POSTED // Jan 21,2009 - nLate June at the South Temple offices of David Irvine, lawyer and former four-term Republican member of the Utah Legislature, a group of current state lawmakers—two moderate Republicans and three Democrats—debated whether to pull the trigger on a formal complaint they had prepared accusing a powerful legislator of offering a bribe. nIt meant forcing a meeting of the Legislature&rsquo...

POSTED // Jan 21,2009 - HDrill DelaynPlugging Arches and Canyonlands full of holes for oil and gas rigs will have to wait. A federal judge foiled the Bush administrations last-minute auction of Utah’s redrock country by postponing the sales while he considers environmentalist arguments for additional study. The move should keep the drillers at bay until Bush is back in Crawford, Texas, and may give Obama a window o...

POSTED // Jan 14,2009 - Reached by phone, City Weekly found Tim DeChristopher, poster boy du jour of lefty environmentalism, in Nevada City, Calif., handing out awards at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival between speeches about how he disrupted a federal auction of oil and gas leases last month in Utah. He’d already done two radio interviews that day, and at the Salt Lake City airport that morning been interviewed ...

POSTED // Jan 14,2009 - Chaffetz AgainnUtah 3rd District Congressman Jason Chaffetz loves publicity and seemingly doesn’t care if getting it means painting Utah as a racist, xenophobic backwater. That’s exactly what Chaffetz accomplished in a recent appearance on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report where the host recommended Chaffetz anti-immigrant plans include coating Mexicans with fluorescent, paint...

POSTED // Jan 7,2009 - Return of the Zion CurtainnFirst, Utah Senate President Mike Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, defended Utah’s private club law by saying the state needed to be able to identify drinkers through the membership lists that bars are required to keep of their patrons. Now the Senate’s Administrative Rules Committee is talking about forcing restaurants to erect walls to shield impressionable childr...

POSTED // Dec 31,2008 - Happy New Year. Now please extinguish that smoke, or we’ll be forced to call the authorities. nThe ball that banned smoking in Utah bars dropped Jan. 1 at midnight, taking official effect just as bar patrons were singing “Auld Lang Syne” and kissing whomever happened to be standing next to them. There is now no legal public place left to light up indoors in Utah. nSome bars, incl...

POSTED // Dec 31,2008 - nOther newspapers choose the New Year as a time to look back, to recap events of the year just passed. Bah, we say. It’s a lame excuse to give lazy reporters a day off every Jan 1. “Hope,” after all, is the watchword for 2009. (Or was it “change?”) Either way, it’s about moving forward. And if there was ever a year to put quickly in the rear-view mirror, it was ...

POSTED // Dec 31,2008 - Missing CannonnIncoming U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, is distinguishing himself faster than any Utah congressman in recent memory. In the face of the country’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (a depression prolonged by then-President Herbert Hoover’s refusal to spend) Chaffetz says first item of business will be to co-sponsor a balanced budget amendment to forever ...

POSTED // Dec 24,2008 - Allen Bithell points over his shoulder through the large glass windows of Port O’ Call looking across 400 South to the massive parking lot that used to be the site of the Hotel Newhouse when he was a kid. Now it is a massive parking lot. The Newhouse Hotel came down in 1983 and has never been replaced. nToday, the 1912 Shubrick building that houses the private club Port O’ Call and som...

POSTED // Dec 24,2008 - Corroon Goes SolarnWhile Utah legislators ready the Beehive State for nuclear power (and, presumably, make plans to rope off of chunks of Utah for millennia’s worth of nuclear-waste storage), Peter Corroon sees a sunnier future. The Salt Lake County mayor’s just-announced solar plan calls for leasing the tops of county buildings to solar-power companies that would coat the roofs with s...