Tag: Utah

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There are plenty of odd moments in the 2022 election season. Thus are the times. New York Democrats played musical chairs following a topsy-turvy US House reapportionment debacle in the Empire State. The head of the House Democrats’ campaign committee, Sean Patrick Maloney, controversially bumped a progressive black incumbent out of one district and now […]

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Join Jim and Greg as they serve up one bad martini and two crazy ones. First, Jim lays out the details of the looming freight rail strike or lockout that could do serious damage to our economy and why there are several indicators that there won’t be a deal by Friday. They also hammer Never Trump Utah “independent” Senate candidate Evan McMullin who ran for president in 2016 vowing to end Roe v. Wade and is now decrying the Supreme Court ruling and vowing to restore abortion if elected. And they roll their eyes as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says it is Republicans’ fault that the border is a mess.

When You’ve Lost NRO

 

Can a GOP governor go so far off the reservation that not even National Review will support they/them? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.  Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, recently vetoed a bill aimed at keeping biological males from competing in women’s sports, and torpedoed a school choice bill by threatening a veto. Both times, his excuse echoed the talking points of the Democrat Left. He threatened a veto of the school choice on the basis that teachers aren’t paid enough.  His veto of the bill to protect women athletes (which was quickly overridden by legislature), he justified by repeating the talking points of LGBT activists.  Specifically, he claimed “trans” kids would commit suicide if the bill became law.

In 2019, Cox — then Utah’s lieutenant governor — tearfully apologized to LGBT activists for the collapse of a proposed ban on conversion therapy. In early 2021, Cox came out in support of the Fairness For All Act, a Republican bill in the U.S. House that has been the subject of fierce social-conservative criticism for its attempt to write sexual orientation and gender identity into federal civil-rights law. Around the same time, he threatened to veto a proposed ban on gender-transition surgeries for minors, saying, “We have to be really careful any time government gets in between doctors and families and patients.” (That bill, HB 92, stalled out in the state legislature before reaching Cox’s desk.)

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My colleagues Leslie Ford and Erik Randolph have an op-ed in Real Clear Policy about what Congress should be doing with the reauthorization of the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act: Rather than putting forward solutions to our workforce problems that target serving these individuals, the WIOA that the Committee marked up focuses on giving unions more […]

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Caucusing Uncle Douglas

 

Hello everyone! Did you miss me? Were you celebrating my absence? Or are you among those who have no idea who I am/was? Doesn’t matter, here I go!

About six years go I decided to attend my district’s GOP caucus in Utah. The only other one I attended was back at the turn of the century when I lived in Blaine, MN, and we managed to nominate Alan Keyes for president in that state. So far, the Utah caucuses … caucususes … coccus … cauci … whatever … are less raucous, so there goes that joke. This year was informative as Utah had just redistricted so there were some growing pains here and there. Our district shaved some on the east and west and grabbed some voters from the south. They’re ours now for at least the next ten years so don’t even try and get them back.

Join Jim and Greg as they welcome new Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and applaud him following up on his campaign promises on his very first day. They also credit the FBI for a successful resolution to the hostage crisis at a Texas synagogue on Saturday but then fume as the bureau, the media, and the president claim the motive for the incident is a mystery. And they hammer the Salt Lake Tribune for suggesting the national guard should be called in to make sure the unvaccinated never leave their homes.

 

Lee’s Ferry

 

Lee’s Ferry

It’s not much more than a small dot on a map; but, despite that Lee’s Ferry has had an outsized import over the years. And, where and what is Lee’s Ferry you may ask? The where is on the Colorado River about 9 miles south of the Utah- Arizona border and, as later would be determined, also as good a boundary as any between the river’s upper and lower basins.  The what is the only location along the river between the small hamlet of Hite, Utah (now submerged under Lake Powell) and Black Canyon (the site of Hoover Dam), a distance of over 450 miles at which it is possible to access and cross the Colorado River with relative ease. Otherwise, the rest of the river between these two points had steep canyon walls making access to and crossing of the river difficult if not impossible, while the Lee’s Ferry area had gentle slopes that could easily be traversed.

Utah Wheels and Rails, Part 2 (Conclusion)

 

(Announcer:) Turn down the lights! You’ve tuned in to Ricochet Silent Radio, our long running theater of the mind. Last night, we began this week’s adventure, Utah Wheels and Rails, a work of fan fiction featuring actual Ricochet members in the Beehive State. And now, the second half, the conclusion.

(Voice of Jason Rudert:) A week went by. I sent the rocket booster metal X-rays to Houston, addressed to nobody special at “The NASA Archives”. I received a form letter of thanks, which was nice.

Half Right News

 

The Jim Bohannon Show included a short bit of news on a woman who had bought a Utah ghost town, in which this artist is now the only resident. Looking up Eileen Muza and the town of Cisco yielded a story that, like the radio show segment, was obviously incomplete, or should have been so. See if you can spot the problem in the Denver Post/AP story:

Eileen Muza is the sole resident of Cisco, Utah, a scattering of old buildings in the high desert 30 miles west of the Colorado line, KUTV reports. The town was created in the 1880s as a fill-station for a railroad, but died off when Interstate 70 was built a few miles north.

Think about it. A fill-station for a railroad was a logistics node where water and coal would be loaded into steam locomotives. The arrival of an interstate highway would have nothing to do with the railroad. So, we need to fill in the rest of the story.

Salt Lake City Meetup and Associated Adventures

 

A handful of us went to SpikeCon, a large science fiction convention in Layton, UT, and had a Ricochet Meetup after the convention. But there was a lot more to the trip than that. Since @katiekoppelman lives near us, she rode along with my wife (Sarah) and me. We caught up with others along the way. The first day was just straight driving from Fargo, ND, to Sheridan, WY. When we went to supper, we saw that Sheridan has a lot of western- and wildlife-themed sculptures along the downtown sidewalks. Since it was raining a little after we got out of the restaurant, we decided to take some time to tour the sculpture scene the next morning before hitting the road.

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Yes, 2019. Of course it seems absurd to advertise an evening meetup so far in advance, but there is a reason. Some of us are going to be in Layton, Utah (a little north of Salt Lake City) for WesterCon 72, a fairly large science fiction convention that runs from July 4-7, 2019. Since many […]

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Ordinarily, the second-place finisher in a presidential election doesn’t have a second political act. But the times aren’t ordinary and Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP nominee, is now a US Senate candidate in Utah. Hoover research fellow Lanhee Chen, Romney’s 2012 policy director, discusses what compelled his former boss to make the run and whether Romney will be a Trump White House ally or nemesis.

Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America welcome the retirement of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and give him credit for the things he’s done well, and while they like Mitt Romney, they wonder if Utah is missing out on a younger and more conservative replacement for Hatch.  They also slam President Trump for his childish tweet about having a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong-Un.  And they react to Steve Bannon unloading on his former White House rivals and accusing Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort of treason.

Update:  Since this recording, Trump has responded to Bannon.  “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency.  When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”  Trump also accuses Bannon of leaking extensively during his time in office.

Yes, Trump Has the Power to Shrink National Monuments

 

President Trump announced Monday that he will shrink the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, declared only a year ago by President Obama, by 1 million acres (an 85 percent reduction). He also declared that he would shrink the Grand Staircase-Escalante monument by 800,000 acres (a 46 percent reduction).

Trump told a rally in Salt Lake City that he came to “reverse federal overreach” and took dramatic action “because some people think that the natural resources of Utah should be controlled by a small handful of very distant bureaucrats located in Washington. And guess what? They’re wrong.”

Regardless of the merits of reduction, it should be clear that President Trump has the authority to shrink or totally reverse the declaration of a national monument by a previous President. Presidents can designate national monuments under a delegation by Congress in the Antiquities Act of 1906. The Act does not address the process for reversing the designation, but neither do most statutes. Instead, we assume that a lawmaker uses the same process to undo a legal act — Congress passes a new statute to repeal an earlier law.

Pondering the Mormon Question of Election 2016

 

As polling suggests Utah may not vote for the Republican for the first time in 52 years, many wonder why the reddest of states and its prominent socially conservative religious group are drifting away from the party. It’s tempting to chalk it up to a simple answer: last go around, they had one of their own at the top of the ticket and he was expected to assure the public and his party that he is against having multiple wives, but this time, the GOP nominee and party leaders take the position that multiple wives are dandy so long as they’re consecutive, not simultaneous. Glibness is fine for the screamers of cable news, but let’s strive for better. The Mormon question is a complex one. There are theological and cultural influences at play that deserve exploration.

Even among other devout Christians, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints–which from now on I will refer to as Mormons for the sake of clarity and brevity–is considered unusual. As religious belief wanes and socially liberal attitudes enjoy ever wider acceptance [1] Mormons and the religious right have found each other fighting the same enemies, but their alliance is not based on perfect harmony. Media coverage has unsurprisingly focused on the peculiar aspects of the religion, like sacred undergarments and the sinfulness of drinking coffee, while giving attention, that is at most cursory, to the doctrines that are significantly different from other Christian sects.

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I’ve just come home from an Evan McMullin for President rally in Provo, Utah. (News report from local newspaper.) I’m convinced that Evan is the real deal. Remember when people accused Mitt Romney of speaking conservatism as a second language? That’s not McMullin. He speaks like a native. He cares about poverty. He cares about […]

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Sure, you have all been watching the presidential campaign like no one’s business because unlike the rest of Americans, we Ricochetti eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and maybe for a midnight snack followed by a shot of Scotch. Of course, there’s other races going on, and as anyone notes, the Senate and […]

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This article was re–published a few years ago in Central Utah’s Richfield Reaper newspaper, as a retrospective. I thought it was apropos of some of our recent discussions here. Originally published Saturday, April 29, 1916. Volume XXVII number 21. DEPUTY MARSHAL SHOT IN EARLY MORNING RAID Preview Open

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