One Utah

Senator McCain is fond of saying in just about every speech that, unlike him, Barack Obama “wants to raise your taxes.” This is not true unless you make over $600,000 a year. But what about McCain’s tax increase proposal? What, you didn’t know?
Joe Klein wrote:

John McCain wants to tax your employer-provided health [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The anti-abortion crowd has been, for a very long time, very quietly anti-contraception. Arguments against contraception range from the ludicrous (use of contraception leads to abortion) to the medically inaccurate (chemical contraception is actually a form of chemical abortion). Since 98% of American women will use contraception during their lives, arguing against it [...]

About a month ago, I wrote about my experiences seeing a doctor on the weekend - that clinics covered by my insurance were no where near my house and so forth. The saga of that visit has at long last moved towards its final act.
My insurance requires that all claims be submitted by the [...]

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 [...]

In a lengthy chapter of his book, Glenn Hurowitz describes Bill Clinton as a gutless wonder. Hurowitz makes the case that Clinton’s entire political strategy was based on his personal dislike of confrontations. Clinton would go out his way to avoid confrontations, including compromsing one core progressive values. Clinton’s reluctance to confront [...]

Suffice to say it’s not been a good weekend around the Brown casa. Yesterday morning at the gym, under the watchful eye of my trainer, I was doing plyometrics. My foot came down in the wrong spot, I twisted my ankle and fell, painfully.
I managed to make it through the remaining [...]

I’ve blogged about suffering from migraines.  At the time I described a migraine as not unlike having a short term mental illness.  The pain of a migraine can be debilitating, pain so intense at times that I’ve rubbed my temples so hard I’ve bruised them.  Migraine pain interferes with your ability to see, to think, [...]

Health care is a major problem. The US spends far more than other nations - not just in terms of hard dollars but in terms of percentage of our GDP. We get worse outcomes for our spending - including some 15% of our populaton without health insurance, which is the same thing has [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]