One Utah

The U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment at the Pentagon
The U.S. Defense Department’s FY 2008 budget was $623 billion, over a hundred billion more than the military budgets of every other country in the world put together. This does not include emergency supplemental appropriations for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Why is the budget so bloated? [...]

There’s been a great deal of talk about corruption in politics. The last 8 years have seen a truly shocking level of corruption in government - from the Republicans K Street Project, to the Bushies’ endless politicizing of every aspect of government starting with no bid contracts for any firm connected to the Administration [...]

From his blog:
1. The government (i.e. taxpayers) gets an equity stake in every Wall Street financial company proportional to the amount of bad debt that company shoves onto the public. So when and if Wall Street shares rise, taxpayers are rewarded for accepting so much risk.
2. Wall Street executives and directors of Wall Street [...]

Originally published on OneUtah June 2007.
Morris Berman, a distinguished professor and writer is known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. His most recent book, Dark Ages America, is not pretty. I first saw him on C-Span book TV. It was interesting because even among the predictably liberal sympathetic crowd in attendance, some got [...]

In the real world, every government policy is an experiment. We look to history to guide us but also ground ourselves in basic values.
Public education, supported by property taxes, open to everyone, is an experiment. Creating a progressive tax code is an experiment. Cutting taxes on the rich in hopes they will [...]

As I continue my desultory series on the four freedoms, I find myself, in the face of the seemingly endless sludge of bad economic news pondering the idea of freedom from want.
FDR’s original line was:
The third is freedom from want–which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy [...]

Do we have anything to learn from a 90 year old pandemic?
A first wave influenza swept the world in March 1918. A second, more deadly wave hit in the fall - from September to November. Finally, a third wave hit the world in early 1919. An exact death toll is unknowable but [...]

Come one, come all pundits on this blog, to a penetrating quantitative analysis of Presidential greatness versus experience at–
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/Maps/Mar10.html
(scroll down to “Is an Experienced President a Good President?”)
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Conclusion: no correlation whatsoever!
My meditation:
According to this data, LBJ, with 27 years in the Congress, is the number two most experienced president and for my [...]

Remember when Americans were outraged that the military was buying toilet seats and hammers for six hundred dollars and passing the bill onto the taxpayers. Ah, the good old days!
I set my alarm clock to the Diane Rehm show on NPR at 9:00 a.m. every morning. If you live in Utah, it is one of [...]

The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, according to data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office.
The total income of the top 1.1 million households was $1.8 trillion, or 18.1 percent of the total [...]

Karl Rove is leaving the White House. 
This means nothing.  Rove will continue to be on Bush’s speed dial.  Moving him out of the White House means nothing - he will still set policy for this White House - now it just won’t be official.  I’ve long maintained the Rove is the exemplar of a Utah [...]