As you can see, the Salt Lake Tribune named seven-term senator Orrin Hatch Utahn of the year. That seems to be as far as Hatch or his aides read before tweeting. Let’s look at the editorial.
These things are often misunderstood. So, lest our readers, or the honoree himself, get the wrong impression, let us repeat the idea behind The Salt Lake Tribune’s Utahn of the Year designation.
The criteria are not set in stone. But this year, as many times in the past, The Tribune has assigned the label to the Utahn who, over the past 12 months, has done the most. Has made the most news. Has had the biggest impact. For good or for ill.
Prophetic words to start! Here’s the reasoning.
It has everything to do with recognizing:
- Hatch’s part in the dramatic dismantling of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
- His role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in passing a major overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
- His utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.
Each of these actions stands to impact the lives of every Utahn, now and for years to come. Whether those Utahns approve or disapprove of those actions has little consequence in this specific recognition. Only the breadth and depth of their significance matters.
Always worthwhile to read more than the headline before tweeting. Or is this more gaslighting from the ever-gaslighting Republican Party?
Reader Interactions
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sigaba
“My voters only read the headlines.”
kindness
Maybe Trump’s staff runs all the Congressional twitter accounts now. I wonder what the weather is like in St. Petersburg now?
p.a.
What bubble will result from pumping more $ to those who need it least? Real estate again? Bond, equity markets? Newbies like bitcoin? Gold toilet futures? All the above? Does the 13th A cover indentured servitude?
cynthia ackerman
… or the Senator thinks those are for better, not ill.
JMG
Orrin Hatch is plenty dumb enough to have tweeted this himself. Give the man some credit.
Uncle Cosmo
Just FTR, the SLT is the flagship rag of the Gentile** Utahns, those Later-The-Same-Day-Sinners who skulk like the Colosseum’s cats in the cracks of the Temple & Tabernacle & slip out whenever possible to tweak the stiff blue noses of their Mormonic overlords, whose paper-of-record is the Deseret Times.
**I.e., non-LDS. Only the Mormons could tag even an Orthodox Jew with the label “Gentile”…
Vixen Strangely
As the old song says, “Every knock is a Booooost!”
Quinerly
Speaking of tweets. Trump tweeted over 2500 times in 2017. Here of 60 of them by rank. A stroll down tweet lane, so to speak: https://thinkprogress.org/trumps-worst-tweets-706ab04ab3b8/
Spc
The tweet reads like snark to me. Given the Trib is a fairly liberal paper, they couldn’t have expected a glowing review. We are slways quick to assume incomptence but we should also make sure that is the case.
Yarrow
@Quinerly: I feel so sorry for the person tasked with doing that job. Ugh. I’m not clicking that link because just thinking about it I can feel my blood pressure rising.
Quinerly
@Uncle Cosmo: Salt Lake City does have a progressive side. It’s voters elected an openly Lesbian mayor in 2015.
Villago Delenda Est
Orrin Hatch has long been a pustule on the ass of humanity. It’s good to see he’s getting some credit for that.
MattF
Hatch will regard the the headline as reality and the editorial as ‘fake news’.
SiubhanDuinne
Yup. And Hatch doesn’t seem to grasp (any more than Trump ever has) that being named the “Bqhatevwr of the Year” (whether by Time or the SLT) is often a very far cry from being “Most Admired” or “Most Popular.”
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@p.a.:
As always, look for the real estate bubble to inflate so that rents will go through the roof and entrepreneurship can be crushed.
oatler.
Congrats, Orrin. Now off to the tumbrel.
magurakurin
@Quinerly: I was in SLC for a ski trip way back in 1997. I met some really cool folks. Climbers, skiers, and outdoor folks. In a cafe I chatted with a young woman about the town. She said there were a fair amount tuned in people in town, but still a clear minority. She said that one good thing was that it was easy for those folks to find each other since the majority Mormons were so obvious to spot and that in turn made it easier to tell who was hip and who wasn’t.
Gin & Tonic
@magurakurin: I’ve been to SLC at least 12-15 times since the early 1990’s, sometimes for the skiing, sometimes for business, sometimes for both. I’m not sure what it’s like to live there 24x7x365, but I found it a plenty cool-enough area as a visitor, with enough good food and drink to satisfy nearly anyone. And the mountains are second to none, IMO.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT: It’s like the whole media agreed to act out some kind of self-parody performance art
Shockingly, several confederate flags appear in the short video clip they’re tweeting to promote this
Another Scott
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’m not seeing any signs of a bubble yet – check CalculatedRiskBlog.com
But the market is weird. There’s not enough inventory for a sales boom, and new construction is still at relatively low levels. But lots of housing is being converted into rentals (too many MotU are hoping to make a fortune via AirBnB and the like). Keep an eye on the Price-to-Rent ratio.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who would look for a short-term bubble in tax-avoidance scams to try to take advantage of the Teabagger tax bill.)
jeffreyw
“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
“You took my pie!”
“All pie is my pie. That is the nature of pie, sir.”
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good God. They just aren’t going to stop fetishizing these drooling morons, are they?
ETA: Tweeted a similar comment at them. Jesus H. Christ! The most corrupt, least popular president in history, and they’re focusing on the con man’s marks instead of the con. Gah!
Schlemazel
@p.a.:
The majority of the money will go to stock buy backs. The Dow will inflate as fewer and fewer people own stock because there are fewer shares to own. This will reward people paid in stock options and screw everyone else.
Take IBM as an example. 22 quarters of declining revenue and profit but buy backs have kept share prices going up, richly rewarding those who deserve it least
Schlemazel
@p.a.:
The majority of the money will go to stock buy backs. The Dow will inflate as fewer and fewer people own stock because there are fewer shares to own. This will reward people paid in stock options and screw everyone else.
Take IBM as an example. 22 quarters of declining revenue and profit but buy backs have kept share prices going up, richly rewarding those who deserve it least
Betty Cracker
@Gin & Tonic: I used to have a job where I visited SLC at least once a year. Beautiful place. Weird, though.
Jager
@Gin & Tonic:
A friend of mine moved there in the mid-80’s. from Houston with his wife and child. He said the hardest thing to find in SLC was a three bedroom house. The three of them ended up with a 4 bedroom house they didn’t need. We had our own room when we visited for the skiing, so it worked out for us.
trollhattan
@Spc:
Orrin Hatch delivering snark seems as probable as Donald Trump embracing broccoli’s nutritional benefits. He has been especially awful this year, so kudos to the paper for laying the wood on him. Iowans need to do the same to Grassley–Hatch’s co-traveler.
trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Beautiful setting, the city itself leaves a lot to be desired and the street naming convention forces you to constantly remember who’s really in charge.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
It’s back to the norm, though, right? The status quo? Remember all the pieces about Forgotten Red State America after 2004?
These are the real voters. Everyone else is fake, an “interest group”.
It’s also amazing how Trump doesn’t have to “reach out” to anyone. What happened to that? Obama was ordered to reach out constantly. Why does Trump get a pass? Because he’s realer than Obama. More legitimate. The fake Americans must bridge barriers- the real Americans don’t have to. There’s a lower standard.
Another Scott
@Schlemazel: AFAIK, lots of non-MotU have stock in index funds and the like – e.g. the 20 million who own Vanguard.
To be clear, I agree that most of the money will be used for stock buy-backs (and mergers and off-shoring) and other relatively non-productive things. That’s the whole point, after all – to let those who control the biggest parts of our economy to get even bigger. And to let the MotU collect their rents by virtue of their position at the top of the pyramid. But those who are fortunate enough to own stock (or stock funds) will see some benefit (almost certainly not enough to overcome the damage done, though).
Cheers,
Scott.
Raoul
Dunno that I can claim original authorship of this, but while tweeting about the latest trans-atlantic skirmishes in our UK special relationship, I used the phrase “grievance-farming” to describe this maladministration.
Feel free to use if you find it handy.
And, I hope Prince Harry seats Obama and his lovely wife front and center at his pending wedding. Fuck Trump, and fuck Theresa May and her brittle Tory coalition.
Kay
I sure hope there’s some hard-working, career employee whistle blowers at some of these agencies Trump is destroying. Clearly no one else has the balls or will to stop him.
cmorenc
@Gin & Tonic:
The immediate Salt Lake City / Park City area is much more like Denver without the pot shops than the sort of environment you’d expect from a city founded with the Oz-like campus of the world headquarters of the LDS church dominating its very center. There is such an abundance of hippies and hard-core outdoor skiers, rock climbers, backcountry hikers, and progressive-minded people in SLC itself that most BJers would feel perfectly comfortable living there – with the caveat that many Mormon families in your neighborhood / kids in public schools are still rather insular toward non-LDS families, e.g your kid might not get invited to their LDS classmates birthday parties (so says a friend of ours who lives there). I too have been to SLC many times and stayed there for seven weeks when my older daughter was rehabbing from ACL surgery and had to go back to work before she could drive (ran out of sick days).
THAT SAID, once you go outside the immediate SLC area, say beyond about the southern suburb of Sandy (at the mouth of Little Cottonwood canyon where world-class ski areas Alta & Snowbird are) – you cross over into the parts of Utah still overwhelmingly dominated by Mormons, culturally and socially – and there are more than enough of them to still easily retain deep-red political control of the state. One counter-intuitive aspect of the political control of Mormons over the state is that although on big-scale issues like abortion etc. they are deeply right-wing, on many small-scale nuts-and-bolts civic issues they are surprisingly progressive e.g. Salt Lake city has first-rate public transport including well-routed light rail. Something else you are very likely to witness coming through the SLC airport as you exit the secure gate area down the escalator to the baggage claim is a substantial group of family and friends of some early 20s age Mormon kid there to greet his return from his two-year missionary duty in Obscuristan (some far-flung part of the world) – true, the purpose of the mission is to attempt to proselytize converts to the church from places where their religion is a bit of a hard sell – but OTOH it’s hard not to admire that their young men are expected to give two years of their lives toward a form of selfless service, and the warm atttaboy embrace they get upon their return. It would be a good thing if young men (and women) across the non-Mormon part of the US were similarly universally expected to give two years toward some sort of secular public service.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Scott: The stat I’ve heard thrown around for the last year or so is that about half of Americans own some stock. I heard Jared Bernstein on MSNBC say earlier that (from memory) 84% of stock is owned by the top 10%. I think he said 40% of stock is owned by the 1%, but I’m less sure of that one.
That was one of Russet’s tics back in the day: “We all have money in the stock market these days”
Kay
Boy, what cowards Wray and Sessions are. They can’t even stick up for their own people. Imagine having such a weak, captured boss. Utterly dominated and owned. Christ, I hope there isn’t a crime wave. These two wimps won’t be much use.
hitchhiker
Moved to SLC for awhile in the mid-70s — fantastic & bizarre place at that time. It was very much like being a teenager again, because “above” you were all these Very Serious Adults going about their Very Serious Stuff, and you were pretty much free to hang out with your friends in a clean, well-maintained, functioning city. (As a terminally location-challenged person, I really appreciated their street numbering system. Even for me, it was impossible to get lost.)
I had a waitress job that easily paid my expenses, because that was the economy we enjoyed in those days.
I hope Hatch ignores this editorial (once he realizes what it says), then runs and loses! It could happen. Romney or McMullin enters as an independent, the Dems run a strong candidate, the vote splits just right ….
germy
Betty Cracker
@Kay: We knew Sessions was a Trump flunky, but for some folks, the jury was still out on Wray. Well, we have our verdict now, don’t we? Weak-minded toady. No better than Devin Nunes, really.
RepubAnon
@Kay: It’s not cowardice – it’s claiming that only Trump Loyalists can impartially dispense justice to both Trump and his opponents. Notice the slight logical disconnect? About the size of the Grand Canyon?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: Rooney is MSNBC’s favorite RW nutcase
SenyorDave
Are we talking about this Orrin Hatch (Supplements – Utah)? Read his close relationship wit supplement industry. He was their godfather, managing to help remove almost all regulations, making his family and friends rich, killing some people along the way. Hatch is an evil MF’er with blood on his hands. IOW, a typical Republican US Senotor
MattF
The ‘salt-of-the-earth Trump voters’ news story is a genre, so there’s a checklist of tropes that must appear in every instance. Coal, abortion, ‘those people’. At least kidlit has flying and, sometimes, vampires.
mai naem mobile
@Another Scott: Phoenix has a gazillion apartments/condos that are either being built or have been built. I just don’t see the population increase.to support all these units and theyre everywhere. And don’t even ask me about the price of older housing in central Phoenix. Nothing special houses that sold for less than $100 are selling for $300k. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived through 2 crashes in Phoenix.
Idaho Gentile
@Uncle Cosmo:
StringOnAStick
Utah’s state and federal reps mostly supported dumps’ shrinking of the two national monuments since anywhere outside SLC is deep red. The annual Outdoor Retailers show started in SLC and is a huge deal and makes serious $ for the city that has it. After the monument shrinkage the big players like Patagonia insisted on moving it to a state that supports wild lands, not shrinks them. Denver won the bid.
Idaho Gentile
That’s Deseret News -not “Times”…
Hungry Joe
From “His Girl Friday” (as best i can remember it, anyway):
Walter Burns, looking at the page in the typewriter: You didn’t mention the Post!
Hildy Johnson: Yes, I did. It’s right there in the second paragraph.
Walter Burns: Who’s going to read the second paragraph?
The Moar You Know
@germy: Bad idea to talk shit about your sugar daddy. He might invite you over for tea.
Miss Bianca
@Hungry Joe: one of my all-time favorite movies!
SiubhanDuinne
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Honestly, does there still remain anyone they haven’t tracked down and interviewed, any racist-sexist-xenophobic-homophobic opinion they haven’t repeated, any deluded faith in coal mines and steel mills and widget manufacturing plants they haven’t shared with breathless wonder? I’d just as soon have the media go back to speculating about missing blondes and disappeared airplanes than to see one more Cletus Quest piece.
raven
Back in Athens after the dreaded 85 South run. Two days down and out for the Rose Bowl!
Schlemazel
@Another Scott:
Since most if those owe vangard via a 401k they will be taxed as ordinary income. They will get the short money
Hungry Joe
@Miss Bianca: The last person to say that to me was Archie Leach — the week before he cut his throat.
I’ve always thought that Cary Grant was a so-so dramatic actor but one of the best comic actors EVER. He and Rosalind Russell together: Has dialog ever again sparked and sparkled like that?
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Should be an epic trip! Hope you have a little chance to relax during the next day or two.
The Moar You Know
@SiubhanDuinne: The media are lazy as fuck. I think it’s a function of the job. I now know two working reporters, down from three (one has given up and decided to live off her ex-husbands money forevermore). Of the two left, one has not gone further than five miles from his home in the last fifteen years. The other hasn’t left his city of residence in three years and gets all his “facts” and quotes for his stories off the internet, and is pretty hampered in his reporting in that he hasn’t lived in America since the turn of the century and doesn’t understand the nation any longer.
Both are award winning, and most of you would instantly recognize their names if I posted them here. Since I’d like to stay anonymous, I’m not going to.
I love “Cletus Quest” and am going to use the hell out of that.
eric
@Hungry Joe: Topper with Grant is one of my favorite comedies (along with the unrelated My Man Godfrey)
Mike J
@raven: I know I can find a red or a white that’s decent and fits with the food, why even bother with a rosé?
StringOnAStick
If you have any shopping to do today,this morning is the time to do it. The grocery store was empty and the stockers were working now instead of over night. Every place I went was slow and quiet, like Denver was in general before our current boom started. Its dang cold too and the rest of the week will be warmer so that plus post-holiday lethargy has slowed things down to”pleasant”.
I’ve got this week off and then full time work for all of January to cover for a vacationing coworker. I did this last year for her 3 week trip and it nearly wrecked my hands (dental hygienist). I’m glad the boss made it clear that she won’t get to do this next year. Until then I’m trying to get ahead on chores and enjoying the antics of our 15 week old kittens, who are in deep insane play machine mode currently.
Trollhattan
@StringOnAStick:
That’s huge, the Outdoor Show is the industry’s (self propelled sports) largest and a big loss.
catclub
@jeffreyw: This pie is your pie, this pie is my pie.
From Pielifornia to the New Yorl Pieland.
polyorchnid octopunch
@germy: I’m seeing a lot of muslim twitter calling him out as a neo-fascist islamophobe.
Ruckus
@Kay:
There is a crime wave, these two are in on it.
NotMax
Isn’t a Utahn the driving move performed after realization by a Down Easter that he/she has sailed right past the intended destination?
:)
Jager
@NotMax:
Vright
raven
@Mike J: I don’t mess with no pluck.
Quinerly
@magurakurin: Only in SLC once with parents on a sightseeing stop when we drove cross country in the early 1970’s. Spent almost 3 weeks in Utah in Feb/March on that extended road trip. Didn’t make it there but met a lot of cool people from SLC who had second homes in the Escalante and Bluff areas. I thought St. George was a lovely town…good restaurants…of course, weird alcohol sales, though (The Zion Curtain). Hated Kanab. Weird town. I was screamed at twice at stoplights by little old ladies…they didn’t like my anti Repug and Trump bumper stickers. Couldn’t get out of that shit hole soon enough.
StringOnAStick
@Trollhattan: Yes it is huge. When I first heard the show was thinking about leaving SLC I was pretty sure Denver would win the bid.
Our state lottery funds open space acquisition, maintenance and state parks; in the semi distant past the R’s tried to change that dedicated revenue stream to prisons and the voters became enraged over that. I think that’s when CO started leaning more blue. Creating a state lottery only passed here because it was sold as a permanent, non revocable fund for open space and when the R’s tried to change that it got pretty hot. This was long before the current huge influx of the young and high tech; I think this state is now a lot bluer than estimated.
SenyorDave
@Hungry Joe: Clark Gable/Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night. My favorite romantic comedy, I think the interplay between Gable and Colbert was amazing.
Miss Bianca
@Hungry Joe: You’re right about Cary Grant as a comic actor – he was one of the best. I just re-watched “North by Northwest” and while I thought he was good in that, his best moments are the funny ones. (I also, at the risk of sounding like a heretic, think Meryl Streep is actually a better comic actress than a dramatic one – but you hardly ever get to see do comedy. Too bad!)
No the dialog in “His Girl Friday” is priceless, and there has never been anything like it before or since, IMO. (And when I watched it with friends, they almost always were amazed at the sheer *speed* of the delivery – to the point where they wanted subtitles so they wouldn’t miss any of it!)
clay
@Miss Bianca: Bringing Up Baby is even better than His Girl Friday, I think. Russell was great, but prime Hepburn was even better.
Mnemosyne
@clay:
I really hate “Bringing Up Baby,” and I can’t entirely explain why, because I love the actors and the director in other things. I just hate that movie in particular.
I got my Grant/Hepburn fix the other day with “Holiday,” though it did suddenly dawn on me that those characters will turn into the couple they play in “The Philadelphia Story.” ?
SgrAstar
@JMG: point of clarification: the Salt Lake Tribune is owned by the (putatively) mormon Huntsman family. This actually makes the slam on Hatch even sweeter; the Huntsmans are Utah’s richest mormon family and they are deeply respected by Utah conservatives. The Deseret News is the rag-of-record and barely meets the least stringent criteria to be called a “newspaper”.
rikyrah
@germy:
uh huh
UH HUH
Quinerly
@SgrAstar: Thanks for this info. All interesting considering Jon Huntsman is the ambassador to Russia.
rikyrah
@Mnemosyne:
My all time favorite movie – The Philadelphia Story.
“My, she was Yar.”
Uncle Cosmo
@SgrAstar: Interesting – I would not have suspected the SLT was Mormon-owned (even if only putatively). But upon reflection, I suppose there’s good money to be made in Utah from a paper not entirely under the thumbs of the control-freakish LDS Elders…long as you don’t tweak their noses too hard..
AnotherBruce
@Villago Delenda Est: I wish we could upvote comments!
Miss Bianca
@clay: Nope, sorry, “Bringing Up Baby” doesn’t do it for me. I find it strained and rather tiresome, with Hepburn’s character just too self-centered and too off the wall. “Zany!” for the sake of zany just grates on me. For classic Hepburn/Grant (plus bonus Jimmy Stewart thrown in!) give me “Philadelphia Story” over “Bringing Up Baby” any day.
ETA: Or “Holiday”, per Mnem. I love “Holiday” too.