Paint.net

So today I've gotten myself interested in Paint.net, a powerful and free alternative to Photoshop. I've just been playing around with it, trying to get the hang of it. I really don't have a knack for graphic design or art, but for my own purposes, I think I've done okay. Here is a sampling:

Salt Lake County Republican Nominating Convention

In my own normal fashion, it has taken a couple of days to gather my thoughts on the subject. No doubt many of you who found my post dug up all the stuff Deseret News and the SL Trib and were disappointed by the lack of thorough reporting. As a county delegate who attended, I can report on at least those portions I was part of.

Most Americans Now Believe Scientists Disagree About Climate Change

I was pleasantly surprised to learn this in a new Rasmussen Poll today. I'm among those that not only question whether all scientist believe global warming is true, but that it's more farce than anything else. How do you explain the worst winter most Americans have seen in a long time? Give the poll a read. Well worth it.

Photo is courtesy angryconservative.com.

Utah State Elections- 2010; County Counsel At Large Race

As I've mentioned in one of my recent posts, I'm now a County Delegate for the Republican party in Salt Lake County, Utah. My job is to help select who will go on the ballot against the Democratic counterparts in the general election. To do this, all of the county delegates will meet in convention and vote. Whoever gets 60% of the vote will move to the general election in November, while those races that are closer than a 60-40 split go to a primary before the general election.

Now that thats out of the way, I can get down to what information I have for you today. First off, I will be covering the elections in the state of Utah all the way to the end, but from a slightly different angle, that of a delegate. Even though there are those who could attend certain meetings to see candidates with me, many will not have face to face contact with any candidate running for office regardless, let alone even know who is who. My goal here is to shed some light on the county-wide elections for the most part, all the way to November. I will also be covering state-wide elections so far as I can gather reliable information from those that I know are State Delegates, in order to try to paint a better picture of the candidates in those races.

In this last week, I've been somewhat busy, and so have neglected to post. Fear not. This post is not "shot from the hip" as it were. In between my personal and professional responsibilities, I've been devoting much of my time to researching and meeting with various candidates for county-wide and offices.

I would like to share some positive experiences with you from the past week or so.

The County Counsel At Large seat B is up for grabs. I've had the opportunity to have face to face conversations with Richard Snelgrove and Winston Wilkinson. Both are admirable and upstanding gentlemen.

Wilkinson has beat himself a very difficult campaign path. He has set up between twenty and thirty small-scale meetings with county delegates in various parts of the county. This is a large effort for a constituency relatively small at this point because it's only county delegates he is campaigning to at this point. These meetings take place as more of a discussion than a meeting with a speaker. Wilkinson has given the delegates a chance to share ideas with him, have frank discussion about possible solutions to problems and so forth. More to the point though, Wilkinson has shown a record of listening to all sides of a problem, something of an asset in a county counsel seat. I had a great time at his meeting, and enjoyed getting to know him.

Richard Snelgrove is also working hard at gaining votes. Snelgrove has gone in a somewhat opposite direction with his campaign, though equally difficult to handle. In one of his meetings that I attended, he gathered as many delegates as he could together at a movie theater, where The Blind Side was shown for us. That was a great treat. Most who attended had the chance to speak with Snelgrove personaly. In the theater, Snelgrove spoke and answered questions. And all around enjoyable experience. It is also noteworthy to state that he funded this event out of his own pocket.

I'm going to say, however, that at this point, I am favoring Wilkinson. I liked the chance to have a smaller group and more face to face discussion. I am glad to say that more of my questions were answered better, and more clearly by Wilkinson than Snelgrove(I asked the same questions). The question that I asked was,"To use an example as a preface, look at all the construction and road work in the county. Much is done by the cities themselves, many county projects are in progress, and even more state road work has lots of road torn up. They all have their own planning and building schedule, and coordination between them all seems non existent. This is only one symptom of the same problem, and that is intergovernmental communication. What do you plan to do to reign it all in?" A long winded and tough question. Snelgrove had his campaign points, and stuck to them. Meme's like "fiscal responsibility" and "trimming the fat" followed by "I don't know yet, but I'll look into it" satisfied me. They were very honest answers. However, Wilkinson gave me something better to work with. He said that he has actually met with a majority of mayors in the valley to discuss the importance of a strong working relationship, including meetings and reports to and with one another. He then said that it was a crucial responsibility of the county counsel to have those relationships with the cities. I thought that was far and away a better answer.

I have another meeting tomorrow, this time with all of the Republican candidates running for county-wide office. I'll get a post up tomorrow night, but not this long winded, I hope.

Fully Sick Rapper does it again

This guy, who I've posted about before, has just come out with another great video. Now keep in mind, all this stuff he does is done within the confines of hospital quarantine due to an antibiotic-resistant form of TB. He does some cool stuff. Let him know what you think. Just click the video while its in progress and it takes you to his Youtube page.

New Rasmussen Poll Shows People Don't know What They're Talking About

Yes, I did say that. The people at large tend to have a pack mentality. I'll admit that it's always tempting to follow the crowd. Now let me explain what I mean.

This new poll says that 48% of voters feel closer to the Tea Party than to Obama, while only 44% say that they feel closer to Obama than the Tea Party. It show pretty much an even split, if you count the usual margin of error. I kept reading the poll as it went through the related questions it asked. It got down to comparing the Tea Party to teachers. Lots of teachers belong to teachers unions. The poll mentioned that the most voters favor Tea Party over unions, while they favor Teachers over Tea Party. I found it a little confusing. A lot of what people may say about usual teachers in our nation is hearsay, it seems a little off balance for people to seeming favor and dislike the same things. At least teachers and unions go together in my mind. They get together to protest that they aren't getting paid enough, they need better benefits and so on, and many places have unions. I'd believe teachers more if what I heard out of them was insight on how to improve the education system. And harping on raises is not the end all, be all, of public schooling fixes.

People believe teachers more because that's what society says we should do. That's all there is to it.

LDS General Conference FTW!

General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is a bi-annual affair, something that most Latter Day Saints look forward to from the time the most recent one ends. I find this true for myself as an active Latter Day Saint(LDS).

Many people find us "mormons" to be strange. I saw a short film produced by a couple of LDS guys that proved the point. Some people they talked to confused us with the Amish. Most of the misconceptions are not true. I've heard some crazy idea's about us; no, we don't have horns, and no, true mormons don't have multiple wives.

What I want to mention today, however, is something that most people can find some common ground with. That is our General Conference. Most other religions can find some similarities with us in the fact that every religion comes together to listen to their leaders. People come from all over the world to witness conference. I have some friends who brought people they knew from Fiji all the to Utah for conference. So there is another similarity. We feel it paramount to give heed to those we know are men of God, even if that means traveling long distances.

But something that is desperately needed in this day and age is reliable counsel. We receive counsel and ideas from all sides these days. We have the internet, TV with thousands of channels and so much music that we don't know what to do with it. We need someone we know we can rely on. That someone is God. I know that many people don't think that the idea of God is needed these days, with all this technology and so called "new science". For me and nearly 14 million other Latter Day Saints, we feel that God is a reality. And so do some few billion other Christians, Catholics, Jews and Muslims.

General Conference, more than anything else, is a time when we Latter Day Saints can receive counsel that comes directly from God, given to us by men he has chosen to lead us, men he has chosen as prophets and apostles. Knowing that these men are what we believe them to be, we can rely on them to help us through these tough and perilous times. It is counsel for our day. They help us to understand the scriptures. For these reasons and many others, we look forward every six months to General Conference.

Mormon.org

Utah Precinct Caucus in Reflection

I've had about a week and a half to look back and reflect on the event of my precinct caucus meeting here in Utah. I've been to other caucus meetings and they were short and productive. These meetings were quiet and orderly. Well, except for my first one, but that's another story for another day. The whole point here is that the way these meetings were conducted have traditionally been a very good showing for the so called "grass-roots" politics here in Utah.

This latest meeting can also be called orderly. Especially if you hadn't been to one before. Now I need to step back for a minute to explain a few things.

The way a precinct caucus meeting for the Salt Lake County, Utah Republican party go as follows; The meeting is called to order, the party platform is read as quickly as possible(however, questions have been welcome to clarify particular points), and then voting. The way voting takes place is supposed to be similar to the way an actual legislative session takes place, which is conducted by the "Roberts Rules of Order". You don't make movements with this form, because movements are for the toilet. You make motions. If there is a question, you call Point of Order before taking the floor, and so on. It's a little more lax than how I make it sound, but the Robets Rules of Order is there so that there can be no disputes concerning the way an election is held.

When voting, the precinct chairman is presiding. There are precinct offices; chair, vice-chair, treasurer and secretary. Other offices, the ones that everyone concern themselves with, are those of state delegate and county delegate. This year the office of state delegate here in Utah is especially important because of the big United States Senate seat that is up for grabs. One thing that I know for sure is that the incumbent, Sen. Bob Bennett, R, Utah, will loose his seat. The only thing I don't know for sure is if he'll loose it in convention or a forced primary.

Now to the business I undertook in the first place.

Our latest precinct caucus was an entirely different undertaking this year. Instead of holding them in homes, the county party decided to gather whole legislative districts together in school auditoriums for the reading of the party platform. This decision presented a huge logistical problem. Normally the democrats in Utah will do it this way and never have a problem because there aren't many democrats here. Couple that with voter outrage with incumbents and you have a lot of people who want and have a right and duty to be involved.

On the evening of March 23, 2010, my parents and I made our way to the caucus site. We were surprised to see more cars in the lot than we thought there would be. Then we remembered how heated these senate races would be. When we walked around the building to the door, we were even more surprised to see that the line to get in was out the door. There were campaign signs all along the walkway up to the doors and then inside, too. Once we got inside we learned why the lines were so long to get in. All the many precincts in our legislative district were being signed in all at once at tables just inside the door. This may not have been as big of a problem as it was, but most of the people there hadn't ever been to caucus meeting, and so didn't know their precinct number. That, and we had tons of people show up late. With all of this confusion, getting people signed in and verified as Republican took longer than it should have.

The meeting was supposed to start at seven that evening. I was in my seat ten minutes early. At 7:15, they said it would be another ten to fifteen minutes. Well, a half hour later, we finally got started. There was a flag ceremony(never had that before, but it was refreshing to have one), and we finally got around to reading the party platform. Suffice it to say that this reading was different than any others I've been privy to participate in. It was like the freakin' State of the Union address. I was wondering if the people knew that we were here to vote, not listen to a speech. Finally, after over an hour from when we were supposed to start, we separated to our precincts, some in the auditorium and others in the cafeteria, and got to work.

This didn't take very long at all. Most of our precinct, at least the regulars, knew how this business took place, and we got the real work done in less than half an hour. I was lucky(or unlucky) enough to be elected as a county delegate from my precinct. I've done this job before, and it seemed that my neighbors were glad to send me to the convention. I was only 18 the first time I did this, so now that I'm four years more mature, I really hope that I will enjoy the experience at the county convention as much I did before.

I hope those of you who want to be more involved in your local government will feel the urge to do so and take the plunge. There is no other person who will take the advantage for you. Despite my latest experience, I doubt it will be as much of an organizational nightmare as it was that night ever again. I love the opportunity to work with my neighbors to ensure a safe and enjoyable community, and this is a great way to do it.

Tell us about your experience from your Utah precinct caucus in the comments.