By Curmudgeon
Just a quick heads up on several Standard-Examiner items this morning before I'm off to grade papers [crushing youthful hopes and dreams... God, I love teaching!]
First, an editorial on the "election follies" in Weber County makes a couple of good points. Notably that Weber County election officials' claims that the problem is that the state does not keep voting rolls current loses a lot of its credibility when we note that other counties didn't seem to have the same problem... large numbers of voters whose names could not be found on the county's election rolls... that Weber County did. The editorial ends this way:
Weber simply dropped the ball. County Clerk/Auditor Alan McEwan needs to own up to his office's shortcomings and do some house-cleaning. After that, job No. 1 will be to make sure his staff's training regimen is improved before voters next visit to their polling places for the Feb. 5 presidential primary. If this nonsense happens again, the heads should keep rolling until the job's done right.Fine conclusion, but I can't shake the sneaking suspicion that what really has the Std-Ex ticked off is the County Clerk's decision to stonewall the press [and the ACLU], backed by County Commissioner Jan Zogmeister, on the grounds that the Clerk is just too busy preparing for an election months away to talk to anybody about the last election. But hey, if the Std-Ex has a hidden agenda in its criticism of county officials, that matters less than that it reached, for whatever reason, the right conclusion. Good editorial.
Second, two good letters to the editor today. One by Chris Hansen makes this excellent point:
Ardent supporters of the Ogden mayor have been arguing over the past several years that opposition to many of his proposals has been by a very few, select naysayers. I hope the election put that notion to rest for good. Nearly half of Ogden voted against the mayor, despite 1) the mayor's enormous financial advantage over his opponent Susan Van Hooser; 2) the newspaper's glowing recommendation of him; 3) his supporters' use of questionable tactics; and 4) the fact that he's an incumbent.The second letter, by Lynette Belka, makes some very good points too, among which is this one:
Because the Standard-Examiner has a very big voice in local politics, we hope in the next four years it will decide to better serve Ogden city by more thoroughly questioning, in my opinion, the mayor's projects and press releases.Amen to that.
