Is Carroon really going to find a soon-to-be-ex-GOPer for LG? Or just a dem from a rural, southern county/Washington Co.? Something to think about while waiting for the outcome of the GOP convention. If I were to bet, I would say Lee and Bennett make it out, but I hope it is Palin Jr.

Hatch does not heart downwinders

Sen. Tom Udall, a liberal Democrat from kitty-corner neighbor New Mexico, amoung others, has proposed a bill to triple compensation to downwinders in Utah other. Downwinders are those who got radiation simply because they lived in the wrong place, and were lied to by the federal government.

And Sen. Orrin Hatch opposes the bill.

"I fear it is overly broad and prohibitively expensive," he said, worrying that high costs might sink the program in budget battles and take current compensation programs with them. Hatch added, "I also believe it is important to continue to base any expansion of the program on sound science"

Sound science? Was he getting his talking points confused? That is the talking point against the Cap and Trade bill. It must be tough to keep all those scripts straight.

And while Sen. Udall's dad, fmr. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, represented many downwinders against the government, this isn't a partisan issue.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, added, "The victims of this testing have waited years for just compensation, and the cruel irony is that the federal government has postponed action for so long that many aren't living to see this bill passed."

In fact, this bill is conservative in nature in a way. The government should be held accountable for lying to the public and punished so harshly that it will be disincentive to take similar measures against the populuous.

Because they are still lying about Utahns' exposure to radiation from nuclear testing.

Earlier research by the Deseret News found secretive government maps of fallout that showed the radiation had hit most of Utah, even though just some southern counties were eligible for compensation. Maps showed that Salt Lake County and eastern Utah — which have been ineligible for compensation — sometimes were hit harder than southern Utah areas.

Sen. Hatch didn't mind spending billions and billions on an unnecessary war in Iraq, yet doesn't want his consituents to be justly compensated for getting cancer from the federal government.

Dear Mark Shurtleff,

If the NRA isn't joining in the Montana gun case, why do you think Utah has a chance of winning? Appearantly you must have not read those interstate commerce cases in law school. Or you just want to ignore them. Do you think the NRA will endorse you for Governor or Senator later because of this case? You know, the statement case that is slightly less stupid than the eminent domain case? What a race to the bottom. Was this your "deputy" John Swallow's idea? Please explain that and the Health Care lawsuit in terms of a court will actually do.

Thanks!

Hatch's activist judges

Sen. Hatch warns President Obama: you better not appoint a "liberal activist" to the Supreme Court, or what he will still vote against his nominee? How is this a real threat? Can he bring Sen. Brown or one of the Maine Senators with him?

I mean, I know that Sen. Hatch technically represents Utah and he used to Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and is still on the committee, but he isn't even ranking member anymore. The Republicans' choice for chairman is a guy who was denied a federal judgeship because he was too racist. So why does it matter was he says? I want to know if a Republican on the Judiciary COmmittee who might vote for Obama's pick says no, or a Republican not on the committee who makes noises about voting for the eventual nominee on the floor. That's news. Sen. Hatch is one of the most partisan guys in the Senate, and that is saying something. He knows how to ask softball questions when it is a Republican nominee and he thinks he knows how to ask tough questions when it is a Democratic nominee.

Appearantly, Conservative activists like Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts are OK to Sen. Hatch. Let's look at what an "Activist Judge" is supposed to mean: someone that disreggards public will and publicly elected officials policy decisions to substitute their ideological views in that place. So since both of these catholic men have made it to the high court, what have they done?

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

• Ledbetter v. Goodyear, where the conservative faction read into the statute a time limitation to sue for sex discrimination, even if you don't learn that you got stiffed by your your employer until years afterwards.
• The Louisville and Seattle cases, where two school districts tired to progressively diversify their schools at the choice of their local communities, and Roberts et al overturned them
• Overturned decades and decades of precedent on arbortion rights to protect the health of the mother (including a case a few years earlier which nixed a nearly identical law), to dissregard the health of the mother.
• D.C. v. Heller, where the court decided, for the first time since the creation of the second amendment, that there is an individual right to bear arms. That's right, never before in 220 years had a court held that there was a right to bear arms, even if the public believed that it existed.
• Ricci where the Court made up a new standard to ensure a white guy won (and embarressed incoming Justice Sotomayor to the delight of Fox News) where the New Haven had remade a test after no minorities passed it.
• Citizens United v. F.E.C., wherein the Roberts court overturned 102 years of precedent to hold that those poor corporations shouldn't be constrained from advertising for and against elected officials. Because when Massy Coal CEO Don "mining accident" Blankenship wanted to avoid a multi-million judgment, and he bought himself a West Virginian Sumpreme Court Justice, that was a good thing for democracy.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The point is, the next time a conservative rattles on about "activist judges," you should say, "You mean Roberts and Alito?"

Sen. Chris "Kettle" Buttars

Default Governor Herbert vetoed a bill that would have made "Cool Keeper" Program--where a little device shuts down some A/C units at peak hours to reduce the strain on the grid--an opt out. Herbert claimed that he cares about the environment and has signed up for Cool Keeper himself, but he doesn't think the state should be "forcing" people to join the program. I guess he didn't read that "opt-out" part. But the part that made me laugh out loud at work was this:

"I don't know how much further you can let government in the house," Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said while the Senate was debating the bill. "I find it offensive that for 25 bucks you're going to allow the government to come into my house and tell me when my thermostat is on or off."

Seriously, Buttars? Of all state senators to complain about government intrusion into the home!

Isn't he the same guy that wants the government not to issue marriage licenses to gay couples? Who uses his lofty seat as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee to compare what gay couples do in the privacy of their own homes to be akin to bestiality? And compared homosexuality to alcoholism? Who sought to ban gay-straight alliances in high schools? I guess he is ok with the government invading your home and your personal life, as long as it is doing something that Sen. Buttars agrees with.

If I had to choose between having the government force me to turn off my A/C for 15 minutes a day in the summer (which it wasn't doing to do anyway) or to prevent me from marrying the person I love (I already married my wife, but stick with me here), I would pick 15 minutes of suffering heat in the summer rather than a lifetime of wishing my love could be recognized in the state of my choosing. I have this crazy belief that the government should never invade the home unless it has, a really good reason, let's call it probable cause. And that invasion should be limited to that probable cause and a one time deal, with independent judicial oversight. Definitely not the oversight of Chris Buttars.

painted into a corner

Of all of the moves that the Obama Administration wishes it could do over on health care, the timing of the announcement of Scott Matheson, Jr. to fill Judge Michael McConnell's seat on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has to be one of the dumbest.

Matheson had been a shoe in for the spot for months and months. I had heard rumors that Matheson had support from HHS Sec. Sebelius and DHS Sec. Napolitano last fall. Scott were friends with them from his days on the 2004 campaign trail and from his days working for Common Cause. Not to mention that Matheson is literally a Rhodes Scholar, a brilliant legal theorist, and imminently qualified. If Judge McConnell could have, he would have supported Matheson for the spot on the bench too--McConnell is also a law professor at the University of Utah--even though they are ideologically miles apart.

Heck, once he was announced, the entire Utah delegation either wholeheartedly supported him (including noted hippies Sen. Hatch and Rep. Cheffetz) or didn't stand in the way. Scott Matheson is going to Judge Matheson, I have no doubt.

But by announcing Scott Matheson's appointment on March 3, after it became clear that Pelosi needed to flip votes to pass the Senate version of the Health Care bill, Obama cost themselves a vote they might have been able to get.

As soon as Scott Matheson was announced, the right wing began to baselessly allege that President Obama was selling the Judgeship for Rep. Jim Matheson's, Scott's brother, vote.

If Jim were to vote for the health care bill, those hacks' smears would be "confirmed." If Jim voted against the health care bill, his union allies might abandon him (like they are abandoning Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA)).

In the end, it looks like Speaker Pelosi and her whips (which now includes Dennis Kucinich on this issue thanks to Obama's trip to his district) will reach the magic number 216 they need to pass the Senate bill with the negotiated amendments on Sunday without Matheson's vote.

Still, it goes to show that Obama's judicial pick team has been WAY too slow in clearing candidates for openings. This is especially true when you consider that during the period when the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate, they should have just piled on the judicial nominee votes. Now, Judges could be filibustered by the Republicans (even though they considered even suggesting such a thing for Bush's nominees to be the end of humanity).

Rep. Garn's Hot Tub Time Machine

On the last day of the session, Utah House Majority Leader stepped into his personal way-back machine to 1985 via a hot tub, just like the John Cusack comedy.

Twenty-five years ago, I made a mistake that has now come back to haunt me. I was 28 years old and I foolishly went hot-tubbing with a young woman nearly half my age. Although we did not have any sexual contact, it was still clearly inappropriate — and it was my fault.

One of the consequences of that decision was the negative impact it had on this young person's life. Years later, when I was running for Congress, she decided to bring this incident to the attention of the media. Shortly thereafter, my wife and I met with her, and at her demand, I paid her $150,000. While this payment felt like extortion, I also felt like I should take her word that the money would help her heal. She agreed to keep this 25-year-old incident confidential. Now that this issue is coming up again, it is apparent to me that this payment was also a mistake.

Translation, when he was 28, he and a then-15 year old staffer both entered into a hot tub. Naked. He claims nothing sexual happened.

"He is not being completely honest," [Cheryl] Maher told the Deseret News by telephone from her home in New Hampshire.
...
Maher declined to be specific about what happened, but said Garn "likes massage." She said she does not want to talk about specifics because she wants the focus not on Garn's actions but on "the devastation of my life because of sexual abuse that happens to so many." She hopes that by talking, "others will come forward, too."

So there are two things going on here: (1) inappropriate contact with an underage staffer, regardless of what happened in that hot tub in 1985; (2) he attempted to bribe her/she attempted to blackmail him when he was running for the 1st District seat against Rob Bishop in 2002. Oh and there is a third element: the Deseret News knew about it and sat on the story back in 2002.

Before we go on, it is important to note that this is not as momentous and important as the unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program that the New York Times knew about in 2004 but spiked so as not to appear to try to tip the scales for John Kerry. Nevertheless, this man was running for Congress and had displayed questionable judgment twice, first in a hot tub in 1985, and second in 2002 when he gave Ms. Maher $150,000. Worse still, he roped in Maher's LDS bishop in this whole corrupt bargin.

Another appalling fact is that after Garn gave his confessional on the Utah House floor, his colleagues clapped for him.

So that makes the second member of the GOP leadership that has been undone and resigned by a morality scandal. Sheldon Kilpack, the Senate Majority Leader, was arrested for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol. Apparently, it was well known that Killpack had a drinking problem, but no one cared until he was caught endangering the legislative agenda public. I hope he gets help for his addiction.

Clearly, these scandals had such bite because the legislature was in session. If Kilpack had a DUI any other time of a year, he might have been able to hang on to his leadership position. Garn's scandal seems too big to have gone away. Nevertheless, Maher's (or Garn's political opponents') timing in resurrecting this story is far from coincidental.

One can argue that Deseret News was right to not publish the story during the 2002 GOP congressional primary, what excuse do they have for not publishing it afterwards? That he lost? What Garn did still could be 1-2 crimes. True, Maher's demand for $150,000 is far from innocent. Unlike Lohra Miller, however, David Yocum was competent enough to have screened both of them for charges rather than just one side at a time.

still broken

Even though Harry Reid found a way to appease Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Metamucil) that he will stop hurting millions of Americans, my contemplated piece on the Senate's "rules" is still worthwhile.

There are some good reasons for having anti-majoritarian parts to the government and slow things down. For example, in the wake of 9/11, the Department of Justice (which includes the FBI) cobbled together their wish list of powers they had lying around for decades into a bill and named it the PATRIOT Act. Only one senator voted against it, and he didn't pull a Bunning either. There are some things that deserve more thought and should require a much larger percentage of grumpy old men and women who call themselves senators to agree.

Here's another example: Judicial Appointments. Once a Article III judge is placed on the bench, they are on there for life (or they have to retire or be impeached). That's why you see Supreme Court Justices being appointed in their 50s these days, so a president can shape the court for decades. I for one think that judges should get lots of scrutiny before they get their life time appointment. Not the did you cheat on your biology exam in high school kind of scrutiny, but what articles have you written, what opinions have you written, what briefs have you filed in court? Is this a judge that wants to find any old excuse to have the result match their ideology, ala Roberts, or are they willing to rule against their fellow travelers for the sake of a high legal principal?

But enough throat clearing, let's get to the bad stuff:

• Unanimous Consent: this is where Bunning got the undeserved power to keep seniors from getting medical care, furloughed construction workers, eliminated health insurance and unemployment benefits. Normally, all 100 senators have to agree to how a bill is going to come to the floor of the senate. Most times, it is no big deal, but senators can use this in really bad ways (see holds below) True, not every senator is a big a jerk as Bunning. But what's to stop them, comity? These days, Senators are betting at raising money, giving red meat speeches, and showing up on the TV than they are at talking to their fellow senators. This is especially true with those outside their caucus. We may wish for a bygone era where Senators treated each other with respect and collegiality. But people also forget during that time we had segregation and husbands could beat their wives with impunity. So take off those rose colored glasses, things weren't all that great in the 1950s.

• (Anonymous) holds: Sen. Shelby from Alabama did this recently with 70 plus appointees waiting senate confirmation. When everyone gasped, he reduced it to 3 semi-relevant appointee. His beef? Airbus, a European Union subsidized airplane maker, lost a bid for some Air Force taker to Boeing, an American company. But Airbus decided it would put its factory in Alabama, so that Shelby could be a dick. Others like my Senator Bob Bennett placed a hold on a 2nd or 3rd tier level guy at the Department of Interior so that he could get some concession from the Obama Administration about public lands. Others just place holds to get attention for their pet issue, which has nothing to do with the individual who's life is placed in limbo. These Senators do it through the unanimous consent provision, which also applies to nominees. Worse still, some are too chicksh!t to reveal who they are, so they hide behind their party leader who stands up and says he objects on behalf of someone in his caucus. Grow a pair and say why you are obstructing. Even better get rid of the whole 100 senators need to agree thing. I say 55 votes if people won't agree.
• Filibuster/Cloture: many others have beat this one to death so I won't go into that much detail. But suffice it to say that this Congress has turned an obscure procedure in a commonplace event. The rate of filibuster is up six times the previous record. Worse still, senators don't need to actually stand there and read the phonebook anymore, it is just a time wasting device that cripples the Senate from considering anything else while time ticks away. I liked the idea of having the number slowly go down (60->55->51) so that the spirit of the idea--to force Senators to think long and hard about bill X before they vote on it--remains while not preventing a vote on the actual bill itself forever. The other reform I like is having it go away in X years such that Senators won't know which party will have majority at that time and will think about merits rather than political expediency.
• Quorum/Roll Call Another annoying stall tactic is for some random senator to "suggest the absence of a quorum" meaning that there are not 51 Senators (assuming there are no unfilled seats due to death, resignation, impeachment, or resignation) on the floor at the moment. However, the room could be filled with those pompous windbags and the chair still has to do a roll call and wait the requisite amount of time. And as far as I know, there is no real limit on how many suggestions one can make. Now I can see the tactical advantage this could provide to the majority to twist arms of recalcitrant senators or to wheel some half-dead senator onto the floor. [By the way, LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act by getting a Senator who had just had a stroke wheeled in and point to his eyeball to indicate that he was voting "Aye" on the bill] But the opposition could use it to stall, to be jerks, or to twist arms of endangered Senators to vote with the minority party to save their own hides. But really, I just can't stand hearing that same classical music and the tape of some clerk saying all 100 names any more. It's bad enough already to watch C-SPAN.

Those are my top procedural nightmares that still plague the Senate and the country. If these were reformed/eliminated, a lot more great bills could see the light of day.

priorities, part duex

Here are bills that caught my eye, one which passed, and the other which failed. And their respective faits tells you a lot about the Utah state legislature.

Sponsored by Rep. Chris Herrod, R-Provo, HB143 was hailed as a way to challenge federal control over certain public lands that have remained untapped because of access issues.

Despite legal analysis by state attorneys that says the measure would not withstand court scrutiny, private attorney Mike Lee said he believes it is a fight worth fighting. Lee is a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.

"I cannot rule out the possibility of victory in this case nor can I assure it," Lee told members of a natural resources committee on Tuesday. "I believe we have a good faith basis for an argument here, an argument the likes of which has yet to be addressed as far as I am able to discern. It is argument that strikes at the heart of the sovereignty of the state."
Two other bills sponsored by Rep. Ken Sumsion, R-American Fork, also seek to wrest control of public access to property held by the School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration, and specifically that property Sumsion and Herrod said has been devalued by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to yank back 77 oil and gas leases that had been offered at auction.

"Most of the land is not in production. We cannot tax it and it cannot provide for us," Herrod said. "But the rewards of going after that land are in the billions and billions. I am not a gambling man, but if someone were to say I could put a quarter in a machine and had a chance to get a billion dollars, I would put that quarter in.

...

Those quarters for the legal fight come with Sumsion's HB323, which provides up to $3 million for up to three years to take on the federal government.

...

"Utah PTA is very concerned about the risk involved with this," said Tyler Slack. "Despite the articulate argument of Mike Lee," this is gamble, he added. "The odds are not very important when you are gambling with someone else's money."

So we have a bill, which proposes the state attempting to exercise eminent domain over the federal government, which will result in an instant, expensive, and doubtful legal battle. And the handpicked attorney? Why it is Republican insider-favorite challenger Mike Lee, who is running for Senate and must need the cash.

Someone in the comments section of this article taked about the equal footing doctrine, showing they paid attention in Constitutional Law class, or got notes from someone who did. However, Utah didn't quite enter the union on equal footing. In the later half of the 19th Century, Radical Republicans in Congress made a list of damands that the state had to agree before it would admit Utah into the U.S. Most famously of course was to ban polygamy and separate Church from State. There is a whole line of cases that fleshes out the equal footing doctrine to be more complex that Utah's rights=Alabama's rights.

Moreover, remind me the last time that a state exercised eminent domain against the feds. There is another doctrine out there, one which is actually written in the Constitution, so people like Scalia are happy. It's called the Supremacy Clause. So any law that a state passes that violates the U.S. Constitution or the constitutional laws of the U.S. preempts any state law. And it is not as if U.S. laws on this subject have not "occupied the field" as the magic words go. So really, while it would be a fun topic to debate at academic forums, it is not worth the state's money.

But hey what's three million dollars in the scheme of the entire budget?

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - A Utah lawmaker wants school districts to get ready to shore up buildings against earthquakes.

Many education officials say it's too expensive to even get started.

Rep. Larry Wiley, a West Valley City Democrat, is sponsoring a measure in the Utah Legislature that would require districts to get a seismic evaluation of every school building.

Deputy state schools superintendent Martell Menlove says the seismic evaluations would cost nearly $2 million and building upgrades more than $9 billion. Menlove says there's no money for any of that.

The Utah Seismic Safety Commission says an informal 2006 survey suggests around half of Utah's schools are vulnerable to collapse from a major quake.

So let's see, we would rather take a $3 million gamble, which I thought was against the religion of most of the legislature, on a dubious legal claim so we can stick and eye in the Democrats in Washington Federal government than spend $2 million to find out just how much at risk a plurality of our population is to an earthquake. Is the legislature's plan to pay $3 million in legal fees, win the case or settle favorably, strike oil in school trust lands and then turn around and fix our schools before children die? Somehow I don't think they are planning on taking that next step.

I'm not alone

About a month ago, I wrote a screed wherein I talked about how the government is broken and the system has failed us.

Finally, CNN commissioned a study asking whether government is broken. The results?

Eighty-six percent of people questioned in the poll say that our system of government is broken, with 14 percent saying no. Of that 86 percent, 81 percent say that the government can be fixed, with 5 percent saying it's beyond repair.

Full results (pdf)

The number of Americans who think the government is broken has grown eight points since 2006. "That increase is highest among higher-income Americans and people who live in rural areas," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Maybe it's just a coincidence, but those are the groups that make up the bulk of the Tea Party activists today."

My question is, who are these 14%? Do lobbyists and their employers really make up 14 percent of the population?

Sound like those who voted for Obama and those who go to Tea Party events do have something in common: they think the government is broken and not going a good job. "Teabaggers" think we are turning into a "socialist" commune. Obama voters are thinking that they voted for change and mostly have gotten minimal results.

For example, credit card reform is one of the few changes that happened. The credit card reform finally went into effect, but the bill was rigged so that just after it passed the credit card companies jacked their rates up for no reason whatsoever other than they wouldn't be able to do that anymore after the bill went into effect. Gee, I wonder why that happened.

It's the same reason why the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee is one of the crookedest in Congress. There's money in it.

Voters handed Democrats the keys and expected things to change. They expected Democrats to pass the agenda they campaigned on, crazy I know. But health care reform, cap-n-trade, financial regulation, and lots of Obama appointees are indefinitely stalled. They don't care who's to blame for this. And that's the genius behind the GOP approach...politically. Practically, our country is in big trouble and no one is stepping up to the plate and taking any risk to make things work.

While you were distracted

So while you were getting all hot and bothered by some legislator's attempt to place a gun rights holiday on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (a guy who was assassinated by a gun), or cutting 12th grade, or eliminating school buses, the legislature crafted a major reform of state pensions.

Why should you care about state employees' retirements? Because these are our judges, our highway patrolmen, our firefighters, and even our teachers. Many county employees join into the state system. Public employees make less generally than employees of private companies. And in exchange, to get good workers, employees are offered better hours, and used to have a pretty good retirement package. Pensions used to be available for private employees as well, but most folks are placed into 401Ks and if you have been paying attension lately, you would know that these funds lost lots of money in the last couple of years.

Here's what the reform would do:

Senate Bill 63 would replace the defined-benefit pension plan for public employees hired after July 1, 2011, with a scaled-down option.

The bill from Sen. Dan Liljenquist, R-Bountiful, would provide a choice between a hybrid retirement plan with reduced benefits or a 401(k) plan that allows workers to contribute 8 percent of their salaries.

Under the hybrid plan, public safety employees like firefighters and police officers could retire after 25 years instead of the 35 years originally proposed.
....
The other bill would bar Utahns who retire and are rehired after July 1, 2010, from collecting a pension and a paycheck at the same time, a practice known as ''double-dipping.'' The Senate didn't have time to vote on Liljenquist's third proposal, Senate Bill 94, which would relieve employers of the requirement to add 1.5 percent of a state or school employee's salary into their defined-contribution plans.

The two measures passed Friday now go to the House for consideration.

The economic meltdown in 2008 left many pension funds shortchanged. The crisis stripped Utah of $6.5 billion, and returns in 2009 did little to recover losses.

The reason why the rest of the country's press is covering this is not because they care about Utah, it is because every state's pension is woefully underfunded and their budgets are in deep red. Most of the gap-filling last year and this year was from the Recovery Act. Yet the local press likes to cover the message bills instead.

Here's a rare exception:

State Sen. Jon Greiner, the Ogden police chief who draws a public-employee pension, was notably absent from a pair of long and contentious hearings last week on historic changes to the state's retirement system.
...
Had Greiner voted against any of the measures, the dramatic changes to Utah's retirement system would have stalled in committee on a tie vote.
"I'm not happy with two out of three of the bills," Greiner said. That includes the reform effort's centerpiece, which would replace the current pension system with a 401(k)-style plan for future hires.
Greiner, R-Ogden, said he had committed to Sen. Dan Liljenquist, sponsor of the reform effort and chairman of the Senate retirement committee, that he would not vote in committee to defeat the bills.
"He's not happy with some of them, but he would have voted them through anyway," said Liljenquist, R-Bountiful. "He understands that the rest of the body needs a chance to debate them."
Numerous law enforcement representatives turned out Wednesday and Friday to speak against the bills, including proposals to add 15 years to the time police officers must
serve before they are eligible to retire by raising the service requirement from 20 years to 35 years.
Greiner acknowledges the issue puts him in a difficult spot, with an inherent conflict on the issue no matter how he votes.
He is not only a recipient of a law enforcement pension and Ogden's police chief, but he also is a so-called double dipper. Greiner retired from Ogden's force and was rehired. He now receives a pension in addition to his $107,000 salary. The bills would not end double dipping for workers such as Greiner, but for future employees.
...
Liljenquist said the argument that law enforcement and firefighters should have an earlier retirement deadline has merit because of their jobs' physical demands, and he plans to find ways to change his legislation to let them step down earlier.
That will likely cost more money, which could raise the amount employees are expected to contribute.

Don't get me wrong: double dipping is wrong and I think the practice should be prevented...but there are downsides to ending it. If you want an experienced former chief from one city/town to be your chief, you can't hire him because he would rather take is pension and work for a private company or just be retired rather than give up his pension for the job you are offering.

There is likely waste in the system that can be rooted out like double dipping. There are probably employees who should not be retained but are kept on so they can reach the magic number of years in order to get their pensions. But this change will mean that a slew of experienced state employees will retire in droves just before the effective date if they have passed that magic number. Why stay on six more months or whatever and lose your pension when you could get a guaranteed discounted portion rather than play the Russian Roulette known as the stock market?

This proposed change is indeed massive and massively important. Will attorneys in private practice think twice about applying to open seats on the bench if it means that not only will their income be slashed dramatically, but they will not get pension benefit? I bet they will. Just like how Congress is filled with the characters we have due to our campaign finance system (who wants to constantly be dialing for dollars, knowing that some outside group and blind side you and knock you out of office?) Will some folks opt for other professions when they learn that the benefits of being a police officer, a firefighter, a teacher, etc. will much worse than they were even last year? Probably.

Will this reform make us safer, our children smarter? That's the big question that no one knows the answer to. But what we do know is that these three bills are a hell of a lot more important that whatever crap bills Buttars scrawls with his crayons. There is a reason why the Ogden Police Chief was told to either vote for the bill or make up an excuse not to be there for the committee vote: the leadership wants this to pass...while you are distracted about school buses or abortion or gay rights. When asked, Utahns weren't that favorable to the idea, hence, the distractions.

priorities

In the first month following Haiti's devastating Jan. 12 earthquake, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provided an estimated $4.25 million in assistance, with plans for ongoing relief and recovery support for the ravaged Caribbean nation.

Mormon church officials, facing an ongoing investigation by the [California] Fair Political Practices Commission, Friday reported nearly $190,000 in previously unlisted assistance to the successful campaign for Prop. 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California.

The report, filed with the secretary of state's office, listed a variety of California travel expenses for high-ranking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and included $20,575 for use of facilities and equipment at the church's Salt Lake City headquarters and a $96,849 charge for "compensated staff time" for church employees who worked on matters pertaining to Prop. 8.

“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.

The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.

Headline of the Day

I am a political junkie, but cheep so I read the free feeds of the Hotline, the National Journal daily online rag. Here is the headline that got my attention:
Dicks Hopeful For "Powerful Position"

But wait, it gets better:

Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA) is making phone calls to fellow members of the House Appropriations Committee to line up the necessary votes to take over a defense panel left vacant by the passing of Rep. John Murtha (D-PA).
Dicks and Murtha joined the defense panel the same day in '79, and since Dems took control of the House Dicks served as Murtha's vice-chair. Dicks is the likely choice, based on his seniority, but he's taking the necessary steps to lock down the vote, he said today.

Stay classy Dicks

Of course he considered Rep. Murtha to be his friend and said good things about him further down in the article. But still, the man has been dead for less than 24 hours and Rep. Dicks is calling around to secure the chairmanship of the Appropriations Sub-Committee for Defense?

Let's just look at some of the members of this corrupting Sub-Committee:

Nearly half the members of a powerful House subcommittee in control of Pentagon spending are under scrutiny by ethics investigators in Congress, who have trained their lens on the relationships between seven panel members and an influential lobbying firm founded by a former Capitol Hill aide.

The investigations by two separate ethics offices include an examination of the chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on defense, John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), as well as others who helped steer federal funds to clients of the PMA Group. The lawmakers received campaign contributions from the firm and its clients. A document obtained by The Washington Post shows that the subcommittee members under scrutiny also include Peter J. Visclosky (D-Ind.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) , C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.).

The document also indicates that the House ethics committee's staff recently interviewed the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) about his allegation that a PMA lobbyist threatened him in 2007 when he resisted steering federal funds to a PMA client. The lobbyist told a Nunes staffer that if the lawmaker didn't help, the defense contractor would move out of Nunes's district and take dozens of jobs with him.

As you can see, this is not a Republican or Democrat problem. The party in power tends to have more targets for the defense industry lobbyists to corrupt, simply because there are more of them on the committee.

Why is this committee the source of so much investigation? Because Defense is a sacred cow in Washington. No one dares to make serious cuts to rid the Department of waste, mismanagement, fraud, or boondoogles...lest they be accused of being weak or pro-terrorist. For example of what a member of that committee can do, read (or watch if your are pressed for time) Charlie Wilson's War.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) for a few days held all of Obama's appointments up on behalf of a foreign Defense contractor--Airbus--to aid them in their longstanding feud with Boeing over a bid to supply a multi-billion dollar air refueling tanker aircraft contract. Now the holds are more relevant, limited to 3 nominees involved in the Air Force and the like.

Defense spending in a members' district means jobs for his constituents and millions in donations in the members' campaign coffers. Its a win-win...for everyone but the American people. So Dicks may get his "powerful position," but it won't change the fact that Norm is a corrupt dick.

ooh look a treasure chest!

image courtesy of Flickr user _delineated

So I have this theory, which I can't remember if I shared it with my ever so loyal readers: every year, the Utah legislature's leaders let one or more of their brethren say, do, or propose crazy stupid things. And while everyone is all hot and bothered (including yours truly) about said stupid thing, the real agenda gets passed without anyone noticing. So for every Wolf Killing bill, every "let's get rid of school because one time I saw an empty school bus on my way to work" bill, every "who needs 12th grade anyway" bill, every the word "international" in international baccalaureate sounds commie bill, for every "global warming is a vast conspiracy to control population growth" bill, there is a slew of bills made or altered at the request of lobbyists.

The same thing happens in Congress. Orin Hatch makes a big fuss about the BCS, and Health Care, and let's his cellphone ring when he is asked to say a prayer at the national prayer breakfast. But Hatch gets big bucks from Comcast and NBC folks when he sits on a key committee to approve the Comcast purchase of NBC. He extends copyright laws all the time and gets his rich friends out of tough spots.

If you as his constituent want help with your real problems? Well how we talk about abortion or "socialism", so something, anything else but the fact that Orin's son is a lobbyist. I am sure it is just because he is really good at persuading people, and not because his dad used to be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

I pick on Sen. Hatch because he is easy pickings, but he is far from alone. Democrats couldn't get health care reform passed, but they could get Ben Bernanke reappointed to be Fed Chair. I don't know about you, but I am not going to get distracted by the comical stuff the legislature does every year, I am going to try to focus on the sausage making.

half a headline

So the Deseret News (and Salt Lake Tribune) both have stories on Rep. Jason Chaffetz's second 15 minutes of fame (first was his debut on the cable show about House freshmen), which is justified since he got on national TV with his good question.

But the headline should not be limited to "conservative House Republican confronts Democratic President, claims Democrat broke campaign promises." That is the journalistic equivalence to "Dog bites Man," i.e. completely expected. What is news is that President Obama and Rep. Chaffetz had an intelligent exchange on national TV. You be the judge who came out ahead:

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: Thank you, Mr. President. It's truly an honor.

THE PRESIDENT: Great to be here.

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: And I appreciate you being here.

I'm one of 22 House freshmen. We didn't create this mess, but we are here to help clean it up. You talked a lot about this deficit of trust. There's some things that have happened that I would appreciate your perspective on, because I can look you in the eye and tell you we have not been obstructionists. Democrats have the House and Senate and the presidency. And when you stood up before the American people multiple times and said you would broadcast the health care debates on C-SPAN, you didn't. And I was disappointed, and I think a lot of Americans were disappointed.

You said you weren't going to allow lobbyists in the senior-most positions within your administration, and yet you did. I applauded you when you said it -- and disappointed when you didn't.

You said you'd go line by line through the health care debate -- or through the health care bill. And there were six of us, including Dr. Phil Roe, who sent you a letter and said, "We would like to take you up on the offer; we'd like to come." We never heard a letter, we never got a call. We were never involved in any of those discussions.

And when you said in the House of Representatives that you were going to tackle earmarks -- in fact, you didn't want to have any earmarks in any of your bills -- I jumped up out of my seat and applauded you. But it didn't happen.

More importantly, I want to talk about moving forward, but if we could address --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, how about --

CONGRESSMAN CHAFFETZ: -- I would certainly appreciate it.

THE PRESIDENT: That was a long list, so -- (laughter) -- let me respond.

Look, the truth of the matter is that if you look at the health care process -- just over the course of the year -- overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings in which you guys were participating. I mean, how many committees were there that helped to shape this bill? Countless hearings took place.

Now, I kicked it off, by the way, with a meeting with many of you, including your key leadership. What is true, there's no doubt about it, is that once it got through the committee process and there were now a series of meetings taking place all over the Capitol trying to figure out how to get the thing together -- that was a messy process. And I take responsibility for not having structured it in a way where it was all taking place in one place that could be filmed. How to do that logistically would not have been as easy as it sounds, because you're shuttling back and forth between the House, the Senate, different offices, et cetera, different legislators. But I think it's a legitimate criticism. So on that one, I take responsibility.

With respect to earmarks, we didn't have earmarks in the Recovery Act. We didn't get a lot of credit for it, but there were no earmarks in that. I was confronted at the beginning of my term with an omnibus package that did have a lot of earmarks from Republicans and Democrats, and a lot of people in this chamber. And the question was whether I was going to have a big budget fight, at a time when I was still trying to figure out whether or not the financial system was melting down and we had to make a whole bunch of emergency decisions about the economy. So what I said was let's keep them to a minimum, but I couldn't excise them all.

Now, the challenge I guess I would have for you as a freshman, is what are you doing inside your caucus to make sure that I'm not the only guy who is responsible for this stuff, so that we're working together, because this is going to be a process?

When we talk about earmarks, I think all of us are willing to acknowledge that some of them are perfectly defensible, good projects; it's just they haven't gone through the regular appropriations process in the full light of day. So one place to start is to make sure that they are at least transparent, that everybody knows what's there before we move forward.

In terms of lobbyists, I can stand here unequivocally and say that there has not been an administration who was tougher on making sure that lobbyists weren't participating in the administration than any administration that's come before us.

Now, what we did was, if there were lobbyists who were on boards and commissions that were carryovers and their term hadn't been completed, we didn't kick them off. We simply said that moving forward any time a new slot opens, they're being replaced.

So we've actually been very consistent in making sure that we are eliminating the impact of lobbyists, day in, day out, on how this administration operates. There have been a handful of waivers where somebody is highly skilled -- for example, a doctor who ran Tobacco-Free Kids technically is a registered lobbyist; on the other end, has more experience than anybody in figuring out how kids don't get hooked on cigarettes.

So there have been a couple of instances like that, but generally we've been very consistent on that front.

OK, I am going to judge too... sorry, I can't help myself.

Chaffetz has some good points. Obama has some good counters, let's take them one by one.

1. Lack of Transparency on Health Care Reform bill vs. Campaign Promise to have debates on C-SPAN: Obama was correct that all of the markup hearings were on C-SPAN as well as floor debates and various speeches/rallies by people for and against. But that is largely a dodge. Chaffetz is right that the important part of the decision making was done behind closed doors. Obama was smart to admit to this and accept responsibility for it. While that particular campaign promise sounded like a good idea at the time, it was completely unrealistic and I bet Obama regrets making it.
2. Earmarks: Again, pretty good point by Chaffetz. While certain spending tags were not technically earmarks, again I think Obama did a bit of a dodge because there was a lot of spending allocated for particular projects. ProPublica, not known as a conservative rag, called them earmarks by another name. Obama'z 2009 strategy of being above the fray and allowing Congress to do the heavy lifting while he pushed behind the scenes on major legislation seems to have had messy, as in the case of the Recovery Act, and disastrous, in the case of the Health Care Reform bill, results. Now again, Obama said we will try to do better and have been making incremental progress. That is true. And really as I have stated before, earmarks per se are not a bad thing. Boondoogles that get in dead of night as earmarks are the real bad. And some times one has to weigh the greater good of the bill versus the wasteful earmark that is needed to get someone (or some group of someones)'s vote. see the Louisiana Purchase.
   Obama's challenge to Chaffetz though was brilliant. He essentially said, sure, I haven't done everything that I said I can do, but I am just the president. Congress writes the bills, the President (unlike many Governors) cannot do line-item vetos to eliminate earmarks. So Congress likes to stuff pork into "must pass" bills like Defense appropriations, or their even more obese cousins Continuing Resolutions or Omnibus Appropriations bills. Obama's retort isn't just good politics, it is true. Republicans were rather fond of earmarks when they were in charge of both the Congress and the Presidency and still are. Even Chaffetz is not immune. First, he said he would do zero earmarks, even if it would hurt his district, but then he changed his tune and talked about earmarks vs. "congressionally directed spending" the difference? These were earmarks he liked.
3. Lobbyists: Chaffetz is right that Obama did make several exceptions to his no lobbyists rule and it burt him badly. Case in point was former Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who was (as is his wife) a lobbyist and who failed to report all kinds of income while being a lobbyist. The Daschles "went Washington," and never looked back. And arguably, this doomed the health care bill back in February of 2009. So Obama learned his lesson the hardway. And Obama is right that they are still the most lobbyist-free administration since the lobbyists took over the city. And 43 percent of Chaffetz's money over his brief career have come from PACs, which are by definition "special interests" lobbying for something. By contrast, less than 1% of Obama's 2008 money came from PACs.

So my vote? Narrow edge for Obama.
What's yours?

present tense

So I was reading an email I got from a fellow political junkie friend of mine and I happened to have noticed the gmail contextual adds. One was for Andrew Cuomo for NY governor, the other was Pat Toomey for the PA senate seat, and the third was for Bob Bennett for the UT senate seat. Let me know if you had the same impression I had:

Bob Bennett For Senate
A Leader Who Will Work For Utah. Support Bob Bennett By Joining Now.
www.BennettForSenate.com/Join

Shouldn't Senator Bennett be a leader who has worked for Utah and wants to continue working for Utah? Maybe I am being reading too much into it, but it almost reads like an admission that he is only paying attention to the public now that he is under serious threat of losing his and his daddy's seat.

Or maybe Bob is singing that Pearl Jam song:

You can spend your time alone redigesting past regrets oh...
Or you can come to terms and realize
You're the only one who can forgive yourself oh yeah...
Makes much more sense to live in the present tense...

Your Government Failed You

(title credit: Richard Clarke)

Despite what was said a few weeks ago, I think the decade just ended tonight. This decade will go down as the one where the government of the United States showed it is currently incapable of addressing the challenges of this era. Let us quickly run down all that happened in the last ten years:

1. On November 12, 1999, by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act repeals the Glass-Steagall Act, paving the way for mega-banks like CitiGroup to be formed. Phil Gramm goes on to represent UBS, another massive bank, which is revealed to have provided illegal tax shelters for the uber rich.
2. 2000: stock market crashes due to insane belief by mega-banks that market will continue to go up
3. 2000: The U.S. Supreme Court overturns Florida Supreme Court interpreting its own constitution, case law, and statues, resulting in George W. Bush becoming the 43rd President of the United States.
4. 2001: using the budget reconciliation process, the Republican majority in the Senate, combined with a handful of conservative Democrats, pass a $1.35 trillion tax cut, that due to the reconciliation rules, expires in 2011.
5. 2001: 9/11...I don't need to tell you what happened.
6. 2001-present: the Federal Reserve keeps interest rates near zero and for a large portion of this time, decline to regulate derivatives market.
7. 2002: Bush begins drawing down in Afghanistan in order to ramp up for war with Iraq and after bungled Operation Anaconda allows bin Laden to escape into the Pakistani side of the Tora Borra Mountains.
8. 2002-03: The Congress Authorizes President Bush to go to war with Iraq for reasons unknown. Those who voted for the authorization do not spend sufficient amount of time reading the classified intelligence report which contains numerous holes. Later, it is revealed that even this intelligence was grossly overstated and "stovepipped" by Vice President Cheney. Major media outlet, excited by ratings, promote those seeking to go to war, and fail to examine the claims of weapons of mass destruction.
9. 2001-08: believing that increased homeownership and stock ownership will result in a permanent Republican majority (and help privatize Social Security), President Bush pushes for policies to deregulate and expand mortgage and financial instruments as part of his "ownership society."
10. Thanks to large donations to both parties, mega-banks and other financial institutions like AIG continue to be largely unregulated for their largest "profit" making sectors: derivatives like CDOs, CLOs, Credit, Default Swaps.
11. Thanks to large donations to both parties, the pharmaceutical industry continues to make its profits on the backs of Americans, while every other industrialized nation manages to reign in spending on drugs.
12. 2008: the stock market collapsed after mega-banks' balance sheets are exposed by derivatives such as CDOs, CLOs, mortgage-backed securities.
13. Bernie Madoff admits to his sons that the whole multi-billion dollar fund was a giant Ponzi sceme. Several individuals complained to the SEC of Madoff's suspicious activities, yet the agency failed to act.
14. 2006-08: After a series of corruption scandals, an unnecessary war that lasting too long and costing too many lives and dollars, and a necessary war poorly managed, a massive collapse in the economy voters give Democrats a series of landlide electoral victories, handing the Congress, and then the Presidency to Democrats in overwhelming numbers.
15. 2009-10: Not wanting to lose their new majority, Democrats decide to attempt to compromise with Republicans, who unify behind opposing practically every major Democratic policy proposal, and not use the reconciliation process for their most important piece of legislation: health care reform. Other major policy proposals wither on the vine as conservative Democrats, faced with near universal Republican opposition, do not wish to risk losing re-election by supporting something wholeheartedly.
16. 2009: Martha Coakley is nominated to replace the late Ted Kennedy, whose "cause of [his] life" was health care reform. She proceeds to take a vacation and not campaign or run tracking polls.
17. 2010: Suddenly realizing the 60th senate seat was at risk (made necessary by the refusal to use reconciliation), Democrats and their union allies attempt a last minute GOTV and ads for Coakley. It fails and Republicans gain 41st seat. Health Care Reform has not passed both chambers in a form that President Obama can sign. He may never get anything to sign.

Our institutions cannot function due to hyperpartisanship, massive campaign donations, intrenched special interests with lobbyists, incompetency, ideology that refused to bend to reality, petty vengeance, political self-interest, and anti-majoritarian rules in the Senate.

The result is 10% unemployment nationally, trillions of dollars spent on tax breaks for billionaires and multi-millionaires, the Iraq war and bailing out the mega-banks, 54 million uninsured, thousands dying daily because they cannot afford the necessary medicine or medical treatment, hundreds of thousands more filing for bankruptcy because of medical costs, global climate change without global will to try and stop it, along with Al Qaeda morphing into a new organization with bin Laden still at its helm (or dead by natural causes).

Richard Clarke was right in 2004. Our government failed us. But not just in failing to prevent 9/11, but in failing to prevent the economic collapse of 2008, failing to catch Bernie Madoff, failing to pass meaningful and necessary reforms.

This last decade has been ten years of the mighty making their own right: from bankers to baseball players. All of us were expected to grovel at the feet of the CEOs, the intelligence agencies, the major media outlets, the syndicated newspaper columnists, and the professional athletes for their purported omnipotence and wisdom. It turned out they were incompetent, had no idea what they were looking at, were in love with having powerful people talk to them, were in love with hearing themselves talk on the TV, and pumping themselves full of drugs when they are not committing various other crimes.

The only good thing to come out of this period has been the internet's blossoming. Now I can instantly find out exactly how full of it a politician, talking head, lobbyist, CEO, or jock is and why. Now I don't need to subscribe to the New York Times and listen to the drivel of Thomas Friedman to know what is happening the world. I don't need to read press releases or speeches, or watch cable television for news.

One can get depressed by all this. Or use it as a cause for action. Voters thought they were getting change in 2008. Turned out, the establishment and the system is really good at fighting the will of the majority and keeping things the same.

We need to dramatically reform the Senate. No more anonymous holds or any other need for "unanimous consent" to pass or do anything. No more painless filibusters. You have to talk the whole time to stall legislation, not block it indefinitely. If senators repeatedly ignore the will of their state's voters, let them be recalled.

We need to reform Congress. No more districts drawn by politicians to help themselves and their friends. No more privately funded campaigns. No more hiring of relatives of members of congress to lobby any branch of the government.

We need to reform the Executive. Congress needs to take back control of many of the things its delegated to the executive (creating the alphabet soup of agencies and administrative law). And if Congress wants to go to war, it should Declare War, which it hasn't done since 1941. The president should not be able to start war on a bare majority of Congress, or without congress. No more "state secrets" doctrine; have an in chambers hearing proving that the evidence really is a matter of national security and then the evidence is excluded, not that the case is dismissed. No more Gitmo or secret prisons or warrantless wiretaps or National Security Letters...no more PATRIOT Act.

We need to reform the judiciary. Cameras should be allowed in federal court rooms in civil bench trials where the parties don't have a compelling reason to object (like witness intimidation or tampering). Supreme Court Justices should retire after they hit their 80s and decisions they make regarding their own conflicts of interest should be reviewable.

Newspapers are slowly being killed off, but cable news needs to change dramatically too. No more hours of hacks blabbing, more hours of investigative reports. No more softball interviews of politicians, executives, or athletes. Maybe then the fourth estate can serve as the intended check that the First Amendment provides, and not a refuge for the powerful to spout their propaganda.

If only a handful of proposed changes happened, the world would be a much better place for it.

a pattern

Hotline picked up on an insensitive trend:

As the MA SEN race looks to be headed to a photo-finish, several pols and pundits have used a similar, albeit unfortunate metaphor, to describe the prospect of a GOPer taking the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA)'s seat:

Earthquake.

All of the following comments were made over 24 hours after the devastating 7.0 earthquake hit Haiti:

FNC's Sean Hannity: "What a political earthquake, though, that would be" ("Hannity," FNC, 1/14).

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), on MA state Sen. Scott Brown (R): "I know if he wins, then, obviously, it will have a seismic effect on American politics" ("On the Record," FNC, 1/13).

Ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, on whether there's a Dem effort to stall a swearing in if Brown wins: "If the earthquake happens and if you have this sudden, stunning, unbelievable result, I think it would be impossible for the Democrats in the Senate, for the president to block the seating of the Republican candidate" "On the Reocrd," FNC, 1/13).

NPR's Juan Williams, on a GOP win: "I know the prospect is boy, that would be something. That would be an earth shaker. Talk about an earthquake. That would be one right here in American politics. No doubt about it" ("Hannity," FNC, 1/13).

The comments offer a contrast to the sensitivities to the term "tsunami" after the late '04 Indian ocean earthquake were still so strong during the '08 pres. primaries that networks abandoned their use of the term "Tsunami Tuesday" to describe the Feb. 5, 2008 primaries.

What do they all have in common? That's right, all appeared on Fox on the 13th and 14th. I am sure it is just a coincidence that they all said the same thing and these "pundits" and politics were not talking from the same script.

a new chapter in the annals of cluelessness

Well it seems that my least favorate State Senator, Chris Buttars, has an ingeneous way of cutting the state's budget to make up some of the $700 million dollar gap:

A state senator says school districts should stop busing high school students as way to save money.

Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, told the Legislative Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee on Monday the move would save as much $75 million.
...
Buttars noted that 75 percent of the state's student population is along the Wasatch Front.

Yes, because (a) the other 25 percent of the state doesn't count to Buttars and (b) high school kids in urban/suburban areas can somehow get to school without a school bus.

As the head of the Granite School District noted, high school administrators have enough trouble keeping teenagers in school without having the lack of busing as an excuse. Moreover, how in the world are kids in rural school districts going to get to schools miles and miles away?

As Gubinatorial candidate Peter Carroon said the other day,

"Our state leaders have talked about education as their No. 1 priority for decades and Utah is falling in national standards," Corroon said. "They've cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of our education system. If that's priority No. 1, I'd hate to see priorities 2 and 3."

Buttars' solution will cause more problems which will cost more than the money he seeks to save. Why is this guy on the Senate Appropriations Committee again?

2.5 Million Dollars and a Good Pair of Shoes

The quote of the day:

Corroon, who raised over $225,000 in the final three months of 2009 and is carrying over about $77,000 from his 2008 mayoral campaign, recognized he has a long way to go in building the bank account, and reaching the voters, to mount a competitive race.

It's going to take $2.5 million," Corroon said. "And a good pair of shoes."

In those shoes, Corroon said, he will take his message to all corners of the state — a task necessary for a man whose name is not well known outside the Wasatch Front.

For those of you inclined to donate to Peter Corroon's gubinatoral campaign, here is the link.