This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Happy New Year. To go with all the best-of-2015 stories both nationally and locally, here are highlights from my columns the past 12 months, sort of a news-behind-the-news review.
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• Granite School District had no idea what it stepped into when it fired Wasatch Junior High School teacher Ann Florence after she refused to grade portions of a districtwide test to measure student progress. Nine months after the ouster, an army of educators and activists raised money for a lawsuit against the district. Former students posted an online petition demanding she get her job back. She since has taken a teaching job with a private school.
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• The Utah County Republican Party boasted on its website that the keynote speaker for its Lincoln Day Dinner would be Rafael Cruz, father of tea party presidential wannabe Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Besides his outrageous comments about President Barack Obama, Rafael Cruz told a right-wing radio commentator on a Christian network that, if taken to a logical conclusion, the LDS Church, he believes, is "wicked" and "promoting ungodliness."
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• I couldn't help musing over the debate in the Utah Legislature about HB160, the bill lawmakers passed that overturned Salt Lake City's ordinance requiring drive-thru restaurants and businesses to serve cyclists. Legislators argued it was heavy-handed government imposing its will on businesses. Those were the same legislators who required restaurant owners to erect "Zion Curtains" to block the mixing of alcoholic drinks from the view of patrons and mandated that businesses allow concealed-weapon-permit holders to bring their guns into their establishments.
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• The Utah House continued its tendency toward unorthodoxy when it passed a resolution to study the use of bitcoin, or digital currency, for transactions with state and local governments. It seemed natural that Utah, with its share of Ponzi schemes and white-collar scandals, would be a trailblazer for government use of fake money.
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• Few defense attorneys around these parts have the firsthand experience with criminal charges that former Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has. He faces multiple felony and misdemeanor charges, including counts of accepting prohibited gifts, obstruction of justice, official misconduct and bribery to dismiss a criminal proceeding. Shurtleff mentioned none of that in a YouTube ad for his law firm, promoting himself as an expert in criminal law.
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• When some 16 recreationists didn't want to follow the required permitting procedures to trek into the environmentally sensitive Fiery Furnace and didn't like being put on a waiting list behind hikers who had followed the rules and signed up in advance, they told Arches National Park staffers they were friends of Rep. Mia Love and would call her to complain. Love's office, in turn, phoned national park officials and, voila, the group got to take the hike.
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• The University of Utah made a boneheaded mistake, considering its stewardship of protecting the historic Fort Douglas, which is now part of its campus. The sin? Digging up the roads around buildings constructed in 1875 (a year before the Custer massacre), hauling away dirt and precious artifacts embedded in the soil and dumping it all into a landfill.
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• The Herriman Days parade featured floats carrying royalty from neighboring cities, including Miss Bluffdale, a young African-American woman, whom the crowd warmly greeted. So was Mia Love, R-Utah, the first black Republican woman elected to Congress, who was a few entries behind the Bluffdale float. In between was the Utah Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who marched along wearing Civil War-era Confederate uniforms, carrying muskets and displaying the Confederate flag.
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• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is going to Disney World. The church-owned Deseret Ranches is going through the bureaucratic process in Florida to win approval to transform rural farmland, used for 65 years to raise cattle, into a metropolis of a half-million residents within 133,000 acres in Osceola County, not far from Orange County, home of the world-renowned Disney resort in Orlando.