Friday round-up

• Utah is bound to get another seat, either in the next couple of months, or in 2012. However, under current projections, it wouldn't get a 5th seat in 2022. But don't loose sleep yet. "We have confidence in the projections we produce," Robert Spendlove, manager of demographic and economic analysis for the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget, said. "However, this is 15 years away and there is a wide margin of error ... when you're talking about tenths of a percent." By the way, Spendlove is a terriffic name for a guy working in a budget office.


• Jon Huntsman Jr. is backing McCain, but Jon Sr. is backing Romney. Romney needs the Huntsman's money men given the cash gap between McCain and the rest of the field (which he created with his Campaign Finance Reform by favoring members of congress over governors). It will be interesting to see if Jon Jr. comes back to Daddy or continues to assume that McCain will win it all. Someone wants to have a cabinet post after all.


• Great lede by the Tribune, pointing out the utter hypocrisy of what Rep. Bishop and his Republican colleagues say: "Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, say[s] Democrats are shutting them out of the legislative process, but their protests do not appear to match the record of the GOP-run House. ...Bishop served as a member of the House Rules Committee, which under Republican control brought more bills to the floor under "closed rules" than any previous Congress.
  In 1994, as speaker of the Utah House of Representatives, Bishop criticized proposals to open the legislative process, specifically the Rules Committee meetings, as shallow, and compared them to taking the doors off bathroom stalls." There's a lovely image.