Jay Evensen - Opinions

Will Utah finally get a homeless czar?

11/11/2020

In Utah, homelessness is up, for adults and, most disturbingly, children. Demand for shelter space is rising.
Is this where you expected the state to be more than three years after police swooped into the Rio Grande area of downtown and politicians declared an end to homelessness as we had known it? Looking back, is the following paragraph something you expected to read in a report in 2020?

Here's the Thanksgiving invitation you should send

11/10/2020

If you’re looking for a good way to invite people to Thanksgiving dinner, here’s a suggestion:
“You are cordially invited to Thanksgiving Dinner at our house. In preparation, please quarantine yourself, and the people with whom you live, beginning Nov. 12 and ending when you arrive at our house. Please also get tested for the coronavirus during this time and bring proof of a negative test result to the dinner. You will not be admitted without this.”
If we were serious about stemming a spike in Covid-19 cases, or about the emergency alert that jolted every Utahn with a cell-phone blast Sunday night, this is the only responsible way to do it.

Ranked choice voting isn't fit for prime time

11/4/2020

For a while late Tuesday night, amid the confusion of close races and the teetering balance of power in the Senate, it appeared that the rubber of ranked choice voting might hit the road screeching.
It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

Keeping a contentious election in perspective

11/3/2020

What can a 2-year-old girl in far-away Turkey and a bunch of photos from outer space teach us on the morning after an election? What do they mean in the aftermath of a campaign season some people told us was as important as life or death?
Plenty, if we’re willing to pay attention.
Election seasons are tsunamis of exaggeration and earthquakes of hyperbole. Almost all of this is directed at the two candidates running for president. From social media to commercials on television, the messages we received were dire. One candidate would lead us off a cliff of irresponsibility, while the other would drag us into a swamp of socialism and ruin. You decide.
It’s as if all those high school lessons about checks and balances, three co-equal branches, vetoes and filibusters were mere fairy tales, while real big bad wolves and wicked stepmothers reside on paper ballots, surrounded by barbed wire obstacle courses we must navigate with blue- or black-inked pens.

Trump-Biden isn't the most important thing on your ballot

10/28/2020

"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but inform their discretion." -- Thomas Jefferson.

Americans will write a new chapter Tuesday in Jefferson’s theory of the safe depository of ultimate powers. Millions already have written their part, having cast early ballots in a pandemic-induced stampede of ballots by mail.

How are you going to handle Halloween?

10/27/2020

Will you open the door for trick-or-treaters on Saturday? If you’re going out with a small child, will you insist the child wear a cloth mask and stay at least six feet away from any other child or adult you might encounter? How will you make sure that happens?
At a time when, as of Tuesday, the rolling seven-day average of new COVID-19 cases was 1,507 per day in Utah, and when beds are being readied at Sandy’s Mountain America Expo Center to handle the overflow from maxed-out hospitals, these may be the biggest questions facing Utahns right now — bigger, perhaps, than the election.

Why are you still getting robocalls?

10/21/2020

Working from home, I have been marking my days by the telephone calls. If it’s 10:30 a.m., Donald Trump will call.
Well, not really Donald Trump, but a robocall of him. At 11, I get another robocall from someone telling me about health care. By noon, I’ve gotten at least one warning that my car’s warranty has expired.
The worst day was when I got a call from some guy on the east coast, threatening me with bodily harm if I didn’t stop calling and harassing him with robocalls. It was a Saturday morning. I hadn’t picked up a telephone all day, neither to send nor receive a call. But he would have none of that explanation, and I was glad we were separated by a couple of thousand miles.
My number had, of course, been spoofed by a telemarketing company, making it look as if this man’s caller ID was reporting my number.

Why COVID-19 may be linked to DUI, speeding tickets

10/20/2020

My morning was humming along nicely Tuesday, until I came across the latest survey on good drivers by the insurance quote site QuoteWizard.com.
It tagged Utah as the state with the 14th highest drunk driving rate and as the 49th worst for speeding. That’s 49th, as in second best of the 50 states.
Tell that to the crowd on I-15, or to the people I encounter on the street near my house, where traffic is supposed to go 25 mph, max.

Utah finally sends the mask message that matters most

10/14/2020

Any time you have to bring a calculator to a press conference in order to understand what’s being proposed, that isn’t a good sign. Utah officials haven’t exactly created something you can put on an anti-COVID-19 bumper sticker.
Let’s see, your county will face the highest pandemic restrictions if it has a positive test rate of 13% or more over seven days, or a two-week rate of 325 cases per 100,000 people and if intensive care units are at least 72% filled, including 15% or more of those being COVID-19 cases.
Wait, is this going to be on the quiz? Will the test be open-book? If you followed everything that was said at Tuesday’s press conference, you may be getting night sweats about studying that you haven’t had since college.

Why elections in Utah won't be like the rest of 2020

10/13/2020

And so it begins — the election season we hope isn’t typical of 2020.
Traditional wisdom, made famous by former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, is that all politics is local. Today, that seems as quaint as dial-up internet or a transistor radio. All politics is definitely national.
Got a state school board choice to make on your ballot? For many, the first question might be who the candidates support for president. Local shmocal.

weebly statistics

weebly reliable statistics

weebly statistics