Boner Candidate #1: BEAUTIFUL WORLD WARS
President Donald Trump refused to say the Confederate flag is an offensive symbol during an interview on Sunday, where he touted the controversial banner as a sign of pride for the South. The Republican president was asked by host Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday if the flag, considered a symbol of slavery and oppression by most Americans, was offensive. ‘It depends on who you’re talking about, when you’re talking about,’ Trump responded. ‘When people proudly had their Confederate flags, they’re not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the South. They like the South … I say it’s freedom of many things, but it’s freedom of speech,’ he added. Trump has been an audible opponent of banning the Confederate flag, slamming it as an infringement of freedom of speech. He’s even threatened to veto a military bill if it allows for the renaming of forts christened after Confederate generals. Trump voiced his disapproval of cancel culture, reasoning that the Confederacy had a role in American history. ‘I’m not offended either by Black Lives Matter, that’s freedom of speech. You know the whole thing with cancel culture — we can’t cancel our whole history. We can’t forget that the North and the South fought,’ he added.
Boner Candidate #2: HOW WE SPEND YOUR MONEY IS NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS.
Since 2012, the Utah Legislature has steered $5.1 million to a nonprofit group called Big Game Forever to advocate for eliminating federal protections for the gray wolf and returning management of the predator to states. Now, the organization has run to court in a last-ditch move to block the public from learning how these tax dollars were spent, arguing that divulging such information would give away trade secrets, akin to Colonel Sanders having to share the recipe for his famous fried chicken. “The disclosure of the names of BGF’s employees/subcontractors would allow for competitors to recruit from BGF’s workforce and bid against BGF for other lobbying work nationwide,” the group’s lawyers wrote in the lawsuit filed in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court. That line of reasoning had failed to sway Utah’s State Records Committee, which in March ordered the Utah Department of Natural Resources to hand over the information to an independent Salt Lake City journalist. For months, Eric S. Peterson, who heads The Utah Investigative Journalism Project and has written pieces for The Salt Lake Tribune, has been seeking the names of Big Game Forever’s subcontractors from the Department of Natural Resources, which has rejected Peterson’s requests made under the state’s Government Records Access and Management Act, or GRAMA.
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