Red meat Emerald City political news, our preferred Weber County Forum diet, is a mite scarce this morning, so we'll set up an open topic thread, just to keep the WCF reader discussion humming along. As a prelude to turning the floor over to our ever-savvy readers however, we've identified a few items which might be worthy of reader comment; and we'll thus reel them off one by one:
1) The Standard-Examiner carries a hard-hitting editorial this morning, urging congress to find the courage to rein in its reckless spending:
• OUR VIEW: A bankrupt America?Although we're in complete sympathy with this editorial, we're wondering whether the SE Editorial Board might be wasting valuable space aiming its message toward the pols in Washington D.C. We have serious doubt that this editorial will be the hot topic in the halls of congress this morning; and in this connection we'll therefore humbly suggest that the SE go back to the drawing board and consider repackaging this message and redirecting it to our local BIG GOVERNMENT borrowers and spenders, right here at Ogden City Hall. Although the federal government can't really go bankrupt in a technical sense (the feds can always "print money" when federal revenues fall short,) local governments like Ogden City can actually go broke when they continue to borrow and spend like there's no tomorrow. Seems to us that the SE should remind our local elected officials of that, at least occasionally.
2) It appears that Utah officials are making great progress in the blockbuster story which broke yesterday, suggesting that somebody had breached the security of a state database. And this morning's SE story now reveals that two individuals who apparently broke into a Utah Department of Workforce Services computer, and spammed various Top of Utah newspapers and law enforcement agencies with a list of "1300 suspected illegal immigrants" have now been identified and placed on administrative leave:
• Two Utah Department of Workforce Services workers behind illegal immigration list on leaveIt's evident that Utah authorities are serious about getting to the bottom of all this; and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff is talking about serious felony time.
We believe Governor Herbert hits the nail on the head with this: "I think it's an immense hypocrisy to talk about taking people to task for being illegal and doing so by breaking the law," which also brings to mind the old jail-house ax, "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime."
3) Last but not least, we'll refer to yesterday's SE story, which, believe it or not, was one of the SE's top stories on Friday, adding new meaning to the term "slow news day":
• Pickleball courts coming soonAlthough we'd originally decided to ignore this story, we're now dredging it up and placing it on the WCF front page, due to the robust debate which broke out in the SE reader comments section between SE readers Neal Cassidy and Bob Becker on the issue of whether "Gullo's private funding of the courts means the city council does not have to adopt a Capital Improvement Plan amendment prior to construction of the courts, because no municipal funds are being used."
Tempest in a teapot? We do not know; but we will opine, just to advance the discussion, that we side with Mr. Cassidy on this, and argue that Gullo's donation does fall into the category of city revenue; and will argue that it therefore ought to have been the subject of a Capital Improvement Plan amendment, (you know, like the last generous donation Mr. Gullo made to Ogden City government.)
That's it for now, O Gentle Ones. Who will be the first to chime in on any of the above topics, or open up a discussion all your own?
