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Utah Gov. Gary Herbert has no sympathy for parents objecting to his edict that children attending school either wear masks or face possible criminal charges. Herbert issued the mask mandate, for grades K-12, in July. The reopening of Utah’s public schools has drawn new attention to the edict, which calls for a maximum punishment of six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for showing up without one. The order applies equally to adults and children, and any charge would be a misdemeanor. Herbert said Thursday that parents opposed to his order are “a little bit irrational,” according to The...

Yesterday a video of a Manchester, New Hampshire Committee meeting was posted to YouTube. The meeting took place on May 24th but there was extremely disturbing and interesting commentary made by a Manchester Alderman. Apparently, the topic was property taxes and tax credits for the elderly. The meeting was a Joint Committee Meeting on Education. Education being the largest chunk of expense for any property taxes. -snip "I’ve got an 85 year old woman that lives across the street, and, and she won’t give up her house, she’s sitting on $350,000 dollars and she can’t afford it anymore and you’re saying (pointing to...

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert is withdrawing his support for Donald Trump. The Republican governor tweeted Friday night that that Trump’s statements “are beyond offense and despicable.” Herbert says, “While I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, I will not vote for Trump.”

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Mormon-church-backed anti-discrimination bill that protects LGBT Utah residents and religious rights received final approval at the state's Republican-controlled Legislature on Wednesday. The House of Representatives voted 65-10 to pass the bill, which was only unveiled last week. The Senate passed it Friday. The bill earned a rare endorsement from the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which helped fast-track the measure through the Legislature. Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican and member of the church, has said he'll sign the bill.

There is a middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version of President Obama’s effort to reform health care. The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care. Which is exactly what the tax is designed to do. The tax would kick in on...

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging. The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over. Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness. Even...

Larry was like a father to me. We spoke on the phone several times in May just before his death. Larry told me he was in the tent when Patton slapped that soldier and that he came over to Larry and Patton spoke to him. Larry said he wasn't sure if Patton was going to yell at him too and he was a bit afraid. I don't know the html to post a picture here so I'll just post links to 3 photos of Larry. God Bless Larry and all the other WWII Vets to die before him. http://www.rhyner.com/photos/lhb/larrybloedelbronzestar.jpg http://www.rhyner.com/photos/lhb/va_hospital.jpg...

Bob Herbert is now far into the fever swamps of kookland. Byron York: I know it's been commented on elsewhere on the Web, but this exchange from MSNBC's "Morning Joe" is quite striking. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was on to explain why he thinks the McCain "Celebrity" ad is racist. "The first thing you see are a couple of images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, right? And we see an image of Barack Obama right after that," Herbert explained. And then he continued: "Do you remember any other startling images right there at the beginning? All right....

I looked around when I heard someone crying, and there was Pollyanna bawling her eyes out. That's how depressing was the one-two punch of pessimism in Paul Krugman's and Bob Herbert's New York Times pay-to-peruse columns of today.Just in time for the elections, the pair paint a picture of America so dreary you half-expected the Google logarithm to place Prozac ads on the page. Krugman tries to talk down the economy, while Herbert sees a more deep-seated malaise. Annotated excerpts:Krugman: "Bursting Bubble Blues" "The housing boom became a bubble . . . the question now is how much pain the...

Automatic Bob Herbert2 May 2006 @ 1:27AM According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News, veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. "For several months now," Kruh writes, "as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon." What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert's columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it...

Donald Herbert's breakthrough after a decade in a nearly silent stupor offers more evidence that other patients with severe brain injuries, often written off as hopeless, might improve with treatment, medical experts said last week. Over the last 10 years, he appeared to fluctuate between a vegetative and a minimally conscious state, said Dr. Jamil Ahmed, a rehabilitation specialist at Erie County Medical Center who has treated Herbert since 2002. Herbert unexpectedly started conversing again April 30, his brain apparently stimulated by a new combination of drugs he started taking three months ago. Since then, he has become less active...

Doctor prescribed drug cocktail to stimulate man's brain May 5, 2005 BY CAROLYN THOMPSON BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A brain-injured firefighter who started speaking after almost a decade of near-total silence has had moments of clarity but nothing as dramatic as that first long conversation Saturday, his wife said Wednesday. But she and his doctor remain hopeful. Don Herbert's startling improvment came three months after his medication was changed. Herbert, who will turn 44 Saturday, went without oxygen for several minutes after being trapped under a collapsed roof while fighting a house fire in December 1995. He spent 2-1/2 months in...

Welcome to the billionaires' club. Ordinary New Yorkers need not apply. When Robert Wood Johnson IV, the fabulously wealthy owner of the New York Jets, craned his neck from a perch in the New Jersey Meadowlands (where the Jets now reside) and trained his eyes on an enormous parcel of Manhattan real estate, his heart began beating wildly and a single obsessive thought began racing through his brain: I want it. After all, it was waterfront property, right up against the Hudson River. Very valuable. You could walk to it from Times Square. Not only did he want this publicly...

Font Size: Bob Herbert Keeps Working Hard, Falling Short By Tim Worstall  Published   10/15/2004  Last week Bob Herbert asked in his New York Times column "How are these millions of poor and low-income families making it?". He was referring to (in tones suspiciously reminiscent of the press release) a report that came out on Tuesday the 12th October, called "Working Hard, Falling Short". It's about the problems that the working poor have in the United States and while it has its good parts it is in the end highly deceptive. The opening line is thus: "The United States of...

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

May 21, 2004OP-ED COLUMNIST'Gooks' to 'Hajis'By BOB HERBERT he hapless Jeremy Sivits got the headlines yesterday. A mechanic whose job was to service gasoline-powered generators, Specialist Sivits was sentenced to a year in prison and thrown out of the Army for accepting an invitation to take part in the sadistic treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.But there's another soldier in serious trouble to whom we should be paying even closer attention. His case doesn't just call into question the treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces. It calls into question this entire abominable war.Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia is...