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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Little Joe who wrote (149877)	11/12/2010 6:25:09 PM
From: Katelew	Respond to of 541933

Liberal ideas about religion and the religious are based on media stereotypes. Among their many silly assumptions is that religious folk are stifled, uncreative, and painfully repressed. An individual liberal will never be able to point to how he or she was PERSONALLY injured by anything related to religion, but because they saw it in a movie they're sure somebody somewhere has been. Which brings us to poor Utah, a state where significant numbers of people actively practice basic religious precepts, and even the inactive are well-behaved and clean-living. Promised Land How Utah became the new economic Zion. It’s said there are no bad jobs during a recession. But there are depressing ones—like trying to recruit new business. That was Jeffrey Edwards’s task as head of Utah’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a publicly funded carnival barker for new and emerging companies. Every state has a comparable office. But while nearly every local economy succumbed to the frozen credit markets, failing to grow much during the last two years, Utah has flourished. With Edwards’s help, it set its own records for new companies (more than 40) and capital investment (nearly $2 billion). That has helped sustain an average of 3.5 percent annual growth during the last five years, more than any state other than energy-rich North Dakota. “It’s a weird countercyclical phenomenon,” says Edwards, “but we’ve been busier than we’ve ever been.” Why Utah? Founded by Mormon pioneers, the state, which has been called “a quasi theocracy” by the editor of its largest newspaper, is overwhelmingly white (93 percent) and Mormon (60 percent). Those demographics make for a socially conservative mind meld—no gay marriage, mixed acceptance of women in the workplace—that might seem hostile to the idea-swapping associated with a go-go economy. Mix in a thin coffee-and-booze culture, and you might expect Utah’s economy to be listless as well. But the opposite is true. Greater Salt Lake City, the 75-mile corridor stretching from Ogden in the north to Provo in the south, has absorbed massive new data centers for eBay, Twitter, and Oracle; splashy new offices for Disney Interactive and EA Sports; and, just last month, a commitment from Adobe—the makers of Flash and Acrobat—to build a thousand-person software-development campus, where the minimum average salary will be $60,000. Homegrown tech is booming as well. The University of Utah recently tied MIT for creating the most companies out of its patented research: more than 80 since 2005. Provo, home to Brigham Young University, has the most high-growth companies per capita in the country, according to Inc. magazine. Expressing a shared sentiment among many businesspeople who go to Utah these days, Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Michael Goguen said at a Salt Lake City business conference last month: “We’re noticing.” From EDC’s Salt Lake City offices, with their view of the snowcapped mountains and horizon-to-horizon blue sky, Edwards delivers a compelling sales pitch. It includes facts like cheap energy, low taxes, and top billing from list makers like Forbes. And it follows a night on the town, where Edwards proves that “you can indeed get a drink,” and “a good cup of coffee isn’t that hard to find.” But the close is almost bumper-sticker simple: cheaper than Washington, cooler than Texas, as outdoorsy as Colorado … and not California. Last year the EDC opened a recruiting center near Riverside, Calif., and Gov. Gary Herbert touts how he is “making the state business-friendly while California is doing the opposite.” Defining itself against the liberal left coast is an act of jujitsu. Utah’s biggest potential liability—its conservative, religious populus—becomes an indisputable strength. Utah’s people are, indeed, an employer’s dream. They are healthy, hard workers (pouring in 48 hours a week on average), and exceedingly stable, with the highest birthrates in the nation. The large number of young Mormons who spend two years on a conversion mission also means a huge swath of the population earned its sales stripes in hostile terrain. This might not offer an easily replicable path for states looking to follow Utah’s economic lead. Then again, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is always looking to expand. newsweek.com

To: Little Joe who wrote (149877)	11/12/2010 6:36:52 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541933

Um as far as I know the Supreme Court is not uniformly liberal. "A year after R. A. V., the Supreme Court unanimously upheld, in Wisconsin v. Mitchell, a statute that imposed stiffer sentences for racially-motivated assaults than for other types of assaults. The Court reasoned that the statute did not violate the First Amendment because it was aimed primarily at regulating conduct, not speech." So your argument that it is "liberals" imposing this on you, is trash. You can, of course, imagine that it is liberals- but it obviously isn't. As for the global warming "suggestions"- that's not the law, so until it is it's just someone's opinion. As such, it has not "intruded" upon your freedom. Unless someone merely uttering the idea is your version of "intrusion". So this is all quite problematic for your argument. McCain Feingold? You are blaming liberals for McCain's bipartisan reform act? Are you serious? 'Nuff said. I can't believe you tried that. I have noticed cities regulating things like transfats. What I have not noticed is that only liberals are doing this. Is your argument that only liberals care about food quality and food ingredients enough to regulate them? Can you prove this? I find all sorts of intrusions in to my liberties by religions. I don't want God on my money. I don't believe in God. What the heck is it doing on my money? I don't want God in the pledge. I'd like to be able to say the pledge- but that "under God" part we added in the 50's, to distinguish ourselves from the commies, is coercive. Why should I be forced to say an oath I do not believe in- and my only other choice be silence? How about a pledge everyone can say? When I was a child we had to pray in school. Ick. I was the child of atheists. I'm glad that went by the wayside. When I was young the abortion laws had only recently changed- much against the cries of the religious, who are against abortion because of their religious beliefs- and who are still militating to have the laws changed back. If they have such beliefs, I'm totally for them not having abortions- but what I do with my body and fetuses, and what my neighbor does, none of your damn business. Hard for me to figure that your imagined "liberal" thought police, and your false attribution of McCain Feingold to the liberals, outweighs decades of Christian religious hegemony (state displays of religious themes, public school religious plays and songs and prayer), and the interference with women's bodies and self determination. I have been forced all my life to do things I find repugnant by the religious factions in our country. You have not noticed these things because to you they are probably invisible. But in order to evaluate the fairness of something, you need to try to see it from the oppressed minorities eyes- and the non-religious in this country have always been oppressed by the religious majority. I don't expect you to care. And I'm not sure you'll even see it. But don't expect me to buy your weak arguments when you ask how the freedom of the non-religious has been intruded upon. And btw - the reference to imaginary friends is important. When you regulate in the name of religion, you reference and imaginary friend. Not everyone has the same imaginary friends- and some people don't want any imaginary friends- so there's a problem trying to use religion to foist laws on a population. When you use science, or the public interest, everyone can evaluate that the same way. We may not all agree on what these things are, but at least they don't involve invisible beings that aren't really part of the debate for everyone. See how that's important?