Salt City Sinner

posted on 11/15/2018 by the Salt City Sinner Utah’s population is quickly growing , due to both our leporine birth rate and a steady influx of new residents from other states. One such incoming resident is Willard Mitt “Mittens” Romney, our new junior senator! Now, Utah is a unique place, both geographically and culturally, and I worry that Mitt – a native Michigander who went on to become a Bay Stater – is going to have a hard time adapting. Well, one of the first things Mitt is going to learn about Utah is how gosh darned neighborly we are! In that spirit, here are a few things I think he ought to check out, things that will help him to comprehend the buzzing soul of the Beehive State. Family Dinner At Chuck-A-Rama As Mittens is stepping into the tattered, ancient house-slippers of Orrin Hatch, what better way to understand the culture of Utah than by dining at Orrin’s favorite eatery ? Whatever clever staffer has been tweeting as Orrin has had great f...

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 7/27/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Willard "Mitt" "Mittens" Romney is in Great Britain right now, where the 2012 Olympic Games are what we in the character assassination / blog game call "a big deal." Such trips are part of the checklist for anyone running for president in the United States - a quick tour of various foreign lands of major or minor significance is a way for candidates to shore up their foreign policy bona fides, extend a friendly handshake to US allies - it's basically a debutante ball for American politicians stepping onto (or at least trying to step onto) the world stage. It was with some dyspeptic amusement, then, that I watched Willard attempt to step onto stage, and then instead step into  a big, steaming pile of controversy and negative press. Willard was giving your standard trip-abroad interview to Pers Morgan, when he said the following : "There were a few things that were disconcerting, the stories abo...

posted 7/19/2012 by Crazypoliticos "What the fu..."  Suddenly, I'm wide awake.  The amber lit digital display on my clock radio reads "3:02 AM".  Summer is standing above me yelling "Wake up Gerald!  For God's sake!" "Jesus Summer, alright I'm awake.  Stop yelling.  You'll wake up the neighbors, I'll get evicted."  I'm even more awake now.  "How did you get in here?" I ask. "With this nifty little bogus warrant" she replies.  But she is not her perky self.  She is anxious.  I can tell she is worried...about something. "Summer-it's 3AM for crying out loud.  What do you want?" "Mitt Romney has it!" "Has what, Summer, c'mon I'm tired can't we talk about it tomorrow?" "He has the gun Gerald!"  Her eyes are wild. "What?" She is pensive and yet sharply focused now.  "He has the prototype.  He has the Skunk Works Multivers...

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?

Posted on 5/30/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Mittens! After securing Texas and, thus, the 2012 Republican nomination for President of these United States, how does one kick it live and direct? The Daily dug up this delightful photo of a young Mitt Romney holding a gun to his head. Good  times! Well if you are Willard "Mitt" Romney, first you host a huge fundraiser in Las Vegas , where the big draw was prominent Birther and human incarnation of ugly, godsforsaken hubris and vanity Donald Trump. Then you release your own birth certificate , which has literally never been a political issue until Big Joe Farah and the boys at WND breathed unholy life into it like some kind of golem made of $h!t. Umm... online? In PDF form? Certified by the State of Hawaii? Then, the next day, you host another  white-collar, high-rolling fund-raiser at a luxurious estate with a bloodless, heartless CEO: With Democrats portraying Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch millionaire and ...

posted on 5/12/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Mitt "Mittens" Romney! Didn't everybody enjoy his last turn in the bucket ? After getting soundly trounced by ancient desert reptile John McCain in the 2008 Republican primary, Romney is back for more. His entire primary campaign so far (which is, thanks to Texas Armadillo Ron Paul , not technically over) has been like the Republican version of the John Kerry candidacy in 2004 - nobody seems to like him, he was virtually nobody's first choice, but there he is, last man standing, about as welcome as a breakfast of thin gruel and tepid water. In an apparent attempt to add some red meat to said sad breakfast, and also to dislodge the persistent and unfortunate belief among the Republican base that Romney is a cult member rather than a True Christian *, Romney delivered today's commencement address at Liberty University, an impressively insane "college" founded by Jerry Falwell. Liberty University is n...

It is a very jaundiced eye indeed that I cast toward pseudo-informational garbage like local broadcast morning news or - god forbid - publications like PARADE. Despite this fact, and despite the glittering jumble-sale of falsehoods, lies, distortions, and hilariously transparent 'message control' that is national electoral politics in this country, good old Mitt Romney still manages to shock the hell out of me with how craven he is. Reading a Salt Lake Tribune recap of a PARADE interview with a slick, wealthy politician is sort of like reading badly translated instructions on how to assemble an end table through a pair of filthy glasses in a mirror, backwards. Here goes: PARADE's interview -- included in Sunday's paper -- touches on premarital sex and his enormous wealth. Romney...notes that past leaders like FDR and Jack Kennedy were well off too and he gives an answer that might catch the attention of some of the Occupy protesters. [Do tell! -Ed.]  ...

Harper's magazine's October 2011 cover story, " Pennies From Heaven: How Mormon Economics Shape the G.O.P. " (by Chris Lehmann*) is certainly a bombshell for anyone living in Utah, anyone of the LDS persusasion, and/or anyone who has a passing interesting in either post-1970s Evangelical politics or political Mormonism. It has some excellent research and some decent points, and also, in my opinion, has some significant, crippling flaws that demonstrate a lack of understanding on the author's part of Mormonism's history (aside from its most recent few decades) and modern Evangelical (especially megachurch-Evangelical) self-help theology. That said, it is exhaustively researched enough to include gems like this one regarding chemical magnate Jon Huntsman Sr., which I think presents the best case thus far for the existence of actual, physical evil: Even as he worked in the Nixon White House as personal aide to the president, the elder Huntsman was also sel...

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...

"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 ...

Mitt Romney is scheduled to make an appearance at legendary local burger pit Hire's Big H. Romney should be there around 3 PM. The predictable traffic apocalypse is going to be especially bad since Hire's sits on 4th South at 7th East, both of which are major rush hour pipelines. Try to avoid the area if you can - if you can't, hell, go grab a burger and see if you can get away with tousling Mitt's impressively immobile hairdo.