When the Utah Legislature manipulated tax and zoning policies a while back to facilitate Real Salt Lake's move to Sandy, it was in part to punish competing bidder Salt Lake City for electing a liberal mayor and in part because key legislative leaders were from Sandy.
But when lawmakers did that, they may have inadvertently put the lives of soccer fans throughout the Salt Lake Valley in danger.
Unlike Salt Lake City, which places traffic cops in the intersections around EnergySolutions Arena before and after Jazz games (and I can personally attest that they do a terrific job), Sandy's police presence is pretty much AWOL after RSL matches.
Thousands of fans leaving the Sandy soccer stadium are left to negotiate a dangerously busy State Street on their own when they try get to the Trax station on the other side of the thoroughfare.
The few motorcycle cops who are there seem averse to getting off their bikes or directing traffic at all, preferring to just yell and point if they see someone trying to jaywalk.
At one recent match, hundreds of fans got to Trax by bending down and walking along a dry canal underneath the street, encountering, among other things, a dead cat that people in the crowd desperately tried to avoid stepping on.
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Double entendre? » During the so-called tea bag rally in Salt Lake City Wednesday to protest government wasteful spending, one of the speakers, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, handed out coins and lapel pins bearing the Attorney General's seal and the designation "special agent."
The pins, along with pocket-sized U.S. Constitutions and a stage for the event, were paid for out of Shurtleff's campaign account.
But it did seem apropos, since much of our national debt that was a subject of the protests is owed to that huge Communist power in southeast Asia, that the pins and coins, distributed by Symbol Arts in Ogden, were made in China .
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A time and a place? » You might have noticed in Wednesday's Salt Lake Tribune the story about Utah Senate President Michael Waddoups threatening to file a criminal complaint with the Attorney General's Office against morals crusader Jack Thompson for sending unwanted images of a violent and sexually explicit video game to Waddoups' Blackberry.
Apparently, a lot of folks got those unwanted images. Ric Cantrell, the Senate chief of staff, was attending priesthood meeting at his LDS ward on Sunday when he decided to check his e-mail. The first thing that popped up was the image of two strippers doing a lap dance on a man. Cantrell had just become a member of that ward, so that was a first impression he left as those sitting around him looked puzzled by his apparent choice of spiritual sustenance.
