All Categories - Jay Evensen

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.

Why not make everyone's income tax returns public?

10/7/2020

If you think the legal battle over President Donald Trump’s tax returns is heated, you should have been around in October of 1924.
That was when Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon decided to take literally the wording of that year’s new revenue law, which said the names, addresses and amounts of income taxes paid by everyone filing a return that year “shall as soon as practicable … be prepared and made available to public inspection…”
Suddenly, newspapers everywhere reported that John D. Rockefeller Jr., paid $7,435,169.41 in income taxes, to lead all Americans, and that, curiously, banker J.P. Morgan Jr., paid only $98,643.

Covid? Protests? Should we really be hosting a debate?

10/6/2020

Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate at the University of Utah will go as scheduled -- at least it looks that way right now.
But stay tuned to the news alerts on your phone. This is a Covid world, after all. A last-minute positive test for either candidate might change everything, at which point the millions in public and private money invested in the event would be lost.
As for the folks in Miami and Nashville, hosts to the next two planned presidential debates? Well, stay tuned. President Trump said Tuesday he plans to be in Miami. Doctors might say otherwise. Joe Biden and moderator Steve Scully of C-SPAN might not want to risk it.

How America rebounds from that debate debacle

9/30/2020

Want some perspective on Tuesday night’s so-called presidential debate? Try watching the first Nixon-Kennedy debate from approximately the same date in 1960.
You need only watch a few minutes. I’ll give you a taste.
John F. Kennedy, speaking uninterrupted by his opponent, says in his opening statement, “We can no longer afford to be second best. I want people all over the world to look to the United States again, to feel that we're on the move, to feel that our high noon is in the future.”
A few minutes later, Richard Nixon responds, again uninterrupted, “The things that Senator Kennedy has said, many of us can agree with.”

We need more basement rental units

9/29/2020

I have relatives who recently built a house along the Wasatch Front, in a city known for lenient ordinances about basement rentals. Their builder fashioned a nice basement unit with a separate entrance off the driveway.
In spite of this, they have run into nit-picking city planners with rulers and yardsticks who are making the permitting process difficult.

Here's why politicians may have the wrong covid strategies

9/23/2020

In Utah, Gov. Gary Herbert seemed determined this week to preserve the principle of localism, as well as the state’s lowest-in-the-nation unemployment rate, in the face of a dramatic resurgence of COVID-19.
His decision to reimpose “orange” level restrictions on Provo and Orem alone — tempting defiant young adults there to simply move their parties to nearby Lindon or Springville — was bound to generate criticism from those who believe not enough is being done.
But Utah County’s decision, only hours later, to finally impose a countywide mandate was filled with political risk, as well. As a group of angry people made clear during a crowded county commission meeting several weeks ago, the thought of wearing a mask gives delicate political belles down there a case of the vapors.

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