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Pardon the Delay
Just when I was bragging in yesterday’s Utah Policy Daily about three years of publishing without a missed edition, we had trouble sending out UPD. We have purchased a new remote e-mail server and installed it at Xmission, along with the latest version of a powerful e-mail newsletter distribution system. After testing, yesterday was the first day we tried to send UPD from the new server using the new software.
We apparently didn’t have all the bugs worked out. At the rate the newsletter was going out, it would have taken some 16 hours to send to all subscribers. So we reverted back to the old server and UPD was late. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Regional Politics
Utah a Demographic Anomaly?
Michael Barone, writing in the Wall Street Journal: “Demography is destiny. When I was in kindergarten in 1950, Detroit was the nation's fifth largest metro area, with 3,170,000 people. Now it ranks 11th and is soon to be overtaken by Phoenix, which had 331,000 people in 1950. In the close 1960 election, in which electoral votes were based on the 1950 Census, Michigan cast 20 votes for John Kennedy and Arizona cast four votes for Richard Nixon; New York cast 45 votes for Kennedy and Florida cast 10 votes for Nixon. In 2012, Michigan will likely have 16 electoral votes and Arizona 12; New York will have 29 votes and Florida 29. That's the kind of political change demographics makes over the years.” Barone says Salt Lake City doesn’t fit pattern of other interior West cities.
Washington Watch
Hatch: Expand Antibiotic Development
Sen. Orrin Hatch successfully amends major FDA legislation to include incentives to develop new antibiotics to fight drug-resistant infections (see press release).
Bennett Podcast Interview
Sen. Bob Bennett discusses his plan for reforming Social Security and his suggestions for overhauling the federal tax code in a recent podcast interview with the Tax Foundation. To listen, click here.
Immigration Challenge for Cannon?
Article: "Republican Rep. Chris Cannon, who sports a near-perfect lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, has faced vigorous challenges from the right over his position on border security. For 2008, a similar scenario is brewing -- and given the renewed attention immigration is receiving from both President Bush and Congress, Cannon's battle to hold his seat could be even more contentious" (The Politico).
Today in Political History
May 8, 1954: French are defeated in Vietnam at a terrible cost (1.3 million Vietnamese and 95,000 French dead). It is reported that the U.S. funded three fourths of the cost of this war. Vietnam is divided into North and South.
May 8, 1962: The Department of Justice orders court action to halt racial segregation in hospitals built with federal funds. (Source: perspicuity)
May 8, 1973: Militant American Indians who had held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 10 weeks surrender. (Source: New York Times)
Wise Words
“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
--Martin Luther King Jr. (Source: Quotations Page.)
Communications Tip
Internet Offers Campaign Tools
Political campaigns are learning to love the Internet, but not for its advertising placement opportunities. Rather, they love targeted e-mail, Web sites, self-service online fundraising tools and cool viral marketing. They love the fact that the Internet has become an incredibly efficient method to find and communicate with volunteers and an extraordinary tool for cost-effective fund-raising.
Historically, no major campaign has spent even one-half of one percent of its budget on online advertising. Of course, political consultants have also learned that every mistake their candidate makes in a public appearance is fodder for YouTube. (Source: Davick Services)
National Politics
Best Stories From . . .
-- Washington Post: "In the heady opening weeks of the 110th Congress, the Democrats' domestic agenda appeared to be flying through the Capitol ... But now that initial progress has foundered as Washington policymakers have been consumed with the debate over the Iraq war. Not a single priority on the Democrats' agenda has been enacted, and some in the party are growing nervous that the 'do nothing' tag they slapped on Republicans last year could come back to haunt them."
-- U.S. News & World Report: Columnist Mortimer Zuckerman says Barack Obama needs to prove that he's more than "a smooth and sweet-talking optimist. He will have to detail just what he would do on health, global warming, Iran. Is he tough-minded enough not just to take a punch but to give one? People who know him well doubt this. If they're right, he will become another one of those failed candidates like Adlai Stevenson, who bemoaned the dirty business of politics and tried to run campaigns that rose above it."
-- Fortune: John Edwards has become the "2008 race's chief proponent of a hotly contentious view -- that America's economic salvation lies in millions more Americans paying union dues. Edwards brings to the contest a core belief that expanding organized labor -- which now accounts for just 12 percent of the workforce, down from 20 percent in the early 1980s -- is the way to reduce poverty, expand the middle class, narrow the nation's income gap and make globalization less painful."
-- Chicago Sun-Times: Columnist Robert Novak reports that Fred Thompson's much-anticipated speech to the Lincoln Club of Orange County on Friday "was a letdown for the packed audience of conservative Republicans. 'It was not Reaganesque.' 'No red meat.' 'Too low key.' That was the preponderant reaction I heard to Thompson's half-hour presentation" (see also related Christian Science Monitor story).
Blog Watch
-- At Washington Post’s On Faith, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid discusses his conversion to Mormonism.
-- New West's Tracy Medley interviews SLC mayoral candidate Ralph Becker.
-- Utah Taxpayer summarizes the 2007 Utah Taxes Now Conference presentation made by David Horner, Chief Counsel in the Federal Transit Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation, on the benefits of congestion pricing.
-- At The Corner, John Podhoretz says of Mitt Romney's New Hampshire poll numbers: "The new polling data clearly indicates that [Romney] did well in the first debate. But let's talk straight here. This is New Hampshire, the state that Paul Tsongas won in 1992. Massachusetts politicians have a leg up in New Hampshire. If Romney starts moving in South Carolina or in Florida, then we'll know something of significance happened last Thursday night" (for more on Romney, see Doug Ross and Jake Tapper posts).
Lighter Side
Yesterday’s Dilbert Cartoon in the Washington Post. |
