Salt City Sinner

#Occupy national hub   here  . #OccupySLC hub   here  . Twitter   here  . Earlier today - at 11:09 AM MST, to be exact - I received a glorious piece of news. Moon Base Alpha, the second #OccupySLC base camp, formerly located at the vacant lot across the street from the Fed and now located in Gallivan Plaza , is still standing. That's right - like a Persistent Sinus Infection of Justice, it has outlived the mighty antibiotic that was the SLPD's recent raid on the original #Occupy base camp in Pioneer Park. And yea, though they pitch their tents in the valley of the shadow of massive financial institutions, they shall fear no evil, apparently. While the cops were kicking down #Occupy's sand castles in Pioneer Park, it seems that the clever denizens of Moon Base Alpha worked out some sort of quasi-formal compromise to keep their camp as long as it stayed tiny, remained completely drug-and-alcohol-free, and kept a "low profile" before du...

As of yesterday's General Assembly, and with the continued cooperation of the SLPD, #OccupySLC is now operating under a 30 day camping permit ( and there was much rejoicing ). General Assemblies continue to convene every morning, with marches at 12 PM and 6 PM. I'll be doing my best to get more coverage of this, including interviews. Stay tuned to the #OccupySLC blogs , which are...informative...in a take-it-or-leave-it way. The twitter feeds ( here ) and (  here  ) were all right early on. ( THIS ) is by far the best feed being updated right now.

A few days ago, I noted that despite what someone might hear on talk radio or Fox News, actual liberal bias in the news media is quite rare in my experience. Most corporate news outlets have a predictable corporate bias, but outside of first Fox News on the right, and then MSNBC on the left, little overt political agenda. I crowed that I had finally found an example of the legendary "liberal media" in the form of an article by Salt Lake Tribune  writer Robert Gehrke that was unfairly biased against lobbyists. I suppose I should have seen this coming - sort of an editorial version of washing my car only to see the rain clouds roll in. Find one example of liberal bias in a local newspaper and sure enough a national narrative will emerge - or fail to emerge - that undermines the idea that rightists are a persecuted lot never treated fairly by the mainstream press. #OccupyWallStreet started at Adbusters, a Situationist publication responsible for much of the bes...

In my previous post on this topic, I explained that a Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry had penned a column for the Nation magazine called " Black President, Double Standards: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama " in which she claimed that white progressives who had given Clinton a pass on his centrist tendencies were unwilling to extend the same courtesy to Obama due to racism. I found this pretty preposterous, and pointed out many variables other than race that could account for Obama's dwindling support (Obama has continued our endless, mindless "war on terror" on two fronts and expanded our military commitments to include the NATO action in Libya as well, Obama has failed on most of his major campaign promises to progressives including closing GITMO and the CIA's black sites, Clinton ran as a moderate while Obama ran as a liberal, &c. &c.). Gene Lyons, an old hand when it comes to anything Clinton, also expressed his outrage over Dr. Harris-Perr...

To hear the conventional wisdom these days on the subject, you would think that pervasive liberal bias in the news media is corrosive to our democracy -- excuse me, our republic -- and so ubiquitous as to be self-evident. Despite this common sense fact, I have had a hard time since I first started consuming large quantities of high-potency political journalism finding this so-called liberal bias. I've noticed bizarre ideological blind spots in the media to be sure, but most of these blind spots seemed to line up nicely with a "corporate bias" if any simple description is accurate. On top of that, within my lifetime I've seen Fox News emerge as the most unapologetically biased and fact-light media outlet outside of Berlusconi's Italy. Indeed, virtually every example of media bias I've ever encountered, with the exception of explicitly ideologically outlets like National Review or the Nation has trended in a bland way towards protecting and benefiting the...

Quite a hubbub has been sweeping the liberal/progressive media outlets lately regarding a column by Melisa Harris-Perry entitled “ BlackPresident, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama .” Harris-Perry attempts to measure the electoral “roll-off” that can be ascribed to racism in the 2004 Senate race between then-State Senator Barack Obama and perennial wingnut candidate Alan Keyes, the 2008 general election, and the 1994 re-election of President Clinton. Her thesis, which is a bit murky, seems to be that by comparing the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we can conclusively establish that the variable at play is racism on the part of white liberals (which is a political category that fits me pretty well, so I might as well kick someone).  Astonishingly, my first and most major objection to Harris-Perry's column ("wait, Clinton wasn't a liberal") is contained within the column itself, written by the author as though it suppor...

Yesterday, I caught the following off of my Twitter feed: fruhwirth: BREAKING: Download a proposed ballot initiative that seeks forced relocation--"final solution"--of homosexual Utahns http://bit.ly/awx8Iv What followed was a day of bizarre accusations and counter-accusations in the Salt Lake LGTB/activist community. To clear things up in advance: the group proposing this “initiative,” Patriots for a Moral Utah , is a Yes-Men-esque send up of, in the words of one of their leaders , “Chris Buttars, Gayle Ruzika, [the] Sutherland Institute and of course the Mormon Church.” PMU’s modest proposal is as follows: under their “initiative,” gay Utahns would be required by law to either 1.) voluntarily leave the state, 2.) leave the state via public transit free of charge, or 3.) report to a rehabilitation center where their homosexuality will be “cured.” It was an intentionally *way* over the top exercise in button-mashing (they actually used the phrase “final solution” in the draf...