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By:  Kevin Trainor/Managing Editor The longest serving Repub senator of all time, Orrin Hatch, has announced his retirement.  More to the point Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) read the polls.  He would win re-election at 84, no doubt, but he knows the turnout would be uninspired.  Utah is a peculiar state politically, and otherwise.  After decades going into the 1890’s it was a U.S. Territory.  Utah leadership, read Mormon Church, had been a largely polygamous entity.  In order to be granted statehood the United States Government had insisted it drop its multiple wives way before it could be admitted to the Union.  Miraculously, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints received a message from God that it should abandon the practice.  In 1896 it was admitted as a state. Currently, the state that leads the nation in use of anti-depressants has already crowned a successor to Hatch.  Welcome Mitt Romney. Why ...

By:  Kevin Trainor/Managing Editor Doug Jones is now a United States Senator.  Much of the Republican agenda in the senate dealt a serious blow by the new senator from the Heart of Dixie.  51-49, and the Repubs in ‘bama have nobody to blame but themselves.  Of course, Mr. Jones will be up for re-election to win his own full-term outright in 2020.  Enjoy your time, sir, and no need to purchase a house in the D.C. area.  I can tell you the Republican candidate is already being assembled in a laboratory outside Montgomery.  Eagle Scout: check; long, happy marriage, check; photogenic, adorable kids, check; banned from a mall? Nope.  So this is the time to do something different.  A unique window for Senator Jones (D-AL), to break the mold, and be a light on the Hill of independence, clear thought, and shoot from the hip honesty.  Have a tirade, a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington moment.  Swear a little bit.  Have fun. Already, how...

By:  Kevin Trainor//Managing Editor In the inner thoughts of Senator Al Franken (D-MN) he may feel he ought be held to a different standard.  After all, the 66 year-old junior senator from Minnesota came of age, career-wise, in the drug fueled halls of studio 8A in the then RCA Building; the home of “NBC’s Saturday Night” as it was called in 1975.  Teaming with fellow new writer hire Tom Davis they wrote edge-pushing sketches, and had their own slot on many episodes called “The Franken and Davis Show.” It was their own bent take on the pop culture scene.  Almost all ending in a gross-out culmination.  It was funny.  A very different time.  Later Franken would leave, and come back to the show two different times.  Among his other character defining appearances were his stints on “Weekend Update,” discussing the oncoming ‘80’s as the “Al Franken Decade,” and, of course, “Stuart Smalley,” a confidence-challenged man making sense of himself in se...

By: Kevin Trainor/Managing Editor “Low Drag – High Speed,” that was the motto of a group of young U.S. Army Intelligence Center students at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in the second half of 1988.  No one exemplified that better than then Captain Michael Flynn.  The 29 year old military officer was exactly the central casting type of the 1980’s military resurgence under President Reagan.  Not an ounce of excess, straight arrow, and focused up.  “Strack” was a term that the budding military analysts, and briefers, would label such officers.  Part in jest, part in admiration. “Captain Strack,” fit Flynn.  Later he would hear of the term, and laughingly approve.  Flynn was posted as “Commander, Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Training.”  He had a group of favorites among the military students, often calling them by their full names rather by rank.  The barracks of HHC was more of a dormitory.  Nobody had a bad word to share regarding t...

By:  Kevin Trainor/Managing Editor In the 1970’s, state universities across the country utilized various affirmative action policies when dealing with admissions on the undergraduate, and post-grad level.  A mandated effort to increase participation of non-whites in higher education.  A worthy goal.  Often students with lower SAT/MCAT/LSAT scores, and grades, were admitted to schools over those with better criteria.  This increased minority participation, but fell short of traditional merit-based criteria.  In 1974, Allan Bakke, a white student, applied to the University of California/Davis Medical School.  He was denied.  He brought suit charging that due to minority quotas his application had been passed over.  He sued the California Board of Regents in a case that worked its way through the court system, and ending up in the United States Supreme Court where he was ordered enrolled.  It was a landmark case that spotlighted admiss...

By:  Kevin Trainor/Managing Editor The American West is a beautiful land of stark contrast.  Of mesas, plateaus, valleys, and flatlands.  It is also a region of divisions when it comes to land.  Federal vs. private mainly.  It is a bitter feud that gets hot from time to time.  Ranchers squaring off against a bevy of D.C.- based administrations and agencies over environmental, conservation, or endangered species concerns.  Want to get on a rancher’s bad side?  Ask his/her opinion on whether wolves require federal protections. The politics of water is not immune to contention.  Water in the ground can be either publicly, or privately owned.  Water owned by the state is publicly made available in set quantities, and metered accordingly.  Communal water for irrigation, crop production, home use, is captured by methods such as damming and charged to consumers by taxation, or other usage fees. A law that looms large in the West is ...