On Second Thought is a lighthearted look at news of the day:
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert said last week that if Attorney General John Swallow were working for him, he’d be fired. Then he said he wasn’t calling for Swallow to resign. If Swallow ever seeks re-election, expect him to use only the second part of that statement in his ads.
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The Labor Department says more Americans are quitting their jobs, which it said is a good sign for the economy. No word yet on whether John Swallow wants to help the economy even more.
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President Obama hosted the Chinese leader last week, making sure the Chinese are still willing to make the federal government’s monthly credit card payments.
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Meanwhile, somewhere in an undisclosed hideout, the meeting of the secret society of government secret-stealers is about to come to order, Daniel Ellsberg presiding.
Ellsberg: We note the excused absence of Pfc. Bradley Manning. We’d also like to welcome our newest member, Edward Snowden!
Snowden: Thank you.
Julian Assange: Welcome, although I knew you’d be here.
Snowden: How’s that?
Assange: I took the liberty of stealing your diary and posting it online this morning.
Snowden: Oh really? Well, maybe you’d like to know what the NSA recorded you saying in a telephone call with a certain Swedish woman.
Ellsberg: Gentlemen! Gentlemen! Why must this always happen?
Snowden: So, who gave the Atlantic those pictures of me as a teenager?
Ellsberg: I don’t know, but now I believe that clearly some things ought to remain secret.
(Enter Chinese leader Xi Jinping)
All: What are you doing here?
Xi: You guys are easy to find. We hacked into the IRS, which gave us Snowden’s Social Security number, which helped us track his calls through the NSA, which helped us get his VISA card number, which let us trail him to the convenience store down the street. A breakfast burrito? Really?
All: (laughter)
Xi: There’s only one problem.
All: What?
Xi: Once we hacked into the IRS, the tea party was on to us. They followed me and are waiting outside, wondering if we will let them join.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.
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| On Second Thought is a weekly feature that takes a lighthearted look at the news.
BY JAY EVENSEN
DESERET NEWS
The Transportation Security Administration made a compromise of sorts last week. It won’t allow people to carry pocketknives aboard planes, but it also won’t stop frisking 100-year-old women.
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Also, kids will still have to give up the plastic bats they got while at a baseball game on vacation. All it takes is
| one toddler who learned to play ball at a terrorist camp in Pakistan.
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Of course, most other people on a plane with a toddler wish he would be part of a sleeper cell, at least for the duration of the flight.
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So now it turns out that guy wandering through television commercials with a Verizon phone repeating, “Can you hear me now?” was really a government agent.
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The National Security Agency has records of every Verizon call. That’s sort of creepy. How can you tell the spies from the regular folks that are a part of the network following you around?
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Remember the good old days when spies actually gathered intelligence on people outside the nation’s borders? Now it appears the Chinese who are spying on us probably knew we were spying on us before we did.
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As the NSA scandal unfolds, it’s apparent that Americans will have to rewrite some of their historic and cultural references. Here are some suggested updates:
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• “Ask not what your country can do for you; we won’t give back your phone records.”
• “Speak softly and carry a big case that won’t let you accidentally pocket dial Pakistan.”
• “Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say, ‘I hope Washington can’t wiretap my thoughts!’”
• “We have nothing to fear but fear itself. But, just to be safe, we’ll send a letter rather than call.”
• “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, if you’re visiting these countries, do not place a call to me.”
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The administration said it is necessary to spy on Americans in order to protect national security. That’s different from how the Soviets used to operate because we get to vote now and then; also, we have the Super Bowl.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.
| | A lighthearted look at news of the day:
Apparently, Mexico has a new strategy for getting tourists to stay a few extra days. It’s unclear, however, how people are supposed to spend money while they’re locked in jail on false drug charges.
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Mexican federales arrested 42-year-old Yanira Maldonado, a mother of seven from the Phoenix area, saying she had marijuana under her seat on a bus. Well of course, it was obvious. If you’re a drug peddler, you know the last place they ever look is under your bus seat.
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|  Maldonado’s husband was advised to bribe the judge. Ah, so that’s where the extra tourist spending comes in.
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Last week the nation was fixated on flopping, or the art of pretending to be injured. But enough about how politicians debate sequestration.
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You have to hand it to Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michelle Bachman. Not many politicians can announce they are quitting and have both major parties see it as a possible gain for their side.
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Meanwhile, reports say LeBron James flinched and fell down last week while passing a referee in a hallway.
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The problem with the Scripps National Spelling Bee is the contestants have no credible way to Tweet about their experiences without misspelling the winning words. Contestants ought to lobby to have no words longer than 140 characters.
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“Amimia,” “laureation,” “morosoph,” “diplodocus” — these were among the words misspelled in the semifinal round. The winning word was “knaidel,” a German-derived Yiddish word for a matzo ball. Rest assured that your word processor probably puts red lines under each of them.
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What’s that? Could I use that in a sentence? Sure: “You morosoph, I can hardly expect laureation for my eloquence if I am forced to use amimia, like the leader of some herd of diplodocus, to tell you I would like a knaidel.”
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Ten public universities and state school systems have contracted with Coursera, a company that offers online college courses for credit. This is the future of higher education. Now all we need is a good computer football simulation to enhance online school spirit.
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Students in the future won’t be able to say, “My dog ate my homework.” However, they could say, “The cloud was down this morning,” which is an excuse even their hippie grandparents never dreamed of using.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.
| | A lighthearted look at issues of the day:
This is graduation season, or the time when years of hard work earns you the reward of sitting in a long, boring meeting and balancing a piece of cardboard on your head.
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Congratulations! Here’s your diploma. Your first student loan payment is due Friday.
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Lois Lerner, the director of the IRS division that apparently didn’t like conservative groups, invoked the Fifth Amendment last week to avoid testifying about this before Congress. Thousands of audited taxpayers now have a new strategy.
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Members of Congress were clearly upset at Lerner’s decision not to testify. For one thing, politicians can’t imagine someone actually not wanting to speak when a camera is present.
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Lerner told Congress she had done nothing wrong, just before she said she wasn’t going to say anything more. In retrospect, we all would have been better off if Bill Clinton had used this strategy in the Monica Lewinsky matter.
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Not long after this, the IRS released a statement saying, “We have no knowledge of an employee named Lois Lerner.”
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Two would-be criminals in Fresno got caught last week because one of them accidentally “pocket dialed” 911 while breaking into a car. Isn’t that always how it goes? You can station lookouts on all sides but forget about who is listening in your pants.
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Some emergency dispatch centers say about one-third of the calls they field are from phones accidentally dialed from within pockets. It’s a good thing first responders are there to save our rear ends.
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Authorities rank “pocket dialing” criminals right up there with the ones who brag about their exploits on Facebook or Twitter. It’s enough to make you lose faith in the rising generation of thugs.
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Apple’s CEO had to explain to Congress last week why his company took pains to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The hearing almost coincided with that of IRS official Lois Lerner, who was asked to explain why the IRS has been abusing its power. Apparently, no one saw the irony.
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Apple is in trouble because its CEO feels U.S. corporate tax rates are too high and its stockholders are demanding the highest possible returns. When he used the words “thrift” and “profit,” senators had to recess to find a dictionary.
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Fox is starting a new reality show in which real workers at real companies have to decide which of them should be fired. Apparently, some television networks haven’t caught the vision of how the economy needs companies to create jobs, not destroy them.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen. |
| |  On Second Thought is a weekly feature that takes a lighthearted look at current events.
The state announced last week that the Timpanogos Highway again has to face months of more construction work. The road, which originally was supposed to open in May 2011, has had more false starts than a track meet in an earthquake.
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Thanks to the missed deadlines and traffic snarls, Utahns now have come to dread these 10 words, “We’re from UDOT and we’re here to help your commute.”
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The Timpanogos Highway ought to qualify for federal stimulus money. After all, few projects seem so perpetually shovel ready.
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Contrary to public opinion, President Obama did not have the worst of all possible weeks last week. For instance, he didn’t order a drone strike on a litter of cute puppies.
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It was impressive, however, to see his administration angering State Department employees, conservative groups and then, in a perfect finale, the media. It sort of made his first-term fight with the Catholic Church look like, well … a tea party.
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I’ll say this, Obama has succeeded in uniting divergent groups. Word is AP reporters soon will be donning tricorn hats.
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So, the IRS was investigating conservative groups and now the government will be investigating those investigators, while people are urging an investigation into how the Justice Department investigated phone records from the Associated Press. Kids, there is a lesson here. Go to school to become an investigator.
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Abercombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries says he wants only beautiful, slim people wearing his company’s clothes. So why is it those people seem to be wearing hardly any clothes at all in company advertisements?
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Maybe the clothes are so exclusive no one qualifies to wear them. What a brilliant marketing plan!
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Abercrombie & Fitch, meanwhile, has signed an international agreement to make sure garment workers in Bangladesh have safe working conditions. The company says it doesn’t want poor people wearing its clothes, just making them.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.
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 On Second Thought is a lighthearted weekly feature examining current events.
Obama administration officials had trouble at congressional hearings last week when they couldn’t quite place the location of Benghazi, Libya. After all, so much time has passed since last September’s attack on the U.S. consulate there.
Gregory Hicks, deputy to murdered U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, provided stark testimony about the administration’s failure to act during the attack in Libya, to which the administration said, “Wow, isn’t this sequestration awful?”
A State Department official testified that the movie, “Innocence of Muslims” really had nothing to do with the Benghazi attack and was a “non-event” in Libya. Other than calling into question the administration’s original statements blaming the movie, this statement exonerates Libyans from going crazy over perhaps the worst movie in the history of film.
The Internet is now 20 years old. Just think, in the mid-90s you wouldn’t think of tweeting in public, and a worldwide web would have taken an enterprising spider an incredible effort. If you got a virus, you actually went to a doctor, not some kid fresh out of college. Progress is great, isn’t it?
The owner of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, said last week he was ready to build passenger spaceships to carry people through sub orbit. The only problem would be figuring out how many G-forces the average person could absorb safely. Well, that and how they would pour peanuts from those bags into their hands in zero gravity.
Ogden’s police department wants to use drones to help keep the peace. I suppose drones sound like a natural fit for the beehive state.
Opponents, however, argue the world has no use for a drone, which also has a familiar ring to it.
Three climbers and their sherpas apparently got into a fist fight on Mount Everest recently. Well, that’s one way to stay warm.
I’m no climbing expert, but it would seem unwise to anger the locals you have hired to show you the way up a steep and treacherous mountain.
Whether it’s 2013 or 1993, the dawn of the Internet Age, no one wants to be downloaded from Mount Everest.
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|  On Second Thought is a weekly feature that takes a lighthearted look at current events.
President Obama has once again vowed to close the prison for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, if only he could find the darned key.
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Rumor has it he asked the former president for it during the opening of Bush library, but W. said he thought Dick Cheney still had the keys.
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Congress and the president have decided not to furlough air traffic controllers after all. Instead, they just won’t pay them.
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Five years after the Great Recession, home prices finally are spiking upward again. That means Congress can once again take the money it spent helping people avoid foreclosure and divert it to helping poor people get homes they can’t afford.
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Boeing officials say the company is working on a plane that would have the longest range of any passenger jet. The trick is designing a galley large enough to hold the amount of peanuts and pretzels needed to keep people alive from London to Honolulu.
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The Defense Department announced last week it won’t permit any religious proselytizing in the military. In other words, it may be true there aren’t any atheists in foxholes, but anyone trying to press the issue could get court martialed.
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Americans were infused with hope last week that strong leadership would emerge to vanquish the stubborn ideologues in Washington and save the nation’s long-term economy from ruin. But then they learned Iron Man is fictional.
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If Washington wrote its own superhero movie, the House version would have Austerity Man battling the evil forces of Sequestration and the Deficit Hog. The Senate version would have Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to … the Deficit Hog.
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Social media is filled with sophisticated, modern, Information-Age consumers who know they can trust crowd sourcing more than the mainstream media. That’s why, not long after the Boston Marathon bombings, the Czech embassy had to release a statement instructing Twitter and Facebook users that, contrary to what many people were posting, the Czech Republic is not the same as Chechnya.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.
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| Politicians in Washington thought they could scare us with long lines at the airport. Ha! That’s like scaring Britons with fog.
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Inconvenience at an airport? This is news? That’s kind of like fruitcake at Christmas — inevitable, distasteful, hardly a surprise, but something you have to endure to get to grandma’s house.
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Besides, Americans don’t worry about canceled flights because they relish food vouchers for greasy restaurants and a night at a bad hotel without luggage.
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It was interesting to see how quickly Congress acted when airline passengers started complaining. If we could somehow tie rising air fares to the growth of the national debt, our problems soon would be solved.
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Federal officials, meanwhile, are trying to explain why they arrested an apparently innocent Mississippi man for sending ricin-laced envelopes to the president and members of Congress. At least his name wasn’t Richard Jewell.
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Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o wasn’t picked the first round of the NFL draft last week. Maybe coaches worried he would chase imaginary ball carriers.
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Given the questionable, and sometimes illegal, exploits of some athletes off the field, being true to a fictional girlfriend shouldn’t be a concern.
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Former president George W. Bush learned this week that his poll numbers are up. If the key to popularity is to not say much for four years, I don’t think a lot of politicians have it in them.
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Meanwhile, the approval rating for Congress fell to 13.5 percent. Apparently, not saying anything is not the same as not doing anything.
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Imagine bringing Alexander Hamilton back from the dead and trying to explain to him how a false tweet nearly started a panic on Wall Street last week.
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The market went into a brief selling frenzy when someone hacked into the Associated Press’ Twitter account and tweeted that the White House had been attacked and the president hurt. This happened because computers were selling in a sort of autopilot mode. Apparently, computers are not levelheaded in a crisis — something to remember in case your toilet overflows in sight of your laptop.
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Wall Street investors are really computers? So it’s true what they say about those financiers being heartless.
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In other aviation news, Boeing is set to begin delivery of its 787 soon. But unless Congress solves sequestration, they won’t actually get clearance to take off until some time in 2015.
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen. |
| | On Second Thought is a weekly feature that takes a lighthearted look at current events:
Samoa Air has started charging people by their weight. This presents a new option for shy single people on Internet dating sites. From now on, just list your height, eye color and airfare to Apia.
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Maybe the airline can offer aerobics classes at departure gates for those looking for a quick discount.
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An opinion poll found most Americans would not want to pay by weight for their flight, but they sure wish the guy hogging the middle seat next to them would.
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Google has agreed to take Provo’s ill-fated fiber optic system off its hands and provide mostly free Internet for everyone. There are some conditions, but they’re minor. I’m sure people will eventually get used being known as residents of Googleville.
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The FCC received a lot of criticism last week for its proposal to loosen its standards and allow fleeting nudity and obscenity on television. It responded by saying @!&*#!.
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FCC officials apparently worry too many adults feel deprived by the lack of quality, thought-provoking fleeting nudity and obscenity in their entertainment.
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Next month will mark 52 years since then-FCC chairman Newton Minow declared television a “vast wasteland.” All in all, I’d rather have a wasteland than a sewage dump.
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How many times have you heard people say, “That was an OK show, but I wish it had more fleeting obscenities and nudity”?
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NASA announced last week it has discovered two planets that may be ideal for supporting life. The best news? Officials said nothing about intelligent life, meaning these may be ideal for most of us.
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The two planets are next to each other. One is warm like Hawaii. The other is cold like Alaska. If there is life there, I can guess which planet is the most popular.
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The chief scientist in charge of the telescope that found the planets said if they do contain life, “it must be very advanced.” You mean there’s something better than HDTV?
Follow Jay Evensen on Twitter @jayevensen. |
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| Members of both parties said last week they had reached a compromise on requiring background checks for gun purchases. Most gun merchants said they don’t care what background you have on your checks, just that they won’t bounce.
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Meanwhile, a knife-wielding assailant stabbed several people last week at a college near Houston. Get ready for knife-control bills in Congress.
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The Ginsu lobby is already marshaling its forces.
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Santa Clara beat George Mason to win the College Basketball Invitational tournament, which is for those not good enough to make either the NCAA or the NIT. In equally relevant news to most Americans, President Obama unveiled his latest budget proposal.
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Last year, the House and Senate both unanimously rejected Obama’s budget — one of the few moments of true bipartisanship in recent years.
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This time, the president came up with new ideas, such as raising taxes on the rich and spending a lot more.
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Obama counts $167 billion the government never intended to spend as a savings due to a drawdown of war costs, then uses that to fund other projects. He forgot to include the savings from not funding a trip to Saturn and not having to pay ransom to an intergalactic overlord who might threaten our very existence. Think what that could fund.
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Meanwhile, Congress last week scribbled “return to sender” on a plan to end Saturday delivery and sent it back to the U.S. Postal Service.
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Apparently, lawmakers didn’t want to ruin their record of being utterly incapable of considering plausible solutions to any financial crisis.
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J.C. Penney has fired the hotshot CEO it acquired from Apple. It wasn’t his fault. Who know that doing away with sales and telling older shoppers they’re not wanted was a bad business strategy?
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Utah Gov. Gary Herbert left on a two-day trade mission to a Third World country last week. No wait, California is still a state.
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How long will it take before a group of cub scouts wants to turn the landslide at the Bingham Copper mine into the world’s coolest pinewood derby ramp?
Jay Evensen is the associate editor of the Deseret News editorial page. Follow him on Twitter @jayevensen.
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