Politics

Jun

2023

The roads are awful in Pleasant Grove

This morning I went on a run in Pleasant Grove Utah and the roads sucked. I live in Spanish Fork and I run regularly on the roads in my home town. In Spanish Fork the roads are great. Not so much in Pleasant Grove.

Here is a photo tour of my misadventures on the rough roads of the P Grove.

Patches like this are very common. Wear and uneven weathering are all over.

In this location it appears as it it has been so long since any thought of repair that the road is degrading back to soil.

Here we have decent erosion from storm water.

So what I see here isn’t a bad road as much as a bad design. The sidewalk entering the park just comes to an end requiring you to use an automobile automobile to enter the park. The whole point of a park is having a place for people to be outside as individuals walking. Why not extend the sidewalk to allow for pedestrian access?

Another poor design, the storm drain is elevated above the road.

Irrigation ditch randomly between the road and the sidewalk. Further down the road the roadway properly extends to the sidewalk.

For some reason this newer house doesn’t extend its pavement of the driveway to the road.

Here is a concrete curve and gutter in terrible state. Just eroding away.

A fire hydrant behind a telephone pole, no red paint marking the restrictions on parking. Strangely enough the City that allows for this poor design also runs the fire department that likely would find this design dangerous.

There is a manhole for sewer access in the grass. Also all over town you can see evidence for where the road was dug up to put in pressurized irrigation. On this road they dug on both sides of the road leaving two tracks embedded in the road.

What do you want to bet that they only cover this trench instead of repaving this section of road?

Pleasant Grove Utah is a beautiful city, but the road infrastructure is in poor shape.

Aug

2021

Q Anon

I could barely believe it when I saw someone proudly sporting a Q anon flag in Spanish Fork this morning. For the uninitiated: Q anon is a conspiracy theory of a grand global cabal where left-wing politicians and elites are attempting to harvest the blood of children to feed their hunger and sick schemes of managing the world. This is crazy stuff, and it is linked to a belief that Trump will triumphantly return to power to kill the conspiracy.

What is unfortunate is that a lot of Republicans buy into this Q stuff, and they are increasingly able to move Republican politics. A party that pays attention to this make-believe narrative and elects nominees who believe in such will have a difficult time governing and actually appealing to those in the mainstream. A Republican party that can not compete in the marketplace of ideas is bad for the Democratic party as well in that it doesn’t check the excesses of the Democrats.

What do we do to solve this problem? Facts and arguments based in reality don’t tend to convince those who believe in conspiracies. It is like a religion, a deeply held belief that is not easily argued around. I’m not sure what a good solution is here, other than those who are leaders should marginalize these fringe beliefs instead of add fuel to the fire.

There will always be fringe among us. We should treat those with love, but not indulge their beliefs, and at the very least we should not allow their fringe beliefs to become mainstream in one of our two major political parties.

Jan

2020

Impeached Ad Rejected

I requested review from blip billboards on the impeached ad I mentioned earlier. It was fairly quickly flagged and not approved, however I requested an actual detail.

Here is what I got.

What I find interesting is that I’m not saying anything inflammatory, other than stating a single word: Impeached – which is a factual statement of the reality of Trump’s presidency. If anything is inflammatory it might be the picture.

I’ve re-submitted a new ad. Let’s see if it gets approved.

Jan

2020

Impeached

Driving home from the Clyde Recreation Center today with Miles I couldn’t help but notice the political ads running on the freeway. There was an ad for Spencer Cox with two bullet points:

Mediocre Farmer
Strong Conservative

I see Spencer Cox stuff all over the place, twitter, sports events, and his campaign tour bus. Heck, one time I even saw him at the Walmart by my house. Spencer Cox is a slick media operator, and his accessible ways might lead you to think he is more progressive than he is.

All of that aside, I remember back to the good old days in 2018 when I had a blip account and ran ads for my 2018 political campaign. This year they have a sign more ideally located in Spanish Fork. All of this lead me to concoct an idea to run a political ad for the good people of Spanish Fork.

This ad is simple, it has but one word: Impeached. It also features our President, with his typical loud mouth opened.

I’m running this ad for a few reasons.

Being impeached is never anything to be proud of, only three presidents were impeached, and it is not the most desired club.

The other reason is to remind my fellow citizens that this president is the embodiment of chaos, and that that chaos is directly tied to the Grand Old Party, aka the Republican party.

When voting most people care about the top of the ticket, and care very little about what comes down ballot. If I can do anything to make people question what they are voting for on the top of the ticket then I can feel better about the change I’m making in society.

Mar

2017

SNL Trump on Obamacare

[evp_embed_video url=”https://s3.amazonaws.com/content.ximz.com/video/snl-trump-obamacare.mp4″]
Alec Baldwin may have been a little prophetic in his portrayal of pre-inauguration Trump when it came to Obamacare.

Feb

2017

Bills and Bagels – Legislative update for Southern Utah County

This morning I attended the Bills & Bagels event at the Nebo School District office. The following legislators were in attendance:

Norm Thurston
Francis Gibson
Marc Roberts
Dedrie Henderson

The meeting felt almost routine in that it was more of a legislative update than anything that was too interactive. They discussed some of their bills, stated their positions on questions that were offered from the audience (via pink notecards), and briefly answered questions afterwards.

My question was the first addressed. I asked if the legislators would finally do something about teacher salaries, instead of punting to next year. Francis Gibson addressed my question and noted that they were working on a 3 percent increase, he noted how much that meant, which was tens of millions, and then he noted that the legislature also funded college education. It was an answer that said: “Yes we will increase funding.” But it didn’t really address if such funding was adequate.

There was a young individual in the audience who participated in drafting a bill that would install cameras on school buses and then ticket the individuals. Gibson again noted that while it is nice that people are getting involved, he wouldn’t support that bill, a cop would be better equipped to issue tickets.

There was some discussion from Marc Roberts on a bill he was working on to address issues with minors being labeled as sex offenders.

Norm Thurston noted some stats saying that 40 percent of Utahans had their health care paid for in part by the state, and he even made some comment that implied that some think teachers should be responsible for all of their health care costs.. which came across as weird given that we live in a country where employers foot the cost of health care.

Dedrie Henderson trumpeted her food truck bill, as well as a proposal to include the total cost of a bond at the top of all local bond proposals. She casted her bond proposal as a sort of government ethics reform, I thought of it as something more akin to posting calories at fast food restaurants. If you want that hamburger do you really care that it has 800 calories? If you want that bond does the cost scare you to voting no – for me probably not.

I was glad I attended, and will continue to do so. While not as exciting at the Chaffetz smack down earlier this month, it was a worthwhile event.

Feb

2017

So called President Trump

Trump is the President of the United States, and he has been so for over a month. What we all thought was completely unbelievable, what could never happen, is now our reality. Now that we’ve seen him as president we know that campaign Trump will not transition to a more mature and sober President Trump.

The last month feels like it has a choreographed attempt to overwhelm the American Public with absurd behavior, so much so that we will lulled into a sense of apathy when Trump does outrageous things.

To review just a handful of crazy things implemented by our Dear Leader:

The Travel Ban, hastily implemented, ultimately blocked by a court.
Communication with allies, terrible diplomacy, super sad.
New tweets that come early in the morning, with continuous insults and bluster.
An all-out assault on the media – claims that the media are an enemy of the American public.

I will not be silent, I will not support him, and I will not be driven to fatigue. I plan on attending every town hall I can, contacting my representatives. I plan on protesting, because if there is one thing that gets under this man’s skin it is seeing a mass assembly of people opposing him.

Dec

2016

At least one entry in 2016

I’ve kept this blog going for years but have really neglected it for a while. I don’t think I really intend on updating regularly, but for consistency sake and for good old tradition sake I’m posting something right now.

The last post noted I bought Star Wars tickets to the Force Awakens. Well a year has passed and I have already seen the next Star Wars move, Rogue One. Perhaps the best of the season.

I should mention that I’m extremely upset, and concerned about the future with the recent election of Donald Trump. Never in a million years would I have thought he would be president, and especially becoming it has he did, by trumping up racism. If I write here going forward, I may use it as a nice way to vent about what is going on with the presidency of the United States, and my general thoughts on the state of the republic.

That’s all for now.

Oct

2012

Election 2012 Prediction Map

Here is my map for 2012. Let’s see how I do:

Paul Jones Dayton predicts the electoral college results for 2012.

Feb

2012

Not concerned about the very poor

This video truly amazes me, but is doesn’t surprise me. If you have been following Romney’s campaigin, you will notice that he is always very cautious to not mention the poor. He loves to focus on the middle class, and I think he does so because a lot of people like to believe that they are middle clase (regardless of their actual income). Many very poor individuals in America probably believe they are in the middle class. Who wants to be really poor?

It is with this political calculus that Romney presses forward with the following quote.

On the surface this sounds like a political gaffe, but I think it truly exposes the way Romney, and in a larger sense, Republicans in general view the poor. They don’t feel as if they need to be politically accessible to the poor, and they don’t feel like it hurts them politically to ignore poor folk. I was floored when Romney deferred any political issues relevant to the poor to the purview of Democrats. Romney essentially said, “I don’t care about the poor, they are taken care of, and Democrats can deal with them.”

In a democracy a vote is a vote, regardless of the economic situation of the voter. And in these economically difficult times, middle class people who have been out of work for months may actually begin to believe they are really poor. Ask unemployed people if they believe in American social safety nets.

Politics

The roads are awful in Pleasant Grove

Q Anon

Impeached Ad Rejected

Impeached

SNL Trump on Obamacare

Bills and Bagels – Legislative update for Southern Utah County

So called President Trump

At least one entry in 2016

Election 2012 Prediction Map

Not concerned about the very poor

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