The country’s first small nuclear modular reactor is gaining traction, and it has the support of more than 20 municipalities that own their own power in Utah as they brace for a world without coal production. The state currently has no nuclear energy offerings.

The Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a consortium of municipally owned power systems in Utah and several other Western states, has partnered with NuScale Power to study and create the technology. The proposed 12-module plant would be at Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, where it could power Utah’s cities from hundreds of miles away.

In Salt Lake County, Murray has committed $15,000 so far to the Carbon Free Power Project to explore the new technology, according to Murray Power Manager Blaine Haacke. The council will have to decide whether to recommit funds to studying the project at a meeting next month.

“It’s a little bit of a controversial issue, you know, bringing nuclear,” Haacke said. “Utah doesn’t have nuclear, and so it’s a new mindset, I guess you could say.”

If they stick with the project, the 28 municipalities that have signed sales contracts for the project wouldn’t actually power their cities with nuclear energy until around 2026, since the project is now in the exploratory phase, with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently reviewing the NuScale reactor design.

UAMPS is funding 25 percent of the project, with the Department of Energy funding half and NuScale covering the rest. NuScale has estimated the plant will cost just under $3 billion to build, and Haacke estimated that construction would begin around 2023.

Though still in the early going, the small modular reactor proposal has caused concern for HEAL Utah, a clean-air advocacy group that urged Murray’s council at its work meeting last week not to recommit funds to the project.

“I think it’s a pretty good question to ask: Why is kind of a small municipal utility conglomerate thinking about getting into a huge, huge capital-intensive generation process when, you know, there’s much more cost effective and proven technologies available?” Michael Shea, a senior policy associate from the group, later told The Salt Lake Tribune.

‘You don’t want all your eggs in one basket’

Though HEAL Utah has cautioned cities considering the project about its possible economic impact — with Shea noting that “almost every nuclear project in the country” has had “massive delays and massive cost overruns” — Haacke said he sees the new SMR technology as a smart investment in Murray’s future.

“We have quite a bit of coal production that we buy our energy from, and we know that coal is being phased out,” he said. “We don’t know what that’s going to be 20 years from now. We could be totally coal-free in the region, so we need to come up with some resource that will replace that — and nuclear might be that resource.”

A report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance published in June speculates coal will be “squeezed out” of the power generation market over the next 30 years, “as the cost of renewables plunges and technology improves the flexibility of grids globally.”

Right now, Murray powers its city with around 43 percent coal. The city’s current buy-in of 1 megawatt of nuclear energy would likely constitute only 2 percent of the city’s energy needs per year, Haacke said, so it wouldn’t come close to replacing coal. But Haacke expects the new small modular reactor technology may “take off,” with financial rewards to those who invested early.

Like Murray, Logan’s City Council is one of several municipalities that are also considering whether to recommit funds to the project. And though the municipality’s $200,000 investment is much deeper than Murray’s is, Logan Power Director Mark Montgomery said it’s a relatively low financial risk for a high possible reward.

“People want their lights to turn on when they flip the switch and they want to be cool in the summer and they want to be warm in the winter, so our job is to make sure we have some kind of a resource to back that usage up,” he said, noting that nuclear could be the answer under a declining coal industry.

“It’s kind of like financial portfolio,” Montgomery added. “You don’t want all your eggs in one basket. You want it spread around so if one [energy resource] has a problem, you can still have power.”

‘Once you have nuclear, you always have nuclear’

While there are plenty of opportunities to “offramp” from the project — with NuScale promising to reimburse 100 percent of the costs incurred since November 2017 if UAMPS participants choose not to participate past 2019 — Haacke said he thinks the city is “comfortable with it right now.”

But Murray Council Chair Diane Turner said she’s leaning toward voting against Murray’s continued involvement in the project in August due to environmental and economic concerns.

“To me, it makes sense to look more and to put all that money into renewables rather than just going with nuclear, because it’s not truly a clean energy,” she said. “And that’s kind of how it’s being touted, but I mean — once you have nuclear, you always have nuclear.”

Turner was referring to the issue of radioactive waste — the safe disposal of which has long plagued the commercial industry.

LaVarr Webb, a spokesman for UAMPS, said the spent fuel would be stored safely at the Idaho National Laboratory site in dry casks, as at other nuclear plants across the country. And while renewables will likely play an increasing role in power portfolios in the future, he said nuclear energy has its place, as well.

“In looking at what will complement renewables so power can be provided when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, [UAMPS] did think that nuclear was the best way to go,” he said. “Especially this new small modular reactor that is dramatically different than the traditional large nuclear plants.”

Webb said the scale of the small modular reactors allows for a simpler and safer design than traditional nuclear plants. And the reactors can shut themselves down and self-cool, with no operator action necessary, which means a disaster like the one at Fukushima in 2011 would be unlikely, he said.

Though Shea conceded that nuclear energy is coal-free and therefore not as polluting as other energy production, he’s worried about the large amounts of water use and the blueprint for managing radioactive waste.

“How do you possibly plan for dealing with a substance that’s going to stay deadly poisonous for the next 10,000 years? The truth is you can’t,” he said. “And that gets kind of to the core of why HEAL opposes it.”

Online disinformation and the spread of deceptive political messages are pernicious, but they aren't necessarily the worst abuse of social networks by governments and political actors. Rational people are resistant to propaganda, and irrational ones only consume messages that stroke their confirmation biases. No one, however, can be impervious to personal attacks on a mass scale.

A report by the human rights lawyer Carly Nyst and Oxford University researcher Nick Monaco is an early attempt to study the phenomenon of state-sponsored trolling, or the digital harassment of critics. The case studies come from a diverse set of countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Ecuador, the Philippines, Turkey, the U.S. and Venezuela. They complement what is already known about the practice in Russia, whose achievements in the field of digital abuse have generated the most interest to date.

The stories in the report, commissioned by the Palo Alto, California-based Institute for the Future, are all similar in some respects. Thousands of social network accounts, both operated by humans and by bots used to amplify the attack, gang up on a person who dares to criticize a regime or a political figure. Invariably, the person is accused of being a foreign agent and a traitor. Memes and cartoons are used to insult the target. The language of the comments, posts and tweets is often abusive; female targets, such as the Turkish journalist Ceyda Karan and her Filipina colleague Maria Ressa, are routinely threatened with rape. The general idea behind the campaigns is to give the target the impression of swelling public indignation about his or her work and views, but also to drown out the target's voice with the howling of thousands of digital voices.

In more authoritarian countries, the campaigns are often conducted by pro-government organizations. That was the case in Russia in the early years of this decade. According to the Institute for the Future report, it's the case in Azerbaijan today, where a group called Ireli ("Forward") openly hunts the regime's opponents on the web. The tendency, though, is toward the professionalization of trolling. Russia's Internet Research Agency, featured in an indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, is just one example of how trolling operations can be run by a corporation-like entity. In Ecuador, a firm called Ribeney Sociedad Anonima won a government contract for trolling services. The Bahraini government has hired Western "black PR" firms to attack critics.

In the less authoritarian states, where voting is still meaningful, trolling operations often grow out of election campaigns. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa created a troll army for the 2012 election and kept using it after he won. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte hired trolls to work for his 2016 presidential campaign and has since put some of the most prominent ones in government jobs. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party maintains an "information technology cell," with thousands of members who receive daily instructions on what topics to promote and whom to gang up on.

The Institute for the Future report also takes aim at the pro-Donald Trump trolls in the U.S. who proliferated during the 2016 campaign and remain active now that he is president. In the U.S. case, the report defines state-sponsored trolling "as the involvement of hyperpartisan news outlets and sources close to the president" that have evolved "from an electioneering trolling machine to an incumbent government's apparatus." Certain statements from high officials, the report says, are "tantamount to a coded condoning of vitriolic harassment online from high officials." As an example, it cites the campaign of abuse against Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University professor, after she suggested in a column that military officers might disobey Trump's orders.

But Trump fans' targeted attacks aren't state-sponsored in the same sense as the Russian, Azerbaijani or Philippine trolling efforts. They'd take place even if Trump had lost, just as the similarly abusive behavior by trolls from the opposite camp, the anti-Trump "Resistance," persists despite Hillary Clinton's election defeat. These operations are instigated, if not necessarily run, by political machines rather than the U.S. government. One could argue, though, that such political machines can be as powerful as the state when it comes to hounding and silencing critics.

The insults and threats can be unsettling on their own, and they can make it hard for the targeted person to get a coherent message to followers. And sometimes attacks have real-world consequences, as when trolls get hold of the target's personal information. That is what happened to the Finnish journalist Jessikka Aro, who tried to investigate Russian troll factories and was subjected to online and then offline abuse.

It's difficult to understand why social media platforms do little, if anything, to stop the trolling campaigns. Twitter and Facebook will remove posts and comments containing death and rape threats, but not insults, treason accusations or suggestions that a journalist is on a hostile spy agency's payroll. They also don't make it easy to complain about entire trolling campaigns rather than individual comments and messages, which are are difficult for a trolling target to flag: Ressa, the Filipina journalist, received up to 90 hate messages an hour at the height of the campaign against her.

The Institute for the Future makes some suggestions on how social networks can help, but they aren't particularly useful. For example, it says a network could ask users who create bot accounts to identify them as such, which troll farms would be understandably reluctant to do. It also suggests that the social media companies should somehow detect and identify state-linked accounts, a game of whack-a-mole that is as hard to play as it is pointless.

The easier and more useful thing would be to empower the targets of abuse campaigns. For example, flagging a dozen similar abusive comments should result in special attention from the network. Users should also be able to turn off comments to specific posts and temporarily disable tagging, otherwise it's too easy for trolls to take over a feed. And if bots are to be marked, it should be up to the networks to detect them: The technology is there, it's just not being applied consistently enough.

The best answer would be for the networks to talk to the trolls' targets and find out what tools they would have needed to fight back. The Institute for the Future's report would be a good starting point: The authors have interviewed some of the targeted journalists and activists. Together, these people and the social networks could figure out ways to curb politicized online harassment without curbing freedom of speech.

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering European politics and business. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.

It’s Tehran’s turn for the “fire and fury” treatment.

In response to Iranian President Hasan Rouhani telling Donald Trump not to “play with the lion’s tail" because “war with Iran is the mother of all wars,” the president fired back in an emphatically all-caps tweet warning of “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE.”

Since the last time Trump theatrically threatened a regime with destruction he quickly turned around and had warm talks with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, his Twitter account has lost some of its deterrent force.

But the exchange of words has focused attention on a growing confrontation with Iran, in which the United States has the upper hand. When Trump pulled out of the Iran deal earlier this year, there were warnings that it would split the Western alliance, prompt an Iranian nuclear breakout or leave the U.S. isolated and unable to effectively sanction Iran on its own.

Instead, Iran is in the midst of an economic crisis before the U.S. has truly ratcheted up the pressure. In less than a year, the Iranian currency, the rial, has lost half its value. There have been broad-based demonstrations around the country. Major multinational companies are pulling back from doing business in Iran, including General Electric, Siemens and A.P. Moller-Maersk.

Iran wasn’t in position to take economic advantage of the windfall of the nuclear deal. It was most interested in funding its terrorism and foreign adventurism, and even if it weren’t, its economy is hopelessly corrupt. Despite then-Secretary of State John Kerry urging Europeans to do business in Iran, the terror state obviously doesn’t present a stable business climate. (The governor of the Central Bank of Iran has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for helping the Revolutionary Guards funnel funds to Hezbollah.)

U.S. sanctions that were lifted as part of the Iran deal begin to snap back on Aug. 6, and the administration has a goal of getting Iranian oil exports to zero by November. Although this isn’t realistic, and the administration will grant exceptions to some allies, Iran could lose 1 million barrels a day in exports (in May, its exports had hit a record at 2.7 million barrels a day).

This is nothing less than financial warfare against the regime, aimed at denying it hard currency to fund its foreign operations and ultimately at destabilizing it. The administration denies that it has a policy of regime change, but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s demands for a new deal are so sweeping and fundamental that Tehran couldn’t comply short of a radical reorientation toward becoming a normal state.

The economic campaign is coupled with a strategy of backing our allies — Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — to the hilt in resisting Iranian aggression in Syria and Yemen.

This is all to the good. The problem is that Trump’s desire to get out of Syria entirely is at cross-purposes with pressuring Iran on all fronts, and the hope that a cynical and self-interested Russia will significantly aid us vis-à-vis Iran is surely misbegotten.

With proxy forces across the region, Iran has cards to play, and the regime is inherently dangerous. At a time when it should be doing everything to curry favor with the Europeans, one of its diplomats was arrested a few weeks ago in Germany for plotting a terror attack on an Iranian opposition group in France.

But Iran lacks several advantages enjoyed by North Korea. It doesn’t have an overwhelming, powerful patron like China. It unites Israel and the Arab states, and none of our regional allies are pressuring us to negotiate with Tehran the way South Korea pushed us to talk with Pyongyang. Finally, Iran doesn’t yet have nuclear weapons.

This gives the administration leverage. The mullahs shouldn’t fear presidential tweets as much as the economic clampdown to come.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

It seems to me if Greg Hughes doesn’t know where his property is or whom he has dealings with involving some of his deals, that would make me think he was pretty inept, but if he does know who, what and where, that would make me think he is a cheating scammer.

And if he has his eye on running for governor, he has all the right qualities for political office. Too dumb to know anything, or too crooked to be fair.

Paul Jerominski, Salt Lake City

Either Utah’s elected leaders don’t get it or they think going through the motions will secure their office. What have they really accomplished regarding our shared, wild public lands?

Congress, thankfully, saw through Rep. Rob Bishop’s failed Public Lands Initiative because it too narrowly followed the wishes of county commissioners. We now have a golden opportunity to extend real protection to some of our best public wild lands in the San Rafael Swell and beyond. But while the Emery County Public Land Management Act is a start, it’s currently about a million acres short of capturing the most deserving lands. If protected as wilderness, the entire country — the entire world — will be envious and proud that the people of Utah, and their representatives, had such foresight.

We must demand more from the Utah congressional delegation than the current Emery County Public Land Management Act. They need to be honest brokers between Utah counties and Utah/U.S. conservationists, not simply taking one side and expecting a different outcome than the failed PLI. Unless they respectfully start to recognize the overwhelming desires of most citizens, we will lose these magnificent lands forever.

Jeffrey Himsl, Sandy

Whether for real-world CIA handlers or fictional 007s, there is no tactic in spycraft more enduring than the honeypot. And so in the Old Testament, we saw the Philistines deploy Delilah’s feminine wiles to undermine Samson, and in the 1980s, we had Clayton Lonetree, the U.S. Marine blackmailed at his Moscow post by a beautiful Soviet. And now we have Maria Butina, allegedly the latest in a long history of double-crossing women whose success depends entirely on how much more they understand men than their marks understand women.

Spend an hour or three scrolling through Butina’s prodigious social media presence and certain themes emerge. Her Instagram is a series of strategic fitness selfies — a sculpted deltoid, a Lycra’d thigh — showcasing strength and femininity. In photos snapped outside the gym, her hair is long and styled. She cooked homey-looking recipes: baked chicken, scrambled eggs. She shared spiritually tinged aphorisms: “Faith makes all things possible. Love makes them easy.” She posted dog-whistle appeals to lonely men: “I want to love someone whose heart has been broken, so that he knows exactly how it feels and won’t break mine.”

And she posted guns. In picture after picture, Butina holds firearms of all shapes and sizes. Here, she brandishes a handgun and wears a cowboy hat. There, she crouches in the snow, leaning a rifle over a dead boar. Do wingtipped eyeliner and bombshell-red lipstick pair well with semi-automatic weapons? On Maria Butina's Facebook feed they do.

Whether or not Butina is actually a Russian spy, what becomes clear is that she was very good at being an American fantasy. While Cold War buffs spent the past week talking about how Butina was reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence in "Red Sparrow" or Keri Russell in "The Americans," the pop-culture reference I kept thinking of was author Gillian Flynn's description of a "Cool Girl."

The concept was a major theme in Flynn’s novel “Gone Girl” — which is itself essentially a deep dive into the relationship equivalent of spycraft: the personas some women adopt to please men, and the boyfriends who buy into it. Cool Girls might package themselves in different formats for different types of guys — sports bros, earnest freegans, “Star Wars” cosplayers. The common thread, Flynn writes: A Cool Girl is “basically the girl who likes everything he likes and doesn’t ever complain.”

Maria Butina is an NRA Cool Girl, a unicorn dream of what a man who loved guns might be seeking in a woman to love him.

If there were boyfriends in her life, or dates, or parties or nightclubs, they weren’t a part of her online personality. In her photos she is almost always alone, like a Realtor’s open house left purposefully devoid of furniture so prospective buyers could imagine themselves living there. If court records hadn’t revealed Butina to be flesh and blood, I would have looked at her Facebook feed and assumed she was a bot or a scammer, one of those lovely women who send a friend request, say you’re cute, then ask you to wire them $5,000.

Are there women with personalities like this in real life? Maybe. But are there a surfeit of highly intelligent, hot, bilingual Eastern European graduate students who love Jesus, cooking, guns, big-game hunting, bourbon, lipstick, cowboys and tenderly repairing the hearts of damaged men?

Maybe?

The fact that Butina became so popular in conservative circles so quickly seems to point in the other direction: There aren't a lot of (real) women like her. "She was like a novelty," a former Michigan GOP chair told The Washington Post last week. "Friendly, curious and flirtatious," described another anonymous source, who met her through the Conservative Political Action Conference.

The men who championed her were so pleased to meet a woman who fit an ideal mold, they never stopped to think that maybe she was an ideal mole.

Or, as one jokester observed on Twitter: "Such a shame that good guys with guns are powerless against bad guys with vaginas."

This is why the honeypot scheme continues to be a thing. Because it's based on an ego-stroking fantasy, a form of currency that never goes out of style.

The sexy narrative of Maria Butina is that she’s a devious femme fatale. But her maneuvering through Second Amendment circles revealed as much about her marks' desires as it did about her own plotting. Maria Butina was NRA Cool Girl. Her Russian compatriots might have hacked into servers and political databases. She learned to hack the American psyche.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section and author of “American Fire.”

Sprawling across rural Utah is a 30,000-mile spiderweb of unimproved dirt tracks and routes, known as class D roads, that largely cross public lands. Often dead-ending after a few miles, these are the roads less traveled and have not enjoyed a dedicated funding source for maintenance.

Until now.

Denounced by environmentalists as a sneak attack on public lands, a bill passed out of last week’s special legislative session could divert millions in gas-tax revenue for blading obscure back roads into remote patches.

SB2004 authorizes cities and counties to dedicate up to 30 percent of their state transportation dollars, normally pegged for secondary class B and C roads, to maintain their D roads.

Rural county leaders say the bill, sponsored by the retiring Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, helps shore up transportation systems on which many residents and visitors rely. Class D roads are often in poor shape and visitors get stranded on them, so maintaining them enhances public safety and reduces the need for rescues, leaders have argued in legislative committee meetings.

With the innocuous title “Class B and C Road Fund Amendments,” the bill sailed through Wednesday without a single question posed to its sponsors or a nay vote.

Critics see Noel’s measure as a gimmick to incentivize blading little-used tracks that are the subject of Utah’s legal fight over historic routes under the frontier-era statute RS 2477.

“The bill also clears the way for rural counties to use even more state tax dollars to pay private attorneys to pursue fruitless RS 2477 litigation — cases that have dragged on for years with no resolution in sight,” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “At its core, this bill amounts to a misuse of taxpayer dollars to fund retiring Rep. Mike Noel’s misguided fight against the federal government.”

Environmentalists argue improving class D roads serves little purpose other than bolstering counties’ legal claims to these routes and undermining the surrounding land’s wilderness value.

The bill also shrinks Salt Lake County’s piece of gasoline-tax revenues by nearly $1 million. According to a fiscal note, Kane would get $183,000 of this money, and the balance would be returned to the pool available for maintaining secondary roads.

The bill reprised Noel’s HB314, which passed both houses during the regular session, but time ran out before differences in the House and Senate versions could be ironed out.

Those versions contained a bombshell that few noticed at the time but caught the attention of lobbyist David Spatafore on the eve of Wednesday’s special session.

While Noel had described his bill as merely an administrative fix for a funding-allocations “glitch,” the measure really drove much further into controversial territory, according to Spatafore, who represents a half-dozen Salt Lake County cities. A problematic provision would have allowed counties to ”develop” class D roads to be included in their class B and C inventories.

“That’s an open-ended invitation to add 30,000 road miles to the system,” said Spatafore, the former longtime lobbyist for the Utah League of Cities and Towns. “This will dilute the system. You shouldn’t have a financial incentive to go out and blade 30,000 miles that don’t need to be done.”

It also would allow counties to use the money to “administer, manage and plan” lands adjacent to their road networks.

At the insistence of the Utah Department of Transportation, this language was stripped out before the bill reached the Senate floor Wednesday.

Yet the amount of money now in play is huge under the language that passed. Last year, UDOT distributed nearly $137 million to cities and counties to maintain class B and C roads. Thirty percent of the share going to counties off the urban Watch Front amounts to $11.6 million. This is roughly the sum that SB2004 makes available for class D road maintenance.

And that’s on top of the revenue transfer Noel accomplished in another recently enacted bill enabling rural counties to divert up to a third of transient-room tax (TRT) revenue to road maintenance.

Over objections from Utah’s tourism industry, Noel shepherded HB367 through the 2018 general session, framing the bill in nearly identical terms as his HB314: Important to the health of rural communities, secondary roads deserve support from taxpayers.

In the case of HB367, the taxpayers getting tapped are tourists, who pay the 4.25 percent levy on accommodations.

“The national monuments, the Big Five [national] parks and the effort we made in Utah to get people to come increase tourism not only in the parks but also on the adjacent lands,” Noel said in committee. “It increases pressure on the counties for garbage disposal, law enforcement, for search and rescues.”

TRT money is normally reserved to promote tourism and address it impacts. Industry leaders cautioned that HB367 could steer $2.5 million away from promoting rural Utah as a tourism destination.

At at the same hearing, however, Duchesne County Commissioner Ron Winterton said his county has 900 miles of nonmaintained D roads that pose a hardship to the county because of their poor condition.

“We have a lot of search and rescues that have to go down and recover people in these areas,” said Winterton, now a Republican Senate candidate. “If we made them better, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

For Kane County, where Noel lives, HB367 enables the County Commission to shift up to $700,000 of its TRT collections toward road maintenance.

According to UDOT data, Utah has 36,014 miles of class B and C roads, the secondary routes for which cities and counties receive gas-tax revenue. Nearly 17,000 are paved; the rest are gravel and dirt. Funding is distributed to the counties and cities based on this mileage, equally weighted with their populations. Under a complex funding formula, they receive far more money for a paved mile, while a graveled mile gets more money than a dirt mile.

The database indicates Kane, the county most embroiled in the RS 2477 fight, maintains 733 miles of class B and C roads in its unincorporated areas; 110 miles are paved, 209 have a gravel surface and 414 have a dirt surface. It has hundreds more class D miles that don’t count toward its allocation.

Last year, Kane received just over $1 million to maintain its back roads. Under SB2004, it would be able to spend $300,000 of that blading its class D network.

Southwest Utah has sustained millions of dollars of flood damage to homes, roads and Zion National Park, with more to come. Meanwhile, Rep. Chris Stewart voted for a U.S. House resolution denying the reality of climate disruption.

Wildfires and floods continue to affect the lives of his constituents while he rakes in donations from the fossil fuel industries.

Despite repeated requests from constituents that he join the Congressional Climate Caucus, Stewart has refused to acknowledge the reality of climate change. Remember this in November.

Jean Lown, St. George

Like all physicians, my judgments are subject to error. However, I do feel I am able to use the resources of my profession in a fairly effective and cost-efficient way. Having said that, let me illustrate a "bad judgment/bad outcome" scenario that is becoming all too common in the health care field.

Every Wednesday I see patients at a low-income clinic in the Salt Lake Valley. The patients of this facility have little or no financial resources to pay for the "usual" medical care. I recently saw a Latina woman who came to our clinic complaining of upper back pain. She had been seen a few days earlier at a local emergency room. She walked out of the ER with no definitive diagnosis, unresolved back pain, and much poorer.

While at the ER she had a chest X-ray, CT scan of her cervical spine, X-ray of her shoulder (the one nearest the pain), CT lung scan and blood tests. She was told she had a muscular problem and was given some pain medication.

After talking with her and examining the appropriate anatomy, I found a localized spot on the medial border of her scapula. I actually examined her, something I would expect of most physicians, and felt an injection of Lidocaine and cortisone would help. As you might expect, or I wouldn't have shared this with you, she walked out of our clinic pain­ free and at a minimal cost of treatment.

Unfortunately, she will either have to take out bankruptcy or the hospital will have to write off the ER charges, not to mention the four or five days of continued pain, which could, and should, have been resolved on her first visit to the ER.

We can, and must, do better as a health care industry. The costs to society and the individual have become unacceptable.

Maurice Baker, Murray

Murray • The Red Cross needs you. It needs your blood. Badly.

Blood supplies are running low, locally and nationally. The organization has put out a call for blood and platelet donors of all blood types.

Donations have dwindled during the summer months. It’s happening across the country, but it’s amplified in Utah because of the holidays.

“It’s a little tougher for us locally, because we have both July 24th and July Fourth,” said Sheri Van Bibber of the Red Cross. “But the need for blood hasn’t changed. Not only are there accidents happening that the hospitals need blood for, but there’s just the everyday surgeries and the leukemia and cancer patients that are at risk the most, and we definitely need to have blood there for them."

The Red Cross has been on “urgent need” status since last week.

“We need every blood type right now, for fear that we’re going to get lower and lower,” Van Bibber said. “We didn’t want to get to this point. We can’t afford for supplies to get any lower.”

Doug Kildoo of Sandy said he’s been donating blood since he was a teenager. “And for the last six years or so, I’ve been donating platelets about once a month.”

Twice this month.

“I came an extra time because of the shortage,” he said.

Amanda Johnson, a seventh-grade math teacher at Eisenhower Junior High in Taylorsville, came in to American Red Cross Blood Donation Center in Murray to donate platelets for the first time.

“Platelets seem very impactful because it’s mostly for cancer patients,” she said. “I feel like I’m really doing something. If it takes a half-hour to donate blood and save a life — if it takes 2½ hours for a platelet donation to help a cancer patient — that’s something I can do.”

Kildoo echoed those thoughts.

“We always say we want to help out society,” he said. “And I don’t have a lot of cash. I can’t give the Red Cross hundreds of dollars. So I just do the platelets. That’s my way of giving back.”

And each donation can help multiple people in need.

“It impacts up to three patients with the platelets, the whole red cells and the plasma,” Van Bibber said. “It has the potential to do that within four days of when they donate.”

The Red Cross sends out emails telling donors where their blood has gone, or donors can download the Red Cross app and follow their blood that way.

“When I donated on June 11, they sent me an email and my blood went to someone in South Carolina,” Johnson said. “That's not what I expected, but it made me feel good about donating.”

To make a donation, go online to RedCross.org to find the location of a blood drive near you. You also can make an appointment to donate at the American Red Cross Blood Donation Center at 6616 S. 900 East, Murray, online or by calling 800-733-2767. There are other locations in Ogden, Provo, Orem, Layton and Logan.

“We need every donor we can get,” Van Bibber said.

It has been 30 years since Princeton University professor James McPherson published his extraordinary “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” which won a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 1989. Great books remain references for decades, and now the book deserves a rebirth of sorts. Listening to McPherson’s account of the 1850s, for example, is oddly relevant even as history makes clear that the relatively young Union was in a far more perilous condition then than ours is today.

There is no "Bleeding Kansas," for example, but there are some powerful reminders that political DNA moves down the generations as surely as human genes do. The Republican Party was birthed in the 1850s, and most people know that Abraham Lincoln was its second nominee for president and its first successful one. The party that nominated him in 1860 was the product of a deft absorption of members from another party: the Know-Nothing party.

The Know-Nothings were a party built on opposition: “anti-liquor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant,” though Northern and Southern party members were split on the question of slavery. Primarily “young men in white-collar and skilled blue-collar occupations,” they organized themselves into hundreds of “lodges” across the country in the 1850s in the wake of mass waves of immigration. “Members were pledged to vote for no one except native-born Protestants for public office,” McPherson recounts. "When asked by outsiders about the Order, members were to respond ‘I know nothing.’ "

The Republicans were primarily a new party of liberty and opposition to “the slave power,” but before they could approach power, they needed to co-opt northern Know-Nothings. This they did by various moves — deft and often disingenuous nods and winks. “Of their principles,” Lincoln wrote in 1855, “I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists,” yet they “are mostly my old political and personal friends.”

These nativists were absorbed into the much broader struggle against the South. Their party disappeared. Their political DNA, never a majority but never insignificant, passed on through 16 decades of GOP evolution. The movement collapsed into the convulsion of the era, but a platform of grievances of those who perceived themselves to have built the country against those new to the country did not die off, and it never will for any nation open to immigrants. There will always be this tension between the new and striving and the old who have investment and labor already sunk into the land.

President Donald Trump took over the GOP riding the old Know-Nothing movement’s modern counterpart — evolved to no longer be anti-Catholic or pro-temperance, but very much a reflection of rapid change and disintermediation, the fears and shocks of terrorism and economic panic of the new millennium combined with 24/7 media. Where the first Republicans beat the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, the GOP establishment was helpless to stop Trump’s extraordinary hostile takeover of the party.

But the party doesn’t change just because it’s captained for a time by an outsider channeling the grievances — some real, some imagined — of millions of stakeholders seeing what they built dissolve into uncertainty. Hardly 1 in 10 elected Republicans cheers all of the president’s agenda, but close to 90 percent are willing to hang on for the ride, at least awhile.

Trump delivers traditional Republicans the military buildup, deregulation, tax cuts and, crucially, judicial appointments of the sort that would make the Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and both Bush coalitions happy. But the party has internal “red lines,” and one of them is national strength and national security in service of the rule of law. It is not isolationist, and it will shatter before abandoning liberty-loving allies for dictators.

When Trump fell into the “Nixon trap” of believing himself able to change geopolitics with a single flip of the foreign policy script in Helsinki (just as Barack Obama indulged the same vanity vis-à-vis Iran), the party’s long-dominant internationalist-realist majority recoiled. Dealing with Vladimir Putin is fine depending on the terms. Pretending he is anything other than a dictator who has repeatedly attacked not just our elections, but also U.S. allies and interests across the globe, is not.

The nativist pulse of the 1850s was not a majoritarian movement. It was a junior partner in the coalition that powered the Republican Party to save the Union and the Constitution. That the pulse returned and captured the presidency does not change the party of freedom’s true north. That lodestar is protecting the Constitution and equality of opportunity for all Americans regardless of race, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation, and doing so with military strength and clarity about who are our friends and foes around the globe.

Hugh Hewitt hosts a nationally syndicated radio show and is author of “The Fourth Way: The Conservative Playbook for a Lasting GOP Majority.”

Utah Against Police Brutality, an organization I am a proud member of, recently announced its campaign to implement the Salt Lake Civilian Police Accountability Council. SLCPAC, made up of seven members living in Salt Lake City, will be able to investigate police officers, veto the appointment of the chief of police, strike down any police policy and direct the police chief to discipline any officer for misconduct. SLCPAC is a momentous step toward expanding community control of the Salt Lake City Police Department.

We have, however, come across a few criticisms about our campaign that I wish to address. The first criticism is that the police chief is already holding the police accountable and that SLCPAC would either be bureaucratically excessive or replace accountability with mob rule. Such criticism assumes that SLCPAC is nothing more than, to quote Robert Kirby, “another set of guards to guard the guards who aren’t guarding the guards the way the new guards would,” for which the only qualifications to join are “a load of outrage and/or an age in which scientists have proved the brain isn’t fully developed yet.”

These assumptions downplay how SLCPAC makes it possible for local elected community members to directly address police misconduct while democratically representing the interests of voters rather than those of the police department. Kirby, curiously, never mentions that SLCPAC is a democratic organization. People could not join SLCPAC just because they are self-righteous young adults infuriated at the police. SLCPAC would require that the voters decide who is qualified for membership based on the candidates’ knowledge and experiences appropriate for holding police accountable.

A third criticism is that the only people qualified to oversee the police are those with police training. The truth is that it is more important to understand community members’ experiences and interests with the police. This is what current oversight lacks. It is one thing to understand how the police do their jobs, but it is another thing to know and to care about how police officers treat and mistreat civilians.

Police officers have the power to kill people, often with impunity. Such power requires democratic control, not just the judgment of current or former police officers. To paraphrase a popular saying: Police violence is too important an issue to leave to the police. SLCPAC would address the city’s failure to stop police violence by bringing together civilians who have expertise, not just on how police officers operate, but also on the ways that oppression affects communities, how policing is part of that oppression, and what communities want to see changed.

Finally, some people wonder why we need SLCPAC when we already have the Community Advocates Group and the Civilian Police Review Board. It is because neither of them can actually hold police accountable. For one thing, as some members would testify, CAG has been less a form of accountability and more a source of frustration. Second, the Civilian Police Review Board, which SLCPAC would replace, does not have the power to curtail police violence. Investigating police officers is one thing, punishing them for misconduct is another.

For evidence of the Civilian Police Review Board’s impotence, look no further than when it found that the police officers who shot Abdi Mohamed were “not within policy.” For several community members, this was the vindication they needed for what they recognized as officers wantonly and needlessly trying kill a young black Somali refugee. But the board’s finding was in vain. Neither the SLCPD nor the judicial system punished the police officers. SLCPAC, on the other hand, can indeed reprimand and fire abusive cops.

Implementing SLCPAC is an important step to curtailing violence, fighting oppression and achieving justice because it places control of the police in the hands of communities, not in those of of the political elite or the police. UAPB will continue to fight for SLCPAC and will always advocate for community control.

Stephen Michael Christian is a member of Utah Against Police Brutality. He is a student at the University of Utah.

The greatest scandal of this presidency — and of all U.S. presidencies, really — is Russia’s co-opting of President Donald Trump. But that should not diminish the importance or the horror of Trump’s greatest domestic outrage: the cruel, senseless separation of migrant parents from their children with no real plan swiftly to reunite them.

The American Civil Liberties Union in a written statement points out that the administration has already missed one deadline and is likely to miss another. (“On July 23, the Trump administration told the court that it had reunited or ‘appropriately discharged’ 1,187 of the 2,551 children ages 5 and older who were forcibly separated from their parents. The government has also reunited 58 out of 103 children who are under the age of 5 and whose reunions were required by the first deadline, July 10.”)

We now know hundreds of parents were deported without their kids, according to UPI:

“The status report to Southern California U.S. District Judge Dana M. Sabraw, in an update between plaintiffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the 463 cases are ‘under review,’ and in those cases the adult ‘is not in U.S.’

“The report was requested by Sabraw ahead of the Trump administration’s 30-day deadline to reunite separated families, which ends Thursday. The judge wanted clarity on how many of the more than 2,551 parents eligible for reunions are no longer in the United States.”

The administration has the nerve to claim that parents — under the duress of family separation — willingly gave up their children. UPI reports: “Attorneys and immigration advocates are questioning, though, whether the parents fully understood what they were asked, and are hoping a court hearing Tuesday will provide clarity. … Advocates argue that migrant parents have been pressured and, out of desperation, signed deportation forms to be released from custody once their sons and daughters were sent to government shelters.” The ACLU expressed “concerns about misinformation given to these parents about their rights to fight deportation without their children,” given the near-impossibility of tracking down parents in Central America.

The ACLU very reasonably rejects the assertion that parents acted voluntarily. “As of July 23, the government reported that 130 parents had waived their right for reunification, meaning that their child would stay in the U.S. while they are removed, either in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody or possibly being released to a sponsor,” it explained. “It is critical that we are able to reach these parents and independently verify that they made this important choice with full knowledge of their families’ legal rights. In court on Friday, the government was not able to say how many of the 136 parents were still in the country, and this is information we will continue to press for.”

Consider the trauma already inflicted on these children. Then add in the real possibility that some parents will never be found. The Trump administration will have willfully and inhumanely inflicted ongoing emotional trauma on innocent kids and created hundreds of orphans for the sake of “deterrence.”

While the administration has tried to claim a “victory” in decreasing illegal entry, its data — big surprise! — are misleading at best. As Harsha Panduranga, counsel in the Brennan Center’s liberty and national security program, pointed out, “Data from the past few years shows that southwestern apprehensions and detentions regularly decrease from May to June. In four out of the past five years, when there was no ‘zero-tolerance’ policy, and which were all years when Barack Obama was president, southwestern apprehensions and detentions also went down from May to June.”

Moreover, cases of family apprehensions “only decreased from 9,485 to 9,449, or 0.4 percent, from May to June. That’s hardly evidence that the administration’s practice of family separation caused any drops in attempted illegal border crossings. Indeed, as Adam Cox and Ryan Goodman have convincingly argued — and as cited recently by a federal court reaffirming an order limiting the detention of migrant children to 20 days — there is little proof that harsh immigration detention policies have had any deterrent effects.”

This disgraceful chapter in Trump administration’s ongoing narrative of xenophobia and cruelty won’t end until all children are reunited. And even then, the damage to them, their parents and the United States’ image in the world will not evaporate.

Jennifer Rubin writes the Right Turn blog for The Washington Post, offering reported opinion from a center-right perspective.

Los Angeles • Utah’s football staff will spend this week finalizing the Utes' 110-player camp roster, anticipating some possible additions, coach Kyle Whittingham said Wednesday.

The Utes are expecting BYU transfer Francis Bernard to join their linebacking corps and hope junior college offensive lineman Bernard Schirmer will follow through on his recent commitment and report for the Aug. 1 start of practice.

Whittingham said of Bernard, “There are certain things that have to happen before you can comment on a recruit or a potential addition to the roster. And that criteria has not been met.”

Schirmer's case is different from those of other 2018 recruits, because he did not sign during the standard letter-of-intent period. He recently signed a non-binding scholarship agreement with the Utes, but remains recruitable. Schirmer has three years of eligibility remaining.

Bryant Pirtle, a junior college linebacker who signed in February, is expected to report Aug. 6, Whittingham said.

Previewing the season during the Pac-12 Football Media Day, Whittingham said the receivers are the team’s biggest question mark, with plenty of potential. Returned missionary Britain Covey is the most proven player in the group; Whittingham mentioned Siaosi Mariner as being “ready to have a breakout year." Linebacker Chase Hansen said Demari Simpkins “is one of the more underrated guys in the conference” and has been outstanding in summer workouts.

Utes say getting close is no longer good enough in the South. To take the next step, Kyle Whittingham says his program must win the division

There is no magic recipe. Not at least according to Chase Hansen.

For Utah to make that much-desired leap to the elite, for the Utes to get to Levi’s Stadium and play for the Pac-12 championship, it’s pretty simple. A play here, a play there. Make them when they count most.

“I think we just need to win the close ones, the ones that we haven’t won in the past,” said Utah’s senior safety-turned-linebacker. “As far as how? Just need to make some plays.”

So there it is.

Getting so painfully close in to getting to Santa Clara, Calif., last December as Pac-12 South champs could help this year’s Utes, Hansen said. That and a returning plethora of starters on both sides of the ball.

Utah coach Kyle Whittingham agrees.

“We’ve been competitive,” he said. “We’ve had the opportunity to get to the championship game a couple times since we joined the league, have not capitalized on that opportunity and that’s the next step in our evolution as a program in our estimation is getting to that championship game. Every team in the conference wants to.”

The Utes, Whittingham said, have heard the close-but-not-close-enough bit for too many years now.

“We own up to that,” he said. “We’re not trying to hide from that; it’s just something that needs to happen.”

Whittingham spoke glowingly of junior quarterback Tyler Huntley, junior running back Zack Moss and his typically vaunted Ute defense. The Utah coach pointed out the position that needs the most work in fall camp is the receiving corps, which has talent returning, but no standouts. The Utes lost Darren Carrington II and Raelon Singleton from a year ago.

Asked if he sees an alpha dog in the 2018 group, Whittingham went to a familiar name, one beloved by Utah fans.

“Well,” he said, “Britain Covey is a tremendous player. He’s back. Siaosi Mariner is a guy I think is ready to have a breakout year.”

— Christopher Kamrani

Herm Edwards is gaining converts — in the locker room at least — as he gets ready for his first season as Arizona State’s coach

There isn’t a coaching personality in the Pac-12 Conference like Herm Edwards.

That much was evident just a few minutes into his press conference at the Pac-12 Media Day in Hollywood. No coach demanded nearly every reporter to whip out their phones and start recording video. Because Edwards, the former ESPN analyst and head coach of the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs, knows how to deliver a soundbite.

When asked if his new team, the Arizona State Sun Devils being picked last in the Pac-12 preseason media poll, will serve as a bit of motivation for his group heading into fall camp, Edwards shrugged.

“I bet on me,” he said, “because that’s the only person you can bet on.”

Edwards said he hopes his players don’t view the outside noise as knocks and instead look inward on how to improve within first. Junior wide receiver N’Keal Harry never saw Edwards as Edwards the ESPN voice who in his years in the NFL went viral for a postgame press conference.

“I never really thought of Coach Herm as the broadcaster,” Harry said, “because he was my coach at the UnderArmour game, so I’ve always looked at him as a coach.”

So what was the reaction of Harry, the Sun Devils' talented 6-foot-4 wideout, when he heard ASU had fired former head coach Todd Graham and hired, of all people, Herm Edwards?

There was a sense of shock, but also now that he’s had more time with him, Harry is looking forward to the 2018 season.

“He’s a man of his word,” Harry said. “He’s a very wise man.”

— Christopher Kamrani

Big media crowd for new ASU head coach and former ESPN analyst Herm Edwards. pic.twitter.com/EJn5Yuw2vH

— Salt Lake Tribune Sports (@sltribsports) July 25, 2018

Stanford LB Sean Barton, a Woods Cross grad, is close to return for Cardinal following injury

The Cardinal always have a presence in the Beehive State. It will be showcased once more on the roster this season.

In 2018, the Stanford football program will have six former Utah prep athletes in Palo Alto, Calif. Back from their LDS Church missions are former Brighton wide receiver Simi Fehoko and East outside linebacker Tangaloa Kaufusi. One of the established Utahns on the roster, however, is nearly back from a season-ending injury and nearly ready to roll.

Senior inside linebacker Sean Barton, who was a standout at Woods Cross High, suffered a season-ending injury in the loss to San Diego State in 2017. But Stanford coach David Shaw said the 6-foot-3, 224-pound linebacker is close to a return.

“I don’t know if Sean’s going to start training camp … 100 percent right off the bat,” Shaw said, “but he’s really close. He’s doing all the running, he’s doing all the exercises. Maybe not with the intensity that we need for everybody to be at just yet. But he’s healthy and he’s excited and ready to go.”

Barton has 49 career tackles and two forced fumbles in 16 games played.

— Christopher Kamrani

Utah’s Matt Gay, who won the Groza Award last year as nation’s top kicker, will try to repeat the feat in 2018

You have to. You just have to include the reigning champ.

The Lou Groza Award watch list is, of course, headlined by last year’s winner, Utah kicker Matt Gay. The senior-to-be from Orem who went from walk-on to indispensable special team star headlines the 30-player list for this year’s Lou Groza Award, which honors the best collegiate place-kicker in college football.

Gay won in 2017 as he drilled 30 field goals, becoming the fourth kicker in FBS history to reach that marker. Should Gay defend his award, he’d become only the second back-to-back winner in the history of the award. Former Florida State kicker Sebastian Janikowski went back-to-back in 1998 and 1999 before going on to star at the NFL.

Utah State junior Dominik Eberle, a finalist for the award in 2017, is back on the Lou Groza watch list in 2018.

Gay joins teammates Zack Moss, Chase Hansen, Lo Falemaka, Bradlee Anae and Julian Blackmon as Utes on preseason award watch lists.

— Christopher Kamrani

Pac-12 continues quest to shorten length of conference football games

Another Pac-12 Media Day, another round of expanded conference initiatives.

On Wednesday morning, Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott said the Pac-12 will further expand its pilot program revealed in 2017 to shorten the length of football games. Scott said at least 30 games are expected to be included in the program, which began in 2017, to minimize the length of college football games as much as possible.

Last season, the Pac-12 started with 15 games.

Scott said after gathering feedback from the schools in the conference, fans and broadcasters, the decision was made to aim at doubling the amount of games in 2018 and pushing beyond the Pac-12 Network games. Pac-12 games on ESPN and FOX in 2018 will also participate in the endeavor designed to minimize the running times of games as much as possible.

Elements of the initiatives include shortening halftime from 20 minutes to 15 minutes, restructuring commercial formats, enhancing in-game advertising, among others. Not all elements, however, will be introduced in every game in 2018.

“Improving the fan experience is a critical priority for the Pac-12 and we believe that taking steps to shorten the length of football games is one way to meet that objective,” said Scott.

In addition, Scott announced the Pac-12 Networks will air 34 live games including 13 over the first three weeks of the season. Also beginning in 2018 is a program dubbed “The Pregame,” which will feature the network’s Saturday show on the road all season.

Each Saturday, starting the second week of the season, the hour-long program will be broadcast live from a different Pac-12 campus, stopping at every university conference throughout the year. A special premiere episode of “The Pregame” will debut in Salt Lake City for Utah’s 2018 opener against Weber State on Thursday, Aug. 30.

— Christopher Kamrani

Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott doubles-down in support of Pac-12 Networks during his explanation of the changing media landscape and how live sports are consumed by fans. pic.twitter.com/wBPHQRZ4sA

— Salt Lake Tribune Sports (@sltribsports) July 25, 2018

Utes picked to finish second in Pac-12 South

Utah is picked a strong second in the Pac-12 South football race.

The Utes ranked close behind USC in the official poll, released Wednesday to launch the Pac-12 Football Media Day.

The panel of 42 media members gave the Utes 14 first-place votes to USC's 22. The Trojans totaled 225 points to Utah's 209. Arizona is picked third in the South, followed by UCLA, Colorado and Arizona State.

The Utes have been picked second in two of their previous seven seasons of Pac-12 membership. In each case, 2012 and 2017, they finished fifth in the division with a 3-6 record.

In the North, Washington received 40 first-place votes. Stanford is picked second, followed by Oregon, California, Washington State and Oregon State. The voters also made the Huskies an overwhelming choice to win the Pac-12 championship game.

— Kurt Kragthorpe

Attorney General Jeff Sessions joins in a “lock her up” chant with high school students. Utahns celebrate Pioneer Day and President Donald Trump praises pioneers. Sen. Orrin Hatch’s office goes out of its way to prove he’s alive after Wikipedia vandalism.

Happy Wednesday. Two years after the presidential campaign, chants of “Lock her up” — referring to Hillary Clinton — are apparently still a thing, and the nation’s top law enforcement officer joined in the call yesterday. Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday spoke to a conservative high school crowd where some folks broke out in the chant that was a hallmark of Donald Trump’s rallies in 2016. Sessions repeated the phrase. The irony, of course, is that Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is actually in jail and awaiting trial. [Politico]

Topping the news: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, whose review of public lands led to the reduction of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, spoke at the Days of ’47 rodeo and praised Utah for understanding “that freedom of religion is a cornerstone of American exceptionalism.” [Trib] [Fox13] [KSL] [ABC4]

-> President Donald Trump wished his best to Utahns celebrating Pioneer Day and praised pioneers who came to the state “in search of religious freedom and a better way of life.” [Trib] [Fox13] [KUTV] [ABC4]

-> Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Wikipedia entry was edited to say he died in September 2017, and the Republican senator’s office took to Twitter to say he is alive and well. [Trib]

Tweets of the day: From @JohnFugelsang: “Ivanka Trump is immediately shutting down her fashion line so a moment of silence please for all those Chinese jobs lost.”

-> From @bazecraze: “It’s fun to listen to that Trump tape and imagine Cohen following him around, aiming a huge lapel flower at him.”

In other news: The U.S. House passed Rep. Chris Stewart’s bill to create a national three-digit suicide prevention hotline on a 379-1 vote, an extension of a companion bill by Sen. Orrin Hatch that the Senate passed previously. [Trib]

-> An unidentified victim was struck and killed by a TRAX train Monday night, marking the third person killed by a Utah Transit Authority train in 10 days. [Trib]

-> Two Salt Lake City residents and three firemen were hospitalized after a fire spread near Ensign Peak, but the cause of the fire is still unknown. [Trib] [ABC4]

-> Under President Russell M. Nelson, the LDS Church, a U.S.-born religion, is embracing multiculturalism with the goal of turning Mormonism into a global faith. [Trib]

-> Robert Gehrke says Brigham Young University’s police department should comply with state open records laws for the sake of transparency and public accountability. [Trib]

Nationally: President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, released a secret recording in which the president appears to have knowledge of secret payments made to former Playboy model Karen McDougal. [NYTimes] [CNN] [WaPost] [Politico]

-> The Trump administration announced it will be giving up to $12 billion in emergency aid to help farmers caught in the president’s escalating trade war. [WaPost] [NYTimes]

-> Mick Mulvaney, a former South Carolina congressman who now oversees the Office of Management and Budget and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, is being seen as a leading candidate to succeed John Kelly as the president’s chief of staff. [Politico]

-> The Trump-backed GOP candidate for governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, captured the Republican nomination and will face Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams in November’s general election. [NYTimes]

Got a tip? A birthday, wedding or anniversary to announce? Send us a note to cornflakes@sltrib.com.

— Thomas Burr and Connor Richards

Twitter.com/thomaswburr and Twitter.com/crichards1995

Prosecutors have declined to charge a Utah woman who left a loaded handgun — with a round in the firing chamber — in a children’s-area restroom at the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium in Draper.

While it may not lead to criminal charges, would the incident be enough to deprive the woman of a state-issued concealed carry permit?

Probably not, according to a prominent gun-rights lobbyist and gun-safety educator.

“Typically, just the act of accidentally leaving a firearm doesn’t rise to that level,” said Clark Aposhian, chairman of the Utah Shooting Sports Council and a member of the state’s Concealed Firearm Review Board.

State law allows for the denial, suspension or revocation of gun owners' concealed carry permits if they are convicted of a crime or believed to be a danger to themselves or others.

But absent a criminal conviction, Aposhian said, it would take a pattern of behavior — or a negative outcome from misplacing a weapon — before a person reaches the law’s threshold of public danger, something he’s rarely seen during his 15 years on the review board.

Concealed carry permits are administered by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Identification, which in turn is part of the Utah Department of Public Safety, or DPS.

Lt. Todd Royce, a DPS spokesman, said it’s “possible” that gun owners could lose their permits for leaving their firearms in a public place, but the incident would be subject to review by the concealed firearm board.

“Normally, the trigger that starts [that review] is a criminal charge,” Royce said.

Royce said the state’s database of concealed carry permit holders is checked against court records each day. When a gun owner is charged with a crime, or when law enforcement personnel recommend charges for screening by prosecutors, the system flags the gun owner for review.

“In the state of Utah, that is done every 24 hours,” Royce said.

In addition to leaving behind her weapon, the woman also apparently disregarded posted signs at the aquarium prohibiting weapons of any kind.

But Aposhian said Utah law does not recognize posted signage as legally binding on many types of private property. Churches and private residences have the power to ban weapons, Aposhian said, but a gun owner would have to be asked to leave a setting like the aquarium — and subsequently refuse — for a trespassing complaint to be raised.

Simply passing a “no guns” sign with a concealed weapon would not constitute a criminal act, Aposhian said, but it would be the property owner’s prerogative to expel someone who violated its weapons policies.

“The sign, itself, has no weight of law,” he said.

The woman in the Draper incident said that she became distracted while using the restroom and keeping track of her children, leading her to leave behind her handgun on a diaper-changing table.

Aposhian said restrooms can present a challenge to responsible gun owners who carry concealed weapons. Many restroom facilities do not include flat surfaces to safely rest a weapon on, and the most common handgun holsters rely on a person’s belt for support.

“Your support system basically falls down, so to speak,” Aposhian said. “It’s a heavy hunk of metal that, when not supported, tends to flop around.”

Los Angeles • The Utah Utes received a nice endorsement Wednesday, when the Pac-12′s official football media poll ranked them a strong second behind USC in the South division.

The same voters also established just how difficult it will be for the Utes to live up to that forecast, or possibly exceed it.

Media members — particularly the 14 of 42 voters who listed Utah No. 1 on their ballots — believe that USC’s quarterbacking uncertainty and the upheaval of three coaching changes in the South make the Utes contenders to win their first division title. The only flaw in that thinking is it disregards a scheduling rotation that sends Utah against the top three teams from the North. The Utes went 0-4 against their crossover opponents last year, although only Oregon dominated them.

This sounds strange to say, but the Utes could sweep their five rivals in the South and not win the division title. That would happen if, for instance, the Arizona-USC winner went 7-2 in conference play and the Utes were 6-3 with losses to Washington, Stanford and Oregon (and a win over Washington State).

That’s why 2019 already looks like a better opportunity for Utah to win a division championship, with California and Oregon State replacing Stanford and Oregon on the Pac-12 schedule next year.

Kyle Whittingham provides an update on Utah’s QB depth chart at Pac-12 Media Day. pic.twitter.com/UE5OPmAA5L

— Salt Lake Tribune Sports (@sltribsports) July 25, 2018

The challenge of facing Stanford and Oregon this season goes beyond the strength of those opponents. Playing a Pac-12 schedule creates a cumulative effect that’s draining for a team. That’s especially true this season when the Utes' bye comes early and they will play eight straight weeks of conference games, beginning Sept. 29 at Washington State.

So if the Utes break through in the South in 2018, they certainly will have earned it. The positive aspect of that schedule is it will give them strong credentials for New Year's Six bowl selection, if they can play their way into that mix.

Taking the 1-through-6 projections in each division and assigning point values to the opponents the South teams will skip in 2018, Utah emerges with the toughest schedule among the South’s top three contenders. UCLA, picked a distant fourth, has a slightly more demanding schedule. Arizona’s road is the most favorable. Using that method, here’s the breakdown, from toughest to easiest:

UCLA: Oregon State (6) and Washington State (5), 11 points.

Utah: Oregon State (6) and California (4), 10 points.

Arizona State: California (4) and Washington State (5), 9 points.

Colorado: Oregon (3) and Stanford (2), 5 points.

USC: Oregon (3) and Washington (1), 4 points.

Arizona: Washington (1) and Stanford (2), 3 points.

Applying the same criteria to the North, Washington has the easiest schedule, missing USC and Arizona in crossover games. Washington State will face the most difficult road to a division title, skipping UCLA and Arizona State.

The Utes were picked second in the South for the third time in their eight years of Pac-12 membership. That’s where I ranked them, being forever scarred by the image of USC’s white horse parading around the Coliseum after the Trojans scored another touchdown against my father’s Oregon State teams. That stuff sticks with a coach’s kid, explaining why USC is my default choice — until the Utes prove otherwise.

The Utah Supreme Court has rejected as moot a Utah Transit Authority lawsuit that sought to block its supervisors from ever unionizing.

That comes after 44 TRAX supervisors voted 25-19 two years ago to reject joining the Teamsters Union — after UTA spent $74,000 (nearly $1,700 per supervisor) on a “union busting” consultant to help dissuade them.

Even after that win, UTA continued to push a lawsuit seeking a ruling that its supervisors are not allowed to unionize under the Utah Public Transit District Act. When a district court ruled that was moot because of the earlier vote against joining the union, UTA appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

“This case became moot when the supervisors voted conclusively not to unionize,” Associate Chief Supreme Court Justice Thomas Lee wrote in the unanimous opinion released earlier this month.

“UTA wants us to decide this case to avert a future case — by opining that the supervisors have no legal right to unionize,” he added. “But such a decision would run afoul of the doctrine of ripeness.”

Legal tussles over whether UTA supervisors may unionize began in 2013 when UTA changed TRAX supervisors from salaried to hourly workers. That led several to contact Teamsters Local 222 to try to unionize. (Other rank-and-file UTA transit workers are represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union.)

The Teamsters said it was able to gather “authorization cards” from a majority of supervisors, and then asked UTA to recognize it as their bargaining representative. UTA refused to do so, arguing in part that they had no right to unionize.

The union sued. The district court ruled that the supervisors had collective bargaining rights under Utah law, but ordered a “card check” to verify that the Teamsters still had a support of a majority of the supervisors.

At that point, the union was unable to procure a majority of authorization cards. It then held a secret ballot election in 2016 in another attempt to establish majority support, but lost.

The district court then issued a final ruling saying the Teamsters Union was not the bargaining representative for the supervisors. UTA continued to seek a ruling that the supervisors had no right to unionize, but courts rejected that as moot.

The Supreme Court said that “would require us to untangle a web of interconnected state and federal statues and to reconcile a range of judicial decisions interpreting them.”

It added, “The relevant controversy is not whether the supervisors have some general right to unionize; it is whether these supervisors have a right to unionize in this instance.”

The court said, “Since the supervisors have indicated their desire to remain unorganized for the time being, our decision could not affect these supervisors at this time."

Documents previously provided to The Salt Lake Tribune through an open-records request showed that UTA spent $74,000 on a “union-busting” consultant, the Labor Relations Institute, to defeat the unionizing vote.

UTA contracted to pay $3,000 a day for the consultants’ work in Utah, plus traveling expenses. It paid $375 an hour if UTA phoned consultants with questions. The company also provided videos, handouts and posters to help lobby workers.

The Tribune and the Teamsters sought documents about such spending before the vote on whether to unionize, but UTA initially refused to disclose the data.

Just before the State Records Committee was scheduled to hear the newspaper’s appeal months later, UTA released documents showing $46,700 in expenses. A month after that, the agency said it found some late-arriving invoices, and the total rose to $74,000.

Last summer, Independence Day fireworks combined with hot and dry conditions to set off dozens of fires throughout Salt Lake County.

In response, one city banned fireworks for Pioneer Day, despite warnings that it lacked the authority to do so. And pressure mounted for state lawmakers to shrink Utah’s legal firework season.

So far, this year has seen fewer blazes, but the dangers remain with tinder-dry conditions and high temperatures. And beyond fires, the noisy, decorative bombs are a frequent source of complaint for some residents, who cite the impact on children, pets and veterans as reasons for their prohibition.

On this week’s episode of “Trib Talk,” Rep. Jim Dunnigan, R-Taylorsville, and former Cottonwood Heights Mayor Kelvyn Cullimore join reporter Benjamin Wood to discuss the pros and cons of fireworks, and whether the state Legislature or individual city governments are best positioned to regulate pyrotechnic displays.

“Trib Talk” is produced by Sara Weber, with additional editing by Dan Harrie.

This Pat Bagley cartoon appears in The Salt Lake Tribune on Thursday, July 26, 2018. You can check out the past 10 Bagley editorial cartoons below:

• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/23/bagley-cartoon-pioneer/" target=_blank><u>Pioneer Parade is for the Birds</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/21/bagley-cartoon-spy-who/"><u>The Spy Who Did(n’t) Love Me</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/18/bagley-cartoon-gumby/"><u>Gumby Government</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/19/bagley-cartoon-inland/"><u>Inland Port Parlay</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/17/bagley-cartoon-ultimate/"><u>The Ultimate Protest</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/16/bagley-cartoon-taking/"><u>Taking a Knee</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/13/bagley-cartoon-barbarian/"><u>Barbarian at the Gate</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/12/bagley-cartoon-an-orrin/"><u>An Orrin for All Seasons</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/11/bagley-cartoon-hes-just/"><u>He’s Just Putin Us On!</u></a>
• <a href="https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/bagley/2018/07/10/bagley-cartoon-boomstick/"><u>Boomstick Rights</u></a>

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