post-April fool's round up

• All that water carrying and bootlicking may finally pay off for a member of Utah's delegation: "After insisting on the unlikely odds of such an event [AG Gonzales stepping down], Hatch said "it's up to the president," but if duty called, "I would serve this country any way I could." Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Judiciary Committee chairman teased Hatch by saying: "The rumor on the Hill this week was that he was actively running for it." Meanwhile, Pete Ashdown notes that Hatch is fundraising for his ultra-safe senate seat...so he can give his kitty to the RNC?
  
  Who would Huntsman appoint to replace Hatch? Can he appoint himself? One of the state legislature clowns? One of the Brothers Cannon? My favorite Utah GOPers these days are Olene Walker, Jon Huntsman Jr. and Rep. Bishop...and I am being pretty generous.


• Our health care system is broken: "Insurance protects your wealth. It does not protect your health," said Roberta Herzberg, a Utah State University associate professor of political science who specializes in public policy. Yet, Democrats are the only ones seriously proposing any changes to the system. Bush's big effort was to add a donut hole coverage for prescription medications for a program that is so complex and wasteful that even my masters-degree-in-economics-grandmother had to ask for advice.


• Josh Loftin of the Deseret Morning News is on a different planet: "An independent, bipartisan commission could address perceived abuses of redistricting, but it could also present new problems to fix a process that is not broken." The process isn't broken? Until 2006, over 90% of members of Congress were reelected. In 2002, 3 incumbents lost out of the 468 up that year. One of them had an affair with a 20-something woman that turned up dead, another went to federal prison. I guess it is working just great when you work for the Utah Republican Party Morning News, but if you care about democracy--voters picking their politicians and not the politicians picking their voters--then it is a disaster.


• Jenny Wilson's big idea is to offer free parking downtown during construction, which would be during the entirety of her would-be term. The sad fact is that whomever is the next mayor of SLC, the big visionary thing has been taken away from them by the LDS church who decided how to redo downtown, and since they own a large piece of downtown, there isn't much for the next mayor to do except fight for historic buildings or tweak the plan.


• This is why Sen. Buttars' gay-straight alliance clubs bill was horrible public policy:
  

  When a student in Cara Cerise's ceramics class at Salt Lake City's Highland High School told her he had a solution to the gay marriage issue, she was ready to listen.
  "Just kill everyone who's gay," she remembers the classmate saying.
  Shocked, Cara started to cry. The daughter of a gay man, the teenager knew she needed to find a safe haven at school where she would not be judged.
  It was through the school's gay-straight alliance (GSA), now melded into Highland's social-justice club, that Cara found a home.

  
  See Buttars, not everyone in the club is gay. They might have gay parents, siblings, cousins, friends, neighbors. Or they might just care about their fellow human beings. Bill's like Buttars' encourages thinking like that one student who suggested genocide for homosexuals. If that was a joke, no one is laughing.


• Bennett-Matheson is back (the St. George Bill). I think it is misguided, but I understand what they are trying to do--reign in Washington Co.'s growth--but this isn't the way to do it.