Blog Archives - Jay Evensen

Utah lawmaker emboldened in fight against pornography

5/31/2016

Last month, as protests engulfed North Carolina after passage of a bill requiring transgender people to use bathrooms correlating with their birth gender, one of the world’s most popular porn websites inadvertently gave a Utah lawmaker an epiphany.

The site started a boycott of North Carolina in reaction to the law. Anyone identified as having an IP address within its boundaries got nothing but a

Voting in Utah? Get your decoder ring

5/25/2016

Author Tom Peters has said, “If you're not confused, you're not paying attention.”

He would love trying to vote in Utah this year.

As the lieutenant governor’s office puts it, the state is in transition when it comes to casting ballots. You might say we’ve gone from hanging chads to a system where voters practically need a decoder ring to figure out what to do.

Like it or not, money and politics will always go together

5/24/2016

I have met a lot of politicians in my career. If they have one thing in common, it is this: They say they hate begging people to donate money to their campaigns.

I also have met a lot of voters. If they have one thing in common, it is that they hate the (at least perceived) influence big donors have on politicians; just as they hate how much money it takes to get elected.

It's best to forget about another Utah Olympics

5/18/2016

I’m not a fan of bringing the Olympics back to Utah, but I am forced to admit that if any place in the world could return sanity to a worldwide spectacle that is spending its way into oblivion, this is the place.

Perhaps the Chicago Tribune said it best in an editorial two years ago. When the United States Olympic Committee decides which city to bid for the 2026 Winter Games, “Salt Lake is the best choice — if only to make the IOC look like fools for rejecting it,” the paper said.

The IOC is the International Olympic Committee, whose members embroiled the 2002 Salt Lake games in a bribery scandal. The Tribune said it wasn’t convinced the IOC had changed, noting its recent penchant to entertain bids from countries

Farmland keeps disappearing, and it won't come back

5/17/2016

No one needs to stop the presses to report that America’s farmland is dwindling. All you have to do is look at your own genealogy to see the story unfold.

I’m guessing you won’t have to go back too many generations to find people who supported themselves through farming, whereas chances are you don’t.

Walking blindly toward national marijuana acceptance

5/11/2016

If you want to start an argument, try saying the legalization of marijuana has led to an increase in automobile accidents nationwide.

You may have read recently that the AAA Foundation for Public Safety released a new study showing an increase, since the legalization of pot there, in the percentage of Washington state drivers involved in accidents who had used the drug within hours of their crash. Similarly, the Utah Highway Safety Office reports an enormous

Rain's deception; and did you abandon the GOP?

5/11/2016

If, like me, you huddled under shelter Monday while rain bounced off the asphalt like thousands of tiny rubber balls, you may be interested in scanning some of the issues Utah’s currents are carrying downstream this spring. Here’s a sampling from my files:

Water, everywhere: Rain can be deceiving. When it comes after years of drought, we forget we live in the nation’s second driest state (behind Nevada), and one of the nation’s fastest growing states (sixth, according to Census figures released late last year).

Rude behavior in politics, culture has consequences

5/4/2016

The Fox News website posted a straightforward story earlier this month about President Obama’s daughter, Malia, and her plans to attend Harvard in 2017, after taking a year off from school.

It didn’t take long before the site had to remove all comments from the story. As the Teen Vogue website reported, people were calling the president’s daughter all sorts of nasty things, from “ape” to the infamous “N” word.

EPA's one-size-fits-all approach to pollution won't work

5/3/2016

Let’s start with the premise that just about everyone in Utah wants clean air.

Something about taking a breath, the most fundamental of human needs, erases the conservative impulse to avoid regulations from Washington. And we’ve all lived through those days when the air here is so dense and heavy we have to wipe it from our windshields before heading to work.

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