I’m from Utah. Yes, I’d put a sign in my front yard. But I think Hatch will win. The convention voters are more conservative than the primary voters. Primary voters who don’t pay attention will go into the booth and recognize Hatch’s name and his perceived conservatism (which he will press in advertising over and over again until June.
In the caucuses I was very surprised at the support for Hatch. Fully 2/3 of the attendees supported Orrin, and I like to think that my precinct is quite a conservative one.
Do I want Hatch to win? No. Hatch got religion when Bennett lost, and I think he’ll lose it as soon as he gets back to Washington.
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For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”
And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1