One Utah

I think we are reaching a nadir in the American consciousness. There are so many indicators both large and small. The surprising populist movement lead by Barack Obama is an obvious one. The changing language and focal points of the Right-Wing are another. Almost no one is left in the media nor in politics [...]

IOW, it’s business as usual on the Hill.
While I’m at it, I’d like to take a moment and thank Strom Buttars for bringing his usual nasty little self out on public display for the people and making what was a boring and technocratic session into yet another nasty gay-bashing fest. FWIW, Chris [...]

Read the whole thing but here are my favorite passages:
The staggering losses we’ve sustained from three decades of increasingly authoritarian, non-reality-based, Daddy-knows-best deciding are mounting up. On 9/11, in New Orleans, in Minneapolis, in Iraq, in a planet-sweeping range of diplomatic failures, in the debacles around a Homeland Security department that was apparently designed for [...]

It’s impossible to attend the Utah State Legislature year after year as I have without developing a sense of cynicism. The majority of Utah’s legislators strike me as well meaning but useless when it comes to actually effecting changing. The few commonsense proposals that actually make it to the floor are usually killed [...]

Brilliant editorial in today’s NY Times:
The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were [...]

My post from Saturday about Kathleen Parker’s sad cry for more virginity at college, got me thinking about connections.
Recently, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy released report detailing their findings with regard to the efficacy of sexuality education programs. The report, Emerging Answers, found that abstinence only programs have no demonstrated effectiveness and [...]

The Trib today published another hacktackular op-ed piece by another member of the conservative stable of writers who are just offended at the gone to hellness of our world. Kathleen Parker is offering yet another dreary denouncement of what hideous sluts kids are today.
What happened to your dearly beloved? He - and she [...]

The cultural divide seems rarely more evident than in the news story about the middle school in Maine that is going to offer birth control to its students.
Conservatives have lost their collective minds.
Everyone else sees it as a non-issue.
Even some the most active sexuality bloggers - the good folks at Sex in the Public Square - [...]

This “blast from the past” stands as a stark reminder of the chorus corporate controlled media, coordinated talking points and hyperbolic name-calling that manged to shout down anyone who presented reason and fact in the face of the drumbeat to attack Iraq.
This little piece contains all the now classic tactics so shamefully employed against the [...]

A group of coworkers and I were mocking George W. Bush.  Another coworker tried to defend him saying “Things are better than under Clinton!  He’s doing better than Clinton.”  Let’s just say that there was a level of jeering I haven’t heard for a long time. 
People started shouting out a list of things that were worse under [...]

The Crandall Canyon disaster hearings are doing what they’re designed to do: get to the truth behind failures of federally-regulated industries and projects. But the mining company, federal government and our own senior U.S. senator are coal-walling them. After Day One, mine owner Robert Murray and MSHA chief Richard Stickler are trapped in their own [...]