Simple Utah Mormon Politics

Death , famine , pestilence , and war . These are the four horsemen of the the Apostle John's apocalyptic vision. Not much could be worse. Yet we have found something that--combined with the existing four-- is worse. Enter two new horsemen, bearing down on us, their mounts full of wanton eyes and nostrils flaring... My kids and I from time to time will have a discussion about the proverbial money tree. Man, it would be nice, they say, to have our very own! Yes, it would, I say--if our family had the only one. But if everyone had one, the prices of everything that money could buy would be consumed in a conflagration of hyperinflation. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a lot of good intentions. But he had no common sense. He thought government was a lot like a money tree. Now, his socialist chickens have come home--in the 20th century--to roost. And they--misnamed Social Security and Medicare--are shitting all over us. It is critical that we learn how to take care of our fellow m...

Congress wussed out in 2003 when it encouraged George W. Bush to make his own decision as to whether to attack Iraq. This is not how it works. Congress must declare war before the president can undertake war. With regard to Iraq, George W. Bush made the wrong--and an illegal --decision. Let's hope Congress takes responsibility for deciding whether to go to war in the future. If President Bush wants to go to war against Iraq, let's hope Congress tells him to suck eggs. Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who understands this fundamental concept. Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution states that, among other things, "Congress shall have power to...declare war." They haven't done a very good job of that lately. Instead they listened to President Bush's Dog and Pony Show and said, ooh, here, you make that decision. That's too scary for us to decide. And we got Iraq. Yet when Iraq is not even nearly mopped up, rumors abound of...

I don't even like Rush Limbaugh, but it's clear what he said about "phony soldiers". I'm not sure why Media Matters can't get it correct. Maybe because they don't want to. Update: Who's calling who a phony? Huh, moveon.org? Update 10/5/2007: There are many "phony soldiers" that the government is investigating. Why would Rush Limbaugh say that all soldiers who are against the war are "phony soldiers"? They're not. Rush knows it. I don't know why he would say that. But I don't have to try to figure out why, because HE DIDN'T SAY THAT. Media Matters has this to say about itself on its website : Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. At least they openly admit that they're only working at "correcting conservative misin...

Something that I've not quite understood for several years is why the governor is authorized to select two individuals from each education district to run for State Board of Education (SOE) in the general election. It kind of sounds like something that would have happened in the former Soviet Union. At any rate, I think members of the SOE should be directly elected by Utahns, rather than their 'choices' being filtered through the governor's office. I have a fair number of things that bug me politically--that I would do differently if I could persuade enough people to agree with me. I'm glad for the Deseret News having reminded me of one of them recently. I don't like the way candidates for State School Board are put on the ballot . ...[in] the current system [] a commission screens applicants, passing on names to the governor, who picks two for each final district race. Voters then choose between those two. Why? Makes no sense to me. During a time when it ...

Donate to the Ron Paul campaign. Join the tens of thousands of others who have! Even if you are a member of the Establishment, you must admit that the Ron Paul Presidential Campaign is becoming a reckoning force. "Ron who?" doesn't work anymore. They've done their best to ignore him. Of course I talking about the rest of the Republican presidential hopefuls, not to mention the Democrats. But I'm also talking about our 'wonderfully impartial media'. In a recent Democrat debate, for example, the statement was made that no candidate on the Republican side has a plan to get out of Iraq. The media did not offer correction to the statement. But you know what? Horse feathers. Ron Paul has such a plan! They know it, but it pains them to admit it, on both the Establishment's left and its right. The self-annointed of the American Establishment might as well stop ignoring Ron Paul's presidential candidacy. Because that is becoming a pretty precariousl...

It's a trait of human nature that people can be influenced with small amounts of money. Imagine what happens when then they get tantalized with a whole bunch of money. Unfortunately, some advocates in the man-made global warming (MMGW) debate have been highly compromised by filthy lucre. It turns out that one of the greatest of these is the supposedly impartial NASA Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen. Part of the mantra of the man-made global warming advocates is that everyone on the opposing side is bought and paid for. They have often cited specious claims that the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) sought to undermine the theory of MMGW by offering scientists $10,000 to speak out against it. The reality, however, was not that cut and dried : The American Enterprise Institute offered scientists, including some who in no way can be seen as allies of the so-called "skeptic" camp, $10,000 to review several thousand pages of scientific m...

Health coverage that covers events that occur catastrophically or infrequently is called health insurance . Health coverage that covers almost anything is called health insulation , because we become insulated from the costs of the health care we receive. When we don't care about the cost of a product, we nearly always demand more of it. So it is with health care. In 2002 there were only two countries where the people receiving the health care paid less of the costs for that care than in the United States. In the US, government and private insurers pay for nearly 90% of all health costs. This is one significant reason that the cost of health care is so high in the US. (The other is because we have better health care technology, which costs more to provide.) Until recently, insurance has always meant to insure against usually unexpected events that are "large" or "infrequent" . Somehow, more recently, we have come to demand coverage for nearly everything, a...