It’s a charge I heard so often as a newspaper journalist, I could recite it in my sleep. And it usually came from the mouths of politicians. Reporters, they said, are cynics. Always looking for the worst in human nature, always waiting for misfortune, trying to be glib and smart.

Well, the “Tax Me More” bill introduced this week by Rep. Greg Hughes, a Draper Republican, takes the grand prize for cynicism.

Hughes favors a $400 million tax cut for Utahns, based on our whopping projected $1.6 billion budget surplus. Polls consistently show that more than 37 percent of Utahns would reject a tax cut if it meant more money going directly to schools and transit. So in the best tradition of a legislative “screw you,” Hughes has come up with this sorry proposal.

It’s no joke. Hughes wants a “tax me more” provision included on state income tax returns. It would allow taxpayers to turn over $1 or more of their tax refund to the state’s general fund. Hughes says other states are doing it. Guess it’s his version of “put your money where your mouth is.”

It also lets him off the hook. Now Hughes and his pals who agree with him can go off and hack away at the tax base, while simultaneously claiming they gave constituents their chance to use tax money the way they wanted. No hard choices for this guy. He’ll leave it up to taxpayers.

It’s glib. It’s sophomoric. It’s unbelievable, really.

Now just who is the real cynic here?

Oh, and a follow-up to an earlier post, #31, titled “One Driven Mother:”

The Utah Senate yesterday voted down the effort to allow anonymous reports (also known as “squealing,” “tattling,” and “ratting out”) of incompetent drivers to drivers license authorities.

The news that Roe vs. Wade turned 34 years old today stopped me briefly in my tracks. It isn’t exactly a mile marker of an anniversary now, is it? The years rolled along, and the 10th anniversary passed, then the 20th, 25th, and 30th. But this year, I paused to consider what the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to legalize abortion has meant for me and other women of my generation.

I could start by writing that this 1973 decision, along with the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, dramatically altered my life. Both are examples of how government can shift and shape its citizens’ lives. The 26th Amendment, ratified in 1971, granted 18-year-olds the right to vote. I still remember at age 19, stepping into the voting booth at the Valley View 3rd LDS chapel in suburban Salt Lake City, and casting my first presidential vote. I got to do that two full years earlier than my parents did, when they each voted at age 21 for Harry Truman. I was a whole three years younger than them. I felt proud, sublime, superior.

I recall — vaguely — the heated debate over whether teenagers should be allowed to vote. Mostly I remember the thinking of the pro-amendment people, and how persuasive their arguments were. I was only 13 or 14 during the ratification process. The Vietnam War was raging. One of the strongest points for ratification went like this: If we’re old enough to fight and die in a war, we’re old enough to vote for the politicians who keep sending us there.

And so I helped elect Jimmy Carter in 1976 to the U.S. presidency.

As for the ruling that legalized abortion, I can say this: I’ve never had an abortion, and thankfully, I’ve never been in a position to even consider one. I was legally married when both my children were conceived and born. I was married to their father, and I could depend on him to help nurture and raise them. Both babies were healthy, born at full-term with beating hearts and working lungs. Prenatal tests showed nothing to worry about.

The point being, I was never forced by circumstances, poor judgment in men or the random cruelty of genetics into weighing the costs and benefits of an unintended or difficult pregnancy. My babies’ lives and long-term health were never in question. And I, fortunately, came through those nine months of pregnancy healthy as a horse.

But then I also had great luck to grow up with Roe as the backstory to my reproductive life. I was 15 years old when Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the groundbreaking majority opinion in Roe. I may have never considered having an abortion, but I do know that Roe helped generate more choices in birth control for women. It also forced men and women to talk more freely about sex and its consequences. And no matter what a person thinks about abortion, these are side benefits of a terribly difficult issue.

Tte new Democratic leadership in the U.S. Senate introduced legislation on January 4 that would increase contraception options in this country. Majority Leader Harry Reid is sponsoring the “Prevention First Act.” Among other things, the bill would require insurance companies to cover all forms of FDA-approved prescription contraception for women and make the “morning after” emergency contraception pill more widely available to American women.

In the “let’s all get along” version of the 2007 Congress, Reid’s legislation is supposed to be getting bipartisan support. You gotta hope. Because why would anyone who professes to be anti-abortion not come down in every way on the side of better and more comprehensive birth control measures? Fewer unwanted pregnancies, fewer abortions, right?

I’ll be 50 next year. If I have the good fortune to survive another 50 years, I hope it’s in an atmosphere of every possible family planning option for women. I’ll be too old to worry about it myself. But still, it will matter. Having options has made all the difference in my own life.

Caitlin, The 18-year-old in our house, finally flew back last night to college in Los Angeles. She just completed what could be the longest winter break in post-secondary education history. Kit (the nickname she gave herself in 7th grade) came home for Christmas an eon ago — on December 18, 2006. Her spring semester starts today. That’s FIVE WEEKS of holiday vacation.

Ted and I had harbored hopes she might land a seasonal job over the holidays. Ha. There was sleeping to do, and shopping sprees at Deseret Industries (AKA the “DI,” the LDS-Church owned thrift store, for those of you living outside the safe boundaries of Utah) and tea parties with friends at the delightful downtown Beehive Tea Room.

So this is the long-winded way of pitching Kit’s new blog, which she and her friend Holly designed over the past three weeks. They began with a shocking premise: that Salt Lake City actually has significant examples of cool fashion, which shows up all over metropolitan sidewalks, the fabulous City Library, art galleries and other nooks and crannies. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder than you might in Manhattan, L.A. or Paris. Or Boise.

The blog is chalk-full of real people, little blurbs about their fashion and a bit about life — of both the interview subjects and the blog masters themselves. As it turns out, Kit and Holly are also fine writers. Which makes the blog fun to read, too.

Of this girl I am proud, and I’ll say it loud.

Yeow. As I write this, I am watching Arizona Sen. John McCain in an interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He looks and sounds exhausted. I wonder, did his handlers advise him to behave like a golden retriever pup that had been kicked around for the last two weeks?

Can you see the campaign consultants hovering around McCain in the green room prior to his studio appearance?

Handlers: “John, John. You’re a front-runner for 2008. You’re now knee-deep in — let’s face it — support of a very bad policy to send more troops to Iraq. The last image you want to portray is war monger! Now is the time to act humble, pal. Passive. Um, thoughtful, even.”

A little peek at the interview, if you missed it (and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t be wide-eyed and glued to the tube at 8 a.m. on a Sunday):

Russert asks for McCain’s reaction to a MoveOn.org ad that paints McCain as the real architect of the surge. Russert refers to it as the “McCain Doctrine.”

McCain says it’s actually more of a “principle,” and with a big smile — emotion, can you dig it! — he quips, “not everyone gets a doctrine named after them.”

In response on the same program, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy argues we’ve already had four troop surges in Iraq. None have been successful. And this: The American people never voted to support a civil war in Iraq.

And how.

Still, McCain–who again, by way of stark reminder, wants to be the next president–tells us “we now have a strategy that can succeed. … We can turn the numbers around.”

A big part of me resists even writing about any legislation sponsored by Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars. The blustery West Jordan Republican is like a big bull moose with a red and white target painted on his gut. Just aim and squeeze the trigger.

His role in the Legislature is well-secured: He’s a dirty water carrier for GOP leadership. It isn’t that Buttars doesn’t believe in the complete moral correctness of the bills he floats every year. He’s passionate. And he’s just the kind of screen majority leaders need so they can play behind-closed-doors games and build their power base. Buttars consistently draws the public’s attention away from complex matters with universal and serious ramifications: vouchers vs. public education funding; tax policies; gun control on the University of Utah campus, to cite a few. His bills, many of which raise serious legal questions, tend to work their way through the system, clogging the legislative plumbing until the last day or two of the session.

Like most in the Utah press corps, I used to find Buttar’s shit-kicking, suburban cowboy image slightly amusing. But then I watched him on Friday at the Capitol, presenting his latest morality bill to the Senate Government Operations Committee.

It was classic Buttars. Like most of his message bills, this one features a big, amorphous fear (in this case, I think it’s secular humanists) which, unchecked, will destroy our way of life.

Buttars contends freedom of religion has been “cloaked” in contemporary society. Therefore, we need yet another law that permits free expression of religious views. He says the state (which I take to mean government in general, and not religion-saturated Utah) has become “hostile” to religion.

Buttars has based this bill, which redundantly offers protections already included in the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, on an anecdotal experience he claims to have had with a constituent. One parent approached him with a story that her child had been suspended from a public high school for wearing a T-shirt with the Mormon slogan “CTR” — for Choose the Right.

Two legal experts — the director of the state chapter of the ACLU and committee member Sen. Scott McCoy, who is a practicing attorney — told Buttars the teacher in that case was clearly wrong to kick the kid out. Perhaps, they both asked, it might be better to work on educating teachers, staff and administrators in the finer points of free expression before putting yet another law on the books that is sure to be litigated from here until 2020?

I was sitting on the side of the room with Deseret Morning News government reporter Lisa Riley Roche. I wanted to stand up and yell: “Hey Sen. Buttars! Have a read of the U.S. Constitution. Y’know — the SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND? It’s all in there!”

My favorite Buttars’ line came when he summarized the bill: “The mainstream religious organizations are living in fear. That fear has cloaked their [religious] freedom. They sent that kid home because he had a CTR shirt, but a kid with 26 piercings and green hair doesn’t get sued. Maybe you ought to sue him.”

Did I mention the bill passed out of committee and on to the full Senate?

Keep on toting that dirty water, Sen. Buttars.

Meet Sam. He’s my 15-year-old son. This photo marks one of his proudest moments: He’s poised to cook a plucked and trussed pheasant he tracked and shot all by himself last fall. He even found his own recipe for the dish in “Joy of Cooking.”

His dad took him to a state-sponsored pheasant hunt for kids. Sam bagged two ringnecks. Sam and his dad (he and I divorced in 2000) spend time together many weekends in Utah’s west desert, target shooting and rabbit hunting.

How can a good liberal and gun-control advocate justify such Neanderthal behavior? How can I support Sam’s love of shotguns, and his pursuit of certain furry and feathered creatures? How do I square it with anti-cruelty beliefs?

Only this: Sam’s understanding of guns, his ability to use them safely and with skill (he’s a graduate of the National Rifle Association’s firearms safety training) impresses me. More than that, it pleases me. Sam hasn’t shown much interest in playing a musical instrument. He hasn’t gone out for high school sports. Yes, he loves video games. But shooting? It’s probably highest on his list.

He knows how to handle firearms. He respects their power. He also respects life; knows how to make a quick kill to help alleviate an animal’s suffering. As pacifist as I am, I’ve always understood that licensed hunting has a place in nature. People who do it legally, with skill and ethics, are performing an environmental service.

Just don’t ask me to ever, ever pull a trigger myself. I would crumble and fall in a heap.

I’m happy about Sam’s hobby. I have a handful of photos his dad took shortly after he shot his two pheasants. Sam’s grin is as genuine and wide as any kid’s who might have just sunk a 3-point basket or run 60 yards for a touchdown.

His shooting ability gives him huge confidence. That’s scarcely pigeon feed in a world where so many teenage boys are perpetually stoned, or lonely, or isolated, or aimlessly violent, or all of the above.

First, I no longer harbor any doubts that I am becoming my mother. Now that I’m home full-time, especially in the mornings when I gaze out the kitchen window, suck my thumb and write this blog, I’ve been listening to talk radio. It’s what I grew up on–a steady stream of screaming, ranting AM radio voices coming from the boxy plastic clock radio on the kitchen counter, or when my mother was out working in the yard, from a tinny transistor radio.

So ’60s!

Well, I’m listening to KSL-AM 1160 as I write this. Talk show host Doug Wright has asked callers to offer their opinions on Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.’s State of the State speech from last night. And, as it happens, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson last night gave his State of the City address. It posed a dilemma. Which guy should a wonky political babe like me watch? I chose to watch Huntsman live on TV; Rocky was broadcast on the city’s cable access channel 17 but I skipped it. (The Utah Utes played and BEAT nationally ranked Air Force last night. The televised game bumped up against the mayor. I have my priorities.)

So today, Wright is thumping on Anderson for his long-winded, esoteric 100-MINUTE speech that touched on everything from global warming and renewable resources to the Iraq War and America’s powerless to a $4.7-million facelift for downtown’s Pioneer Park.

The guv, on the other hand, is getting slathered with sloppy wet kisses for a speech that quite honestly, was a tired rehash of his 2007 budget presentation from last month. Huntsman was standing against a blue curtain and a state seal at the Utah National Guard Air Base at the Salt Lake airport. Can’t fault the guy for taking the message to the home of the troops, but come on. A metal airplane hangar? All that was missing was the echo and rumble of the heating system.

Plus, Huntsman came across as a little bored. I know better. He’s making a pitch for 18.2 percent in new education funding, which includes $25 million for a one-time teacher signing bonus. So, it isn’t like he had nothing to pump his fist about and turn cartwheels. (Though it always amazes me that because our school system receives such piddly funding–and has historically–that even a smidgen of extra political support comes across like the delivery of manna from heaven.)

I like all the “state of” political speeches that go long on drama and passion. These are speeches about vision, after all. You didn’t get it from Huntsman last night. The guy might as well have been conducting a shareholder’s meeting at his family’s Huntsman Chemical headquarters. ZZZZ…

The thing is, I like Huntsman. I’m this blazing liberal and I stick out in this state like a ragged, bleeding cuticle on a baby’s pinkie finger. But, given Utah’s rush to Republicanism in every election, the man is the best moderate we could hope for. He knows something of human suffering. His budget this year includes a commitment to restoring funding to the poorest of Medicaid clients and $4 million for the Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIPS), which will lift a cap from the program and allow for many more enrollees.

I just wish the guy would have pumped it up a bit. Maybe with a little less wacky-wacky than Rocky, but with the same sense of um…urgency? Delight? Ooomph?

I didn’t make it to the opening day at the Utah Legislature, but no worry. We still have 43 days left in which to dissect motives and messes on the way to making state law. Today I found my way to the Capitol for a short committee meeting. State senators who oversee transportation matters took up a bill that would allow family members and friends to rat out–anonymously–people who are incompetent to drive their cars and therefore may pose a risk to themselves and others on the roads. The bill would empower concerned family members to call the state drivers license division, and report the geezers they feel should no longer be driving, but not have to face any grilling or repercussions for making that report.

It would all be on the QT.

The bill passed the committee 4-0. They barely had a quorum. Now it moves on to a House committee for consideration.

Sen. Allen Christensen, a Republican from North Ogden, got the idea for the bill because his elderly mother kept taking off for California on a whim. She would hop in her car and go. Christensen said his mother did this after she had suffered a stroke, had lost some of her capacity for balance and decision making. But she thought nothing of driving oh, 600 miles, as if she were a sorority girl skittering off for a long weekend to Vegas.

Christensen got a little flushed when he testified that he couldn’t possibly have told his mother straight out about her driving incompetency, or reported her to authorities, for her poor road skills. If he–or other adult children who can’t stand up to their elders–could pass the problem on to government authorities to investigate and determine a solution, why not? Whenever his mom got into the car, Christensen testified, “she scared the tar out of me.” So suddenly, his problem became everyone’s problem. If you don’t have the chutzpah to tell your mother what she needs to be told, or to just take her keys away, why not legislate it? We all have to feel his pain, I guess.

What I always love to see at the Utah Lege is the brick-sized blind spot that blocks its vision. We live in a state that glows with this philosophy that government should stay out of our lives. Too much government, too many taxes, too much intervention, too much Big Brother. But give one guy an aging mother who who can’t be controlled or deterred, who insists on independence and driving wherever and whenever she likes, and suddenly we need a statewide solution.

I’d say the senator has a few mother issues. Seems like more of an issue for Sigmund Freud than the legislative grist mill.

The day after I quit my columnist job at the Salt Lake Tribune, I got an ego-stroking e-mail. Bill O’Brian, an opinion section editor at the Washington Post, asked me to contribute with eight other U.S. newspaper columnists to a Sunday feature.

The assignment was truly sweet. We were asked to write 250 words describing how people in our hometown/state view Washington D.C. As in, when Utahns hear the words “Washington D.C., what do they immediately think?”

O’Brian told me to be witty, acerbic, downright provincial. What? Did the guy read my mind or something? Talk about an assignment right up my alley.

In the interest of disclosure, I told O’Brian I had just quit my job. I mean, I had no more standing as a paid newspaper blowhard. No status.

His approximate reaction: “That’s exactly why I called you.”

Well, see what you think. At least I’m in good company. Brian Dickerson, a Detroit Free Press columnist, is a friend of mine from 30 years back. Connie Schultz won a Pultizer Prize in 2005 for her Cleveland Plain Dealer columns, and has become a favorite e-mail friend of mine. Connie took a leave of absence from the CPD last year to avoid any charges of conflict of interest while she campaigned for her husband, Sherrod Brown. Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate in the big Democratic sweep.

I can’t add any more superlatives to the list for Elaine Elliott. The University of Utah women’s basketball coach clinched her 500th career victory Thursday night with a 73-57 win over Colorado State.

Watch Elliott on the court. Listen to her humble, almost self-deprecating views of her remarkable 24-season run with the Utes. She’ll go on about how she took over for her legendary predecessor, Fern Gardner, at a moment when she was scarcely a few years older than the athletes she coached. She’ll smile slightly and mention how she manages to recruit stellar women every year.

And look at her teams. Last year, the Utes reached the NCAA Elite Eight; this year, with a younger squad, everyone is talking about “building.” It’s always tough as a fan to sit through a season like that. But we know Elliott. It’s all going to be fine.

One more note in general about women athletes, and specifically, Elliott’s teams: When was the last time you saw or heard of any of them strutting around and groping someone at a downtown bar, ala Utah QB Brett Ratliff, or BYU starting point guard Rashaun Broadus, kicked off the team this after his arrest for suspicion of drunken driving. The Cougars seem to be fine without him.

Women are such a superior species in sports. I love these Ute women. And Elliott? Just keep going.