Author Archives: ptmadmin

I signed the “Never Trump” petition. Despite his entertainment value, Donald Trump is an unprincipled opportunist, in my opinion. He certainly is not qualified for president in any sense of that term. He’s not the kind of person I want my grandchildren to admire or mimic. Trump is simply not a rational candidate if you’re a conservative and, frankly, I don’t know how rational people claim to support him.

For those reasons, and more, I guess I am now a part of the Establishment. I hear how the Establishment doesn’t want Trump to be president because the Establishment would lose its power. In other words, the defense of Trump against the Establishment is that the latter opposes the former not because of any fundamental policy disagreements but because the Establishment seeks to maintain power that grants them access to plunder – and, incredibly, Trump is supposedly the savior who would stop all the plunder. read more

Conservative icon William F. Buckley made popular the obscure expression, “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!” an expression he gleaned from political theorist Eric Voegelin. To immanentize the eschaton means to try to bring to pass some imagined glorious moment on earth right before the world’s end. For Buckley and Voegelin it referred to all utopian ideas they opposed such as socialism or communism.

There actually is some religious history to this expression as well and one that relates to Utah’s Mormon heritage. It’s not surprising during the Second Great Awakening, when Joseph Smith gathered people to Mormonism, that an anti-millennial opposition was formed. The Lutheran Church, for example, spoke out against any talk of building heaven on earth. But the whole goal of the early Mormon Church was to build a new Zion – a formal and functioning community of people living God’s laws preparatory to the end times when heaven would literally come down to earth to meet the new Zion. In this way Joseph Smith believed that we really could immanentize the eschaton. read more

The political success of Donald Trump is not surprising. His formula for success is rather simple: Tell everyone how bad things are and assure everyone he is the answer. Use his celebrity. Use his billions. Use his “you’re fired” tough talk. And Trump has his finger on the pulse of modern America. He’s right that America is fractured, culturally and economically, after two terms of Obama. He’s right that federal debt is nearly insurmountable at this point and America has lost its stature overseas. But those observations are not unique to Mr. Trump. A blind man could see the problems. read more

In 1990, attorney and author Mike Godwin introduced the world to Godwin’s law (now, apparently, an official part of the Oxford English Dictionary). Raised initially as a clever rhetorical instrument to hedge arguments against absurdity, Godwin’s law is boiled down to the inappropriate use of any comparison between anyone and Adolf Hitler. Just last December, Godwin raised the point again because of the hullabaloo over Donald Trump – yes, he might feel like Adolf Hitler sometimes when he speaks but, let’s remember, the real Hitler killed millions upon millions of innocent people. Trump hasn’t done that. Yet. read more

As candidates for Utah public office begin to position themselves for this election year, nearly all of them face the dilemma of the fallout from a new state campaign law, most commonly referred to as SB 54 or the “Count My Vote” compromise. The new law allows a candidate access to a primary ballot, circumventing Utah’s traditional caucus/convention system, through a reasonably easy signature gathering process. This new process was primarily designed by its authors to allow more seemingly moderate candidates to get around more ideological voices inside the Republican Party. It also places new burdens on political parties in the state to structure internal rules accordingly at risk of being stripped of official status. read more

By October 1987, the disease AIDS was still a mystery for the medical profession and for most Americans. AIDS gained a higher profile as it began to take the lives of several prominent people in the entertainment industry.

In Congress at the time, a representative from West Hollywood, Henry Waxman, was chairman of the House subcommittee on Health and Environment, the subcommittee assigned to look into the problem of AIDS. Waxman was a dedicated liberal and loyal friend of the entertainment industry. In October 1987, Waxman moved the first congressional bill to provide federal funds for AIDS research. read more