaving aside the fact that Donald Trump called for riots last night, a human with a functioning brain stem and access to Google might have noticed the following : Local media reports that "hundreds of Ole Miss students exchanged racial epithets and violent, politicized chants" across campus. As many as 400 students are said to have partici...

posted 11/6/2012 by the Salt City Sinner It's getting to be the cold season, here in the City of Salt. When you are confined in your individual cell or oubliette here in the vast subterranean Prison State of Deseret, your own wails, your clotted coughs, your sniffles and cries - it makes you feel alone, all alone with the pain in your chilled finger-tips as you attempt to heat a tin of Kitty-Feed over a stub of candle in the darkness. It's only when you venture out onto the stairwell that the symphony of agony makes sense, that the muffled wails of your neighbors combine into a sort of orchestra of suffering, a community unaware of itself. On this, the Holiest of Nights at Salt City Sinner, two things are becoming increasingly apparent. First, that the Kenyan Usurper, B. Hussein "Barry Soetoro" Marshall-Davis, may well slink like the Beast back into Bethlehem / Washington D.C. Alestair Crowley had some nerve calling himself the Beast - obviously, Bam-Bam...

posted 10/16/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Think of me as a Tarot Card. I represent "Opportunities About To Arise." They did some very interesting and downright inhumane experiments with rat colonies, Neville.  They found when certain population limits are reached, all it takes is the addition of one extra rat...  and the whole community slides into unstoppable chaos. One little rat and Utopia turns into Rwanda. So here we are, America. Two presidential debates down, and what more could possibly be at stake? Two men in expensive and identical suits have engaged in a hideously pre-ordained set of talking points ( link ), focus groups engaged and "dial-polling" (thanks, Frank Luntz, you inhuman sack of excrement) purified. Truly, this is the end of days, if popular culture is to be believed. The rise of pop-culture's embrace of the zombie apocalypse, the rise of survivalism since the 90s: everybody from your friendly local securalist to...

posted 9/25/2012 by the Salt City Sinner When we   last  touched base with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe "Tough Guy" Arpaio, he was industriously applying his puckered lizard pseudo-lips to the powdered ass-cheeks of a noted member of the landed gentry, one Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley. Lord knows it's a proud and celebrated tradition here in the colony to suck up to the British aristocracy - remember just last week when Elizabeth Warren flew to London to pay tribute to our beloved Queen? No? Me neither. Anyway, it seems that Sheriff Joe's twenty-some-odd year reign of terror is (maybe? hopefully?) on its way down the tubes: Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently lost support among his Maricopa County constituents amid a high-profile attempt to prove that President Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate is a forgery, a new poll finds.  According to the poll commissioned by Citizens for a Better Arizona, a group helmed by progressive activ...

posted 9/25/2012 by the Salt City Sinner You remember Mia Love, right? First black female Utah mayor, potential first black Republican woman member of Congress, wingnut who called Barack Obama "the food stamp president"...speaker in a prime slot at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. It's a pretty short resume so far, but it's certainly high-potency. I've been watching Love's emergence as a political force with some interest. This is her first big election, and she's running against Jim Matheson - a truly loathsome "Democrat" and establishment creature who I would truly love to see replaced. But replaced by Love? Oh, my goodness gracious no. The Salt Lake Tribune has an article originally out in July but updated earlier this month entitled "Mia Love's budget plan: Do her deep cuts go too far?" The answer to that rhetorical question is an emphatic "YES." From the Trib : [Mia Love] has ...

posted 9/19/2012 by the Salt City Sinner There's an old golf joke that my dad busts out occasionally that still cracks me up: "I hit two good balls today...I stepped on a rake!" Mitt Romney has made it something of a personal philosophical commitment, his recent rake-stepping. There was the RNC's baffling piece of performance art in which the Romney Campaign sagely decided to let an 82-year-old man ramble through over twice his allotted time in an unscripted, unvetted "speech" (read: cranked-out bitching at an imaginary man in an empty chair). There was Romney's attempt to smirk his way ... ... through a cheap, political "gotcha" moment regarding the tragic deaths of U.S. diplomats - again, wham!, right in the runts. And now, in a surgical political strike by Mother Jones magazine (a previously relatively little known and scrappy publication that has now earned a MAJOR chunk of attention), Romney's words from months ago h...

posted 8/27/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Today is part one in what will be an ongoing series regarding prominent officials and hypocrisy. Now, this might seem like shooting fish in a barrel (it is), but in an election season Bedazzled ( TM, NSFW ) with loathsome talking points and "narratives," sometimes it is useful to remember a few very basic points about members of our political class that somehow get lost in the sparkles. Today we will be discussing the disclosed  - not still-sealed, mind you - finances of one Willard Mitt Romney. Willard is a wealthy man ( seriously ). His net worth is pegged at $230 million by anti-Romney, liberal muckraker Forbes magazine ( link  here ), with $91 million in debt securities, $52 million from "Bain Alternative Investments," $29 million from "other alternative investments," and $23 million from mutual funds and ETFs (exchange traded funds). Romney is also worth a cool $18 million in real estate, inclu...

posted 8/17/2012 by the Salt City Sinner For the first time in the history of this blog I would like to reproduce, in its (almost) entirety, an essay. Thomas Frank, "Compromising Positions:" Let us review. Barack Obama, who was lifted to the presidency four years ago on a great wave of progressive fantasy, likes to say that hte national budget is like a family budget: that when times are tough, government has to tighten its belt. This is a Republican simile of very long standing, and the president is a Democrat. He is in fact the leader of the party that is supposed to believe in deficit spending during hard times. Yet Obama has enthusiastically adopted the belt-tightening trope, and all the terrible ideas that go with it.  Another thing the president likes to say - or liked to say, back in the days when his administration was new and "hope" hadn't started to stink yet was that "we should be looking forward and not backwards." More recently, h...

posted 8/10/1982 by the Salt City Sinner I am not the world's biggest Barack Obama supporter; let's just put it that way. While the Romney people would have an easier time squeezing farm-fresh goat's milk from a largish chunk of obsidian than winning my vote, I'm not at all pleased with some facets of Obama's tenure thus far. In particular, his cabinet full of Goldman Sachs alumni and his quite astonishingly murderous foreign policy puzzle and distress me. It was an unexpected opportunity, then, that this week I was given the opportunity to return to my ancestral spawning grounds to see Obama speak at a rally in Grand Junction, Colorado - the town where I was born (30 years ago today, as a matter of fact!). OH GOD WHERE AM I Grand Junction is a beautiful city located in the western slope region of Colorado, right near the Continental Divide. Colorado is a vital swing state during this year's election, and the energy boom and bust in western Colora...

Posted 7/11/2012 by the Salt City Sinner "Please allow me to introduce myself I'm a man of wealth and taste"        --"Sympathy For The Devil," the Rolling Stones Willard "Mitt" "Mittens" Romney is not the easiest human being on the planet to feel sympathy for. It doesn't help that while a lot of his countrymen are barely scraping by (or not scraping by at all, actually) he can't seem to stop himself from behaving like a rich, self-entitled prick, swanning around in his luxury boat and throwing $25,000-a-plate fundraisers in the Hamptons with the likes of this astonishing piece of work : A New York City [Romney] donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. " I don't think the common person is getting it ," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting ...

posted 4/6/2012 by the Salt City Sinner As far as Fourth of July campaign malarkey goes, I try to pay as little attention to it as possible during political campaigns. Willard Mitt "Mittens" Romney, however, coughed something up during a campaign stop day before yesterday in scenic Wolfeboro, NH, that was so weird that I couldn't let it slip past: "Happy Fourth of July!" Romney wished supporters as he criss-crossed the street, his Secret Service agents in tow, to shake as many hands as possible. "Happy Birthday, America!"   When one supporter yelled, "Save our spirit," Romney responded with an emphatic "You bet!"   "Get out and vote next year, this November, I mean!" said Romney, wiping beads of sweat off his brow. At one point, stopping to guzzle a glass of lemonade, Romney was asked how it tasted, to which he replied, "Lemon. Wet. Good." Maybe he was suffering from heat stroke?

Since I was a child, Iran has been a regular (and rich) subject of discussion in my household. There's a simple reason for this - on my father's side of the family (the Bernards), the last two generations of Bernards have lived and worked in Iran pretty extensively. My grandfather was actually "knighted" by the last Shah before the Iranian Revolution for his contribution to oil and gas projects in the region. My father went to high school at the American School in Tehran, then later returned to work there as my grandfather had. My dad and my aunt still speak a little Farsi. This is kind of cool: I'm named after my paternal grandfather Charles G. Bernard, AKA Chuck Bernard, AKA whatever the hell this sign (which used to be his) says in Farsi: Due partially to the subject of Iran, I got into a lengthy dust-up in the Facebook discussion group for #OccupySLC , where the ideological demographics can be roughly divided up into one part anarchists/radicals (hello, f...

It's too early to call it, but I'd wager the 2012 election will be a "near-to-total loss" at this point. Then again, I'm not one of the optimistic experts at Standard and Poor's or Moody's rating agencies who gets a nice fat envelope in the mail a few times a year to keep blowing bubbles for amused toddlers (and also CNBC). I hate election years, and I hate news coverage of elections even more. Occasionally life tosses you a tender scrap of hickory-smoked hilarity, but if there's one thing I've learned lately it's this: if you're just whistling past the graveyard, change your route home. So. Ron Paul's has a depressing level of support*, even in groups of people from whom I never would have expected such a bizarre suspension of disbelief. Ron Paul supporters and their eccentricity have been documented extensively, but I still remember one spat very fondly . That spat is probably the reason I have such a soft spot for Paul and...