Welcome to Glennbeckistan

Where the Tea Party Rules and Tea-hadis Roam

Good piece in TomDispatch. Links at site.

What if the Tea Party ruled? Imagine a land, let’s call it Glennbeckistan, where white, patriarchal, religiously zealous, Tea Party-type patriots hold a super-majority in both houses of the legislature, sit in the governor’s mansion, and control most local governments. It’s a place so out of sync with the rest of the nation that states’ rights and even secession are always on the agenda. It’s a place where gun-ownership trumps all other rights, climate change is considered an insidious socialist conspiracy, and a miscarriage can be investigated as a potential crime. Welcome to Utah.

Go read.

It's no coincidence that the state line signs say "Welcome to Utah. Set your clock back fifty years." Well, they should.

Utah has an awful lot going for it. Parts of it are so drop-dead beautiful it makes your heart sing. Arches, Canyonlands, Zion, and Bryce Canyon NPs and the Grand Staircase Escalante NM are places you should see.

Gearheads have the Bonneville Salt Flats as a holy shrine to speed, and there's slick rock 4-wheeling and mountain biking around Moab, where you can eat Mexican food while you get yer 'sickle fixed.

Up north, there's all the winter sports you could ever want, but in all fairness you should come here instead.

There's world class fishing. Hunting? You can blast away at critters you never heard of.

I could go on and on, but in short Utah is an outdoor, scenic, recreational and sportsman's paradise.

But God has to have his little joke. He populated the joint with those fuckin' Mormon cultists. Most, and I don't mean all, but most of 'em I've met are arrogant pricks. I do not discuss religion and politics in Utah, and most certainly not the "Mormon Massacre". Take warning from that one. They love our tourist dollars, but we're all, non-Mormon wingnuts included, if to a slightly lesser extent, infidel gentile trash to most of those bastards.

They're all fucking retards, but they own the joint. Well, they want to:

WaPo

SALT LAKE CITY -- Fed up with federal ownership of more than half the land in Utah, Republican Gov. Gary Herbert on Saturday authorized the use of eminent domain to take some of the U.S. government's most valuable parcels.

Herbert signed a pair of bills into law that supporters hope will trigger a flood of similar legislation throughout the West, where lawmakers contend that federal ownership restricts economic development in an energy-rich part of the country.

Read as: There's coal, oil, and gas in them thar hills and we want to tear all them mountaintops off and put oil & gas wells everywhere to get the money.

We will eventually have to go after all those energy deposits even if we change our profligate ways, but for now I'm happy the Feds are in charge if for no other reason than to keep from making those damn Saints any richer than they already are.

Just as an aside, I went back to the Brain archives for Sept. '05 to look for material from my last trip to Utah. The archives only went back to 9/18. Whassup wid dat?